So is mocking climate change deniers prohibited? I guess it’s unfair to mock people who are no longer allowed to come back and defend their views with evidence supported by cited research and coherent argument, as @HoneyBadgerDC always used to do.
I don’t see why not. We’re allowed to mock nazis, but they aren’t allowed to defend genocide, so…
~Max
From Ed’s thread, those are draft rules. IMO they are not in effect today. I didn’t dig into the category-specific rules to determine whether climate change denial is already a prohibited topic in any category.
Our guest of honor certainly engages in climate change denial, or at least climate change science denial pretty regularly. Always ending with a question mark. Which reminds me of the rubric that any article headline in the form of a question can be answered “No” regardless of how hard the article pushes the “Yes” POV.
Don’t worry @HoneyBadgerDC, your epic plight has driven Sammy to come out of his self-imposed meltdown hissy fit retirement to provide ‘evidence’ of the Biden Crime Family! 
Sam and HoneyBadger are essentially the same poster. If you hid the posters’ name, I doubt you could tell which one wrote it.
FYI, some years ago Jonathan Chance introduced a new set of rules in GD that included a prohibition on climate change denial as being one of those tired old “thrice told tales”, meaning that we no longer want to hear debates about the fundamental science. Of course, that doesn’t prohibit mocking denialist morons in the Pit! 
I’ll take friendly minor exception to that. HBDC’s posting has a spacey speculative tone with random leaps of non-logic. Sam is absolutely positively dead certain. With “facts” and reasoning that would be reasonable if only the “facts” were true.
IOW, Sam is your computer running on GIGO. HBDC is your computer running on GIGO and drugs; but mostly drugs.
Equally useless for ignorance fighting. But quite distinguishable as personas.
I would characterize Sam as (a) quite intelligent, (b) articulate, and (c) an unhinged right-wing loon. It’s item (c) that’s so tragically unfortunate, but (a) and (b) distinguish him from most other right-wing loons.
So there’s a chance he’s right!
[ I guess it’s the same joke as the one about what happens when Trump loses his filter, when his filter is designed to filter garbage in. ]
That’s an excellent summation. On non-political topics he’s a voice well worth listening to. And he has had a successful professional life in general as best one reads between the lines.
But yeah, once it gets into politics, it’s pure survival of the fittest / luckiest and devil take the rest.
Sam is dumb as shit, but then again you guys seem to mistake assertiveness and contrarianism for intelligence.
I most definitely do not.
Tee hee
Yes, you do.
You sound a little bit conciliatory.
I’m not sure banning climate change denialism is the right approach. If it was a fringe thing like flat earth, then fine. Or if it is a popular thing, but offensive it also should be banned.
But CCD is something a large proportion of politicians subscribe to, as well as many of the most popular podcasts and opinion sites. We can’t avoid hearing it.
You could almost make an argument for having a climate change board, with a sticky that debunks all the main CCD talking points / links to the actual science.
Speaking as someone who’s participated in such debates here and elsewhere, the problem is that denialist arguments aren’t very inventive and generally regurgitate the same tired old talking points again and again. This really is tiring and wasteful of everybody’s time. My reading of the rules is that any major new scientific development could (and certainly should) be discussed and debated, just not the dozen or so standard old talking points that denialists always use. Otherwise, there’s always going to be some newbie that shows up who just read some junk article on a crap website and thinks he’s got a killer argument against climate science, and then there we go again. I mean, in a perverse way I actually sort of enjoyed those debates for a while because it was so easy to steamroll over these morons, but it gets old pretty fast.
Climate change denial is not the same a taking a more majored approach because we have more time than we are being told. Anything less than existential threat is viewed as denial.
Well, that’s something we can build from.
I would say that there are two issues with discussing “how much time we have”.
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“How much time we have” is obviously relative to some scenario. Extinction? It could be a millenium or more.
Record-breaking heatwaves, extreme weather, forest fires etc? About negative 20 years.
As much as a lot of the denialist sites like to put it in binary terms, there are many terrifying scenarios between the status quo and extinction. How many people should we watch die, how many homes destroyed, how many species extinct before we should take it seriously? -
There are numerous vicious cycles in our climate; higher temperatures mean less ice, more methane, more desertification etc and these things will increase temperatures further.
This isn’t like seeing how close we can sit to a campfire and being able to stop when we’re uncomfortable. This is more like drifting towards a waterfall, and at the point we decide we’re uncomfortable, it’s too late.
Correct, and that’s because there is overwhelming evidence of an existential threat.
Attempting to stake out a position midway between the overwhelming scientific consensus and ignorant fools who make a lot of noise does not make you an enlightened centrist, it just shows that you spend some of your time listening to ignorant fools.