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By correspoding with a Canadian I know who is a climate change denier, I somehow ended up in an email group of them.

Recently I sent them a Washington Post report about a study that found strong support for climate change dangers not being exaggerated as skeptics often claim.

That was a mistake.

One member of the group responded by calling me a Luddhite: “Like the Luddites of the past,” he wrote, “there is a segment of the population, strongly supported by a troubled media, that has a cult-like commitment towards global warming that no amount of truth or evidence will change. They have become the new martyrs, committed to a cause at any cost.”

(Luddites were 19th century artisans who revolted against mechanization of the textile industry because they saw the handwriting on the wall for their job future. Today the term refers to people who question the efficacy of blind acceptance of all technological innovation.)

If that were not enough, he then compared environmentalism to communism. “When, like communism, it [environmentalism] has caused enough damage and people can no longer avoid the truth, it will disappear and be replaced with another utopian cause.”

The “truth” to which he referred, of course, is that global warming and climate change are a hoax, just as Senator James Inhoffe (R-OK) said years ago.

As you might guess, others in the email group immediately voiced support for this man’s views. One of them even said, “Amen!”

I was tempted to respond that “research” by climate change denying scientists is more often than not funded by Exxon, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Koch foundation, and that the lesson learned from the tobacco industry funded “research” that for years insisted smoking posed no health hazard might be a guide here.

A case in point is Dr. Wei-Hock Soon, a favorite of climate change deniers because he says global warming is caused by variations in the sun rather than the burning of fossil fuels.

It seems documents obtained by Greenpeace under the Freedom of Information Act show that Dr. Soon once described his own research to fossil fuel interests who fund his work as “deliverables.” In addition, the documents show that he has published at least 11 papers in academic journals since 2008 without disclosing the source of his funding.

That was enough for Luddhite Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) to call for an investigation into what he described as a “denial-for-hire scheme” perpetrated by “the anti-climate action cabal.” As Markey put it, “The American public deserve an honest debate that isn’t polluted by the best junk science fossil fuel interests can buy.”

No doubt the email group members would say to Markey that the only “junk science” around comes from scientists who keep insisting global warming and climate change are real and that fossil fuels play a major role in both (findings, by the way, supported by 98% of the world’s foremost scientists who study this issue, including several Nobel Laureates).

But I’ll never know for sure.

You see, this latest exchange and the roughly twenty to one odds always facing me with this group were enough for me to throw in the towel. So I requested that my address be deleted from future emails.

It wasn’t easy to do that. Where I come from you never walked away from a fight.

But I’m older now, a lot older, in fact, and, if I do say so myself, a little wiser about choosing my battles.