Source: Bigstock

How will today’s great debate about climate change be regarded by our posterity? Which group will seem to them the bigger fools? Those who assert that man-made climate change is the most urgent problem of our time, those who deny that we have any responsibility for whatever change may be taking place, or those who say that there is no cogent evidence for climate change at all? Each group appeals to facts, or its interpretation of what it takes to be facts. Some of us, and our opinions, are going to look very stupid in a hundred years”€”but which?

Common sense tells us there are facts we can rely on. We accept our families as a fact, and the house and the town where we live. It’s a fact, whether you like it or not, that Donald J. Trump is now President of the United States. But suppose you air the theory that the man in the White House is not Donald J. Trump, the property developer, but an impostor, a substitute, a Russian plant, perhaps. How long would it be before this ridiculous idea found a constituency on social media, went viral, and took on all the authority”€”spurious or not”€”of an “€œalternative fact”€?

No wonder Pilate got out of the room fast.