Associated Press
Drought conditions continue to worsen nationwide.
A couple of weeks ago, former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.) said his party will have no choice but to "eventually" come around on climate change -- the facts, he said, will simply "overwhelm" Republican resistance.
The facts, I'm afraid, are still losing. Just recently, Republicans have heard from Dr. Richard Muller; they've seen the satellite footage from Greenland; they've been confronted with national drought conditions and wildfires; and they've seen brutally-high, record-breaking temperatures. Joe Romm noted yesterday, "July saw 3,135 new daily high temperature records in the U.S. -- over 100 per day. That overwhelmed new cold records by a factor of nearly 17 to 1."
Inglis' optimism notwithstanding, Republicans don't seem overwhelmed.
GOP lawmakers say this year's harsh weather that has produced devastating wildfires and the most widespread drought in 50 years has not changed their minds on climate change.
With more than a month left, the summer of 2012 is on pace to be one of the three hottest since 1950, according to an analysis by WeatherBank and AccuWeather. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the preceding 12 months in the continental U.S. had been the warmest since record keeping began.
Many Republicans on Capitol Hill point out that weather is inherently cyclical.
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) argued on the Senate floor, "It gets cold, it gets warmer, it gets colder, gets warmer. God is still up there, and I think it'll continue in the future."
History will not be kind.
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"God is still up there, and I think it'll continue in the future."
Well, that's reassuring.
The right is very fond of issuing bold finger-wagging scolds to anyone not appearing to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", or ceding control of anything to big gummint.
But when it comes to climate change, suddenly god is taking care of it, don't worry.
largenose,
It's an intellectually dishonest, Theologically Correct way of avoiding even admitting that the problem exists.
"God" was there when dinosaurs died off. He was there when Hitler rose to power. He was there when humanity almost went extinct in the ice age. He rode with Atilla the Hun. He was there when Rome grew then fell.
If there is a God he must be so proud of those who expect him to wipe their butts!!!
Actually, Attila the Hun has gotten a bad rap. He was the son of a king sent to Rome as a hostage, educated about Rome, knew all about it, and decided to destroy it. Unlike the mythology, the Roman Empire was about as "civilized" as the American Empire is (an empire equally deserving of the same fate). He attacked Rome as Rome was setting out to conquer more lands to add more slaves to their slave economy. He was doing a Good Thing.
I think you got my point anyway.
(sigh) It's not that those on the right don't understand, they do not care! Their "Devil-take-the-hindmost" "I-want-mine-now-and-it's-all-mine" attitude prevents them from caring about future generations, no matter how much sanctimonious posturing they engage in over "The Deficit!" The "My a*s is golden" syndrome is fairly common among people in general, but those on the right have particularly severe cases of this syndrome.
True, the right doesn't care about climate change. There's no reason to. When you consider the lying, cheating, and general BS surrounding the purveyors of climate change, why would anyone believe there's a problem. Consider the Greenland example. The images make it look like all the ice melted, when nothing of the sort happened. It's dishonest.
For another example, here's an article stating that weather stations doubled the temperature increase. Not a surprise. What is a surprise is that all this sturm and drang is over half a degree centigrade rise over a century. Really? The left wants to cripple power production over a half degree? That's nuts.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/17/new-paper-blames-about-half-of-global-warming-on-weather-station-data-homgenization/
But it isn't surprising. It's just become easier to ignore climate cries of doom. Whatever they present is usually debunked shortly thereafter. We have better things to do than go ballistic every time the left reports the end of the world.
A, surprise surprise, shooter (change the first "o" to an "i" and the second "o" to a "t" and you have him figured out) is here to demonstrate how good he is at memorizing the talking points. Thanks, Pooper, for the daily demonstration of how dumb dumb has to be to be one of you scum.
Um, Shooter: You do know that the paper you reference has already been utterly debunked, right?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=1561
Rick...,
He doesn't care! He will repeat his favorite lies no matter how often they are debunked.
Entropy is right. Wingnuts can be corrected over and over and reality does not faze them. Evidence does not faze them. Reasoning does not faze them. Consider Mr. Mitty above. He took a massive beating in the post by Benen on the Greenland ice, yet here he is here spewing the same garbage. Just complete garbage. They're cool with that, man. They're amoral asswholes; plain and simple.
For the reality-based folks, here's Hansen in the Washington Post from this weekend if you missed it:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here--and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/6ae604c2-dd90-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html
If you are interested in stupidity in it rawest and most spectacular form, check out the wingnut comments to the article. These are people as stupid as our Mr. Mitty (aka The Blank) deeming themselves competent to call balls and strikes on climate scientists. You can tell none of them have ever had a science class.
God is still "up there."
Also, he is an old, white guy with a beard- and will answer your prayers. But, first you need to prove your worthiness. A virgin and a volcano will suffice.
Could Sen Inhofe please ask God to give us less heat and humidity in NYC? Enough already!
i work with the UN on climate change. i was in africa this summer, malawi specifically. it's one of the poorest countries in the world, with all the usual problems like high infant mortality, high rates of illiteracy, etc.
the most common refrain you hear when trying to educate farmers, etc on low-till agriculture and other climate-compatible strategies for development? "oh, god is taking care of that"
its sad that one sentaor can be so willfully ignorant.
That rather depends on who writes it, doesn't it?
I rather imagine that the lords of the tropical island paradises in the Aleutians will think they got a pretty good deal out of it all when most of the rest of the world is too hot to maintain civilization (or even mammalian life in large areas.) Owning those islands and the serfs they allow to live on them wouldn't have been possible without cashing in on a fossil-fueled world.
i find it odd that the gop worries endlessly about the "size of the debt we're leaving our grandchildren" but never stops to consider the kind of environment they're leaving those same kids....
Really? I find it totally consistent, since in all cases:
they work as pretexts for doing precisely what the Right and its sponsors want to do for other reasons.
I must admit,i have my best lines in the circus that is the supposedly "climate change" debate.
As a Physicist,i can't dispair--Every big scientific fact/discover goes through three stages.
1) first, people deny it (e.g people were put to dead for sayingthe earth is not the centre of the Universe and that it is not flat,but "spherical").
2)second people say,"well it may true but it conflicts with the Bible"
3) people say Well we know it all along.
Honestly i don't know yet,the stage that conservatives are in.
All this drama is akin to the Pre civil rights fight.People fought against issues that on hindsight,you would think,it ought to have been a no brainer.
khayyam, you make it sound like civil rights is in stage 3. You should be paying more attention to the conservative's treatment of the uppity ni88er president. That should give you a clue where they fall on climate change. And forget about establishing the age of the planet. From time to time I have this brain fart that says their belief in gods is correct but it isn't the gods they designed. It is a superior civilization who sends each developing planet thru a litmus test to see whether or not they have sufficient intelligence to be allowed to continue their evolution. This one is in epic fail mode.
That's right Sen Inhofe, then let US let "G-d" take care of that pesky deficit that we're leaving our children and grandchildren. And let US let "G-d" decide about Iranian nuclear materials, oh and how about letting "G-d" decide if Israel should even continue to exist!
Now for those of US that are awake, WE really need to deal with the coming crisis!
"God giveth, God taketh away". God setteth Kings and Kingdoms". Says the bible. This time around God will replace Barack Obama.
Always nice to see one of you ignorant Stepford Bimbos come along and give us our daily demonstration of how stupid stupid has to be to flunk the IQ test low enough to be one of you, you ignorant airhead.
WOW
Yes, right; and global warming doesn't affect me- I have air conditioning!
Golly! Where was "god" when we elected Obama. Did he/she/it make a mistake?
God, personally, will replace Obama? Wow indeed.
When taxpayer subsidies to oil companies finally end, we'll probably see much of this "anti-climate-change" nonsense they fund and propagate quickly fade. They'll be too busy turning their attention to schemes to dominate and exploit alternative energies.
That's the one consolation, isn't it? History will not be kind.
History HAS NOT been kind to so many righteous and wrong. And yet people still take leave of their senses, believe disproven things and righteously insist upon them.
They should have their own Hall of Fame or annual awards ceremony, like with the Darwin Awards, for the annals of time, to record the amazing ability of humans to believe wrong things.
The Flat Earth Awards? Aren't they the most wonderfully delicious exemplars?
We've got the Catholic Church on Copernicus and Galileo.
The Middle Ages in general, our unread era's spiritual forebears. Such an amazing period in the Western world, a time of despots and vast differentials in wealth, when those with the most power and resources did not see an advantage in knowing how to READ, because, you know, a lowly scribe can be paid a pittance to do it for you (like Romney, with his tax returns?)
Various bouts of hysteria and witch hunts, a repeating trope throughout history, like Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery," an ancient rite answering a society's primal need for scapegoats and human sacrifice.
Naked Emperors and tyrants who commit mass murder of the most learned in any given society, even those who wear eyeglasses.
Honorable mention has to go to those 1930s Germans who chose to be so selectively blind. And Holocaust deniers who remain so.
But for all the Wrongs perpetrated in the name of Wrongness, even mass murders and killing fields, would not the Award for the worst of all be reserved for climate change deniers, for potentially engineering the massive death and die-off of an entire planet's ecosystem?
You forgot that men never went to the moon. It was all staged.
Well, that is the core of the Flat Earth Society's reasoning. Faked moon landing.
I forgot to add, there should be a special category for Conspiracy Theories. But they have to be WIDELY disproven conspiracy theories (because I still am holding out for some of them!).
For instance, Lizard Shape-Shifters running all the world governments. That's one of my favorites.
Alien abductions and anal probes. A made-for-Freud conspiracy theory.
A parallel race of beings living in the magma at the center of the Earth, exercising all-powerful influence on world affairs. Doctor Who had a field day with that one.
Over half of our nation is experiencing the worst drought in history. The Mississippi River is rapidly becoming an unnavigable riverbed. The fish we eat are dying at alarming rates due to excessive heat. Potable water is getting harder to process for communities. Crops are failing and livestock is being butchered en mass. Colorado and other states are burning down. Yet, the Republican congress says to applause, "But more importantly lets go home!"
Free up the space on your iphones, the constituencies are not happy. There will be plenty of revealing footage up for grabs. Indeed Benen, history will not be kind to these inbreds.
GOP, Keeping the base ignorant even when their eyes are wide open.Only the future generations will suffer due to the lack of knowledge & denial.