Eehh, what he is saying is very much bovine waste. Not everyone needs to check all the primary data on any given subject all the time, even working within the field. We'd get nowhere that way, and you'd quickly lose perspective. That's why review articles and guidelines are a thing, among other things.
I kind of wonder if he has, himself, but honestly I don't give a flying turd about that, or about whether he's really a climate change denier or not. I'm guessing this was a bait to get questioned about this thing and boast that he has read some article or another. By the tone his last few posts I'd hazard he has discovered Ayn Rand, LessWrong, or somesuch and therefore feels very enlightened.
It wasn't bait, it was overwhelming pessimism. It was me pointing out that it's par for the course on these forums for people to confidently claim things wildly at odds with reality, like that you can see the moon landers through a telescope or onions release sulfuric acid when cut or a dozen other things that are simply wrong on an elementary level. I know this is going to sound really snotty, moreso than anything I've said yet, but it's really depressing to realize how little effort people make to correct themselves when I've worked as a scientist so long that I check everything I can reflexively. More than I should, really, but there you go.
And then you see a thread like this. Admittedly, about the only unqualifiedly accurate thing in Baffler's post is his description of the scale and complexity of the problem, but in that he's spot-on: this is huge and complicated, and the figures the government releases are only part of the problem and an incomplete description even of that. Temperature measurements and carbon levels are meaningless without some sense of what they imply for the climate and projections of climate change are more subtle than a lot of public-facing articles really have the space to articulate. So they go with dire but vague warnings how the whole planet's going to melt and burn and die, and I can see how that would feel kind of hopeless in general but the details really do matter.
I'm not denying climate change. Anthropogenic global warming is real and is definitely passing catastrophic levels, but catastrophes aren't apocalypses and we've got more tools than ever before to deal with them. People are worried about viruses coming out of the permafrost and that's a real problem, but it's one to which the rational design of peptide viral entry inhibitors is providing solutions with increasing rapidity. You can find the figures on how much farmland we're going to lose to desertification and those figures are real, but unfortunately the order-of-magnitude improvements in the efficiency of aeroponic systems that would make it way more feasible to grow crops in those deserts anyway aren't published yet.
So I am, I suppose, a denier of the inevitability of the apocalypse, not because there's a single paper out there with the perfect answer on how to undo a century of ecological abuse but because we're rapidly accumulating the means to ameliorate its specific effects. People haven't put the parts together yet in ways that make it obvious what they can do for these specific problems, but that's a political problem of a sort we're increasingly able to model to real, predictive effect. So I'm hopeful.
I'm just not hopeful for reasons I can show to you all without Herculean effort; laying aside the requisite copyright infringement, the theoretical background to counter the inevitable knee-jerk "it'll never work" would by itself take years to impart and almost nobody willing and able to put in that effort hasn't already done so -- and that's fine, because most people are irrelevant anyway. So no, this wasn't bait. I'm not willing to put in the effort required to convince you of anything in any way that actually matters (rather than just by cudgelling you with links until you shut up, as is standard operating procedure on here), so boasting of reading "some article or other" would ultimately be pointless. I'm just venting, because it pisses me off when ignorant people call what I do futile based on nothing but what they want to be true and I've learned there's no stopping them. (See all the people advocating for genocide to "prevent overpopulation" and then being all cool and edgily misanthropic.)