Silver:
I was and remain on topic. The fact that the underlying causes are not discussed at great length in many places does not put them off-topic or make them a departure from the subject. Vikarion, furthermore, does not get to say his piece and then end the discussion without rebuttal.
Vikarion:
Katrina, Afghanistan, Iraq, AIDS in Africa, and the Japanese nuclear powerplant meltdown are all, on a highly significant and obvious level, human errors.
Perhaps I should be more clear: "You do not make political hay out of an apparently natural disaster absent a strong and obvious human element." Katrina would not have been Katrina without "Heck of a Job" Brownie and similar incidents of official incompetence. Fukushima had red flags going up about it for decades; it was horrendously mishandled. And I don't believe I characterize leftists as all goodness and light-- like I said, we eat our own. Aside from certain implications about the Right's sustained antintellectualism and disdain for science, which even the Right's own commentators (e.g., David Brooks) have criticized it for, I've said nothing about its overall qualities, nor have I made any moral judgment on either side.
I do not, however, feel the need to balance my observations with opposing views as though there were not an overwhelming scientific consensus on one side of this issue.
The fires in Colorado are problematic to talk about because they represent part of a pattern, rather than a specific, verifiable consequence of a specific flaw or failing. No single weather incident can be linked with high certainty to the problem, and even the bark beetle plague is not for absolute certain a climate change issue-- it could just be a string of warm winters, a quirk in regional weather patterns having nothing much to do with anthopogenic climate change regardless of whether such climate change is occurring. Following the science of the thing suggests a lot of unsettling patterns, but produces few "teachable moments" because you can never say for certain whether a given "moment" is part of the pattern or not.
More pointedly, even if that given "moment," as in Colorado, can be traced at least in part to a phenomenon that is most likely a part of the pattern (again, those damned beetles), the uncertainty makes doing so politically toxic. If you bring it up, you come off alarmist, shrill, and opportunistic-- trying to make political capital off of people's misery when you can't even show that what you say caused it actually caused it. That doesn't stop everybody from giving it a go (ah, how varied is the internet), and a few pressure groups might speak up, but you won't see, for example, Barack Obama or the DNC releasing any formal statements discussing the Colorado fires in the context of the bark beetle infestation and the infestation in the context of anthopogenic climate change.
Admittedly, this may have something to do with the point that the scientific consensus is not so much shared by the population. Hence the need to approach these matters somewhat sidelong, as I am doing here by discussing the difficulty of confronting the issue rather than actually and directly confronting the issue.
It's one area where neutral-ish figures such as certain talk show hosts (not Rush; the other kind) have a leg up: you can discuss the possibility (and some have; it's how I know about the beetles) without coming off all partisan. Still, holding a discussion on the air is a bit different from getting out there and saying, "We need to do something serious about anthopogenic climate change, and this is the reason right here."
Edit:
Ah! There's the issue.... We seem to have a misunderstanding.
Vikarion, I'm not saying that liberals don't make hay out of (natural) disasters because we're nicer people or something. At the least-cold, we avoid it because we don't like getting yelled at by grief-stricken conservatives who've just lost everything including a couple family members and are profoundly adverse to some skeezy lib trying to tell them it was all because of something they don't believe in. At the coldest, we avoid it because it looks like rank opportunism to everybody else, too-- it hurts our cause, so we don't do it.
Sensitivity or practical considerations, not moral consideration.
