Climate change deniers on Capitol Hill

During Bush's and the Republican's reign of error for the last several years, climate change denial was to be expected. We knew that Sen. Inhofe (Republican - Oklahoma) thinks climate change is a bunch of quackery and that Exxon/Mobil and big coal are just being oppressed by those pesky environazis. His level of denialism was upheld by a constituency of big energy companies aligned with radicalized Christian denialists across evangelical and fundamentalist sects and denominations.

These people denied, revised, rewrote, or invented scientific findings to support their pocketbooks, cherished beliefs, or both. Inhofe invited that climatology and ecology wiz Michael Crichton to speak against the necessity to reverse climate change. It was twilight zone stuff. I love Jurassic Park. But it would not have made Crichton panel-worthy for some proceeding on what to do about dinosaur digs. He was a fiction author. Come on now.

I hoped that these people would really be cast into the proverbial wilderness with the new Congress and Obama administration. As Solve Climate notes, they haven't. Watch.



Plant food. Plant food. In the interest of "fairness" to climate change deniers the congress hears about CO2 as "plant food." Possible quibbles about CO2 concentrations aside, let's just ignore the fact that we are not living in the Cambrian Era or the Triassic period of the Mezazoic Era. The issue here is that we are transforming the state of our atmosphere so rapidly that organisms may not be able to adapt to it. The issue of the Cambrian and Mezazoic are irrelevant.

Ignore the findings of every national academy of sciences in the world today including the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. who write, "Climate change is one of the most important global environmental problems facing the world today." Ignore the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed literature on this topic. Ignore James Garvey, Peter Singer, Vandana Shiva, Richard Kahn, and Wolfgang Sachs. Ignore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ignore the U.N. Human Development Report 2007/2008.

Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. Failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem. Looking to the future, no country—however wealthy or powerful—will be immune to the impact of global warming.

All of these people are nuts? Inhofe and his buddies are in such a state of denial or stupidity that it is frankly catastrophic.

For a bigger take down, read Solve Climate or Treehugger. Their take on the Fairness Doctrine is excellent.