What especially irritates me about global warming denialists is their thoroughly lazy approach to counter-arguments. They don’t find a competing, compelling theory to global warming. Instead their entire rebuttal consists of “But what about…” statements. They’re confronted with tens of thousands of peer-reviewed pages of support for global warming, and the response it, “But what about the 40 square-mile region in Antarctica where things have gotten colder?” “What about the temperature on Mars?” “What about that two-year blip in warming that we detected by arbitrarily choosing a convenient start and end point for our graph?” I mean, the reason I call this approach lazy is because it isn’t even Scholasticism. At least when Aquinas did this, he was smart enough to approach the same subjects over and over again, from different angles, and he normally tried to break objections to things down into very bite-sized pieces. And by the way, Aquinas would think the denialists were the stupidest collection of jackasses he’d ever encountered. Read the first few entries in the Summa Theologica and the first thing that will probably strike you is how scientifically literate Aquinas was for somebody living in the early Middle Ages. Whatever friction exists between science and religion wasn’t there before Galileo started poking Aristotle in the eye, that’s for damned sure.