(By which, in this case, I mean Washington)
Clockwise from left: Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich.
When Obama failed to get enough Democratic Senators to support his 2009 bill to join our country to the rest of the civilized world in reducing greenhouse emissions, he lost his chance of success for at least that season, because then the Republicans took Congress in 2010 and the whole Republican Party launched on a concerted drive to convince American voters that climate science was still speculative. (It isn’t. At least two dozen major scientific societies, from the American Geophysical Union to the Royal Meteorological Society (U.K.), support the consensual findings of a rising global temperature brought about by an increasing carbon burden from burning fossil fuels.)
And yet the candidates resolutely refuse to take a stand on an issue which seriously threatens the survival of many human beings. Not one of the four surviving Republican candidates has made this issue part of his platform. Only one, Newt Gingrich, has said anything at all on the subject, and that, after coming down forcefully on both sides of the subject at one time or another, was only, “I actually don’t know whether global warming is occurring.”
And onetime hopeful candidate Jon Huntsman, who started out his campaign with the statement, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming,” is now supporting Romney, who is far less forthright.
You know what the really scary part is? It’s that the Republican primary voters have kept these know-nothing people and no better informed ones in the race to run the most powerful nation in the world.
Paul says:
It is a puzzle, on multiple issues from climate change to evolution republicans don’t like science. They seem to be the party of myth.
April 7, 2012, 4:16 pmJJ Brannon says:
I do not wish to be rude to my good host while leaning on the rail what is essentially his front porch, but I must say, most respectfully, that it was my training as an evolutionary biologist at MIT that inclines me to be strongly skeptical of the AGW claims.
Even the most recent paper in Nature on ice core analysis continues to propagate the same reasoning from fundamentally flawed assumptions which go against all my education. Sure, there’s global-warming and has been since the beginning of the Holocene, with temperatures being around 2°C higher 8kya, undergoing moderating fluctuation and rising again. The earlier rise the end of the early Holocene glaciation was unlikely due to all those Homotheria and Giant ground sloths holding charcoal barbecue socials.
I’ll grant you the GW, Fred, just not the anthropocentric causation. My money’s on solar activity and complex homeostasis feedback functions here on the geosphere. However, you won’t find any argument from me on the urgent dangers of over-population and chemical pollution, especially of heavy metal contaminants and estrogen-analogs.
I’m not especially enthralled with the science grasp of the members of either major party which, in part, goes to explain why I’ve always been registered independent from the time I was eighteen.
Now if we could just accelerate the gene-therapy life-extension research maybe both of us would have sufficient base-line — say a century or two more — to reconvene at our leisure to reexamine the evidence. :>)
JJB
April 7, 2012, 5:16 pmLarry Kollar says:
To me, it just seems too coincidental that CO2 levels and temperatures both started rising shortly after the Industrial Revolution began, when clear-cutting forests and burning coal by the trainload really took off, to dismiss the anthropomorphic part. The thing is, humanity is part of Nature, no matter how much we deny it, and Nature is self-correcting over the long term. We’re likely to hit our second global oil shortage this year (the first was 2008), and that in turn is likely to give us a repeat of the self-correction mechanisms (recession and conservation) that kicked in then.
I too am not thrilled by what JJ Brannon calls “the science grasp of the members of either major party.” That is likely a reaction to the strong anti-intellectualism that seems to be part & parcel of America’s history. They might take a good long while to answer the “before you post” question below, but they do know how to vote.
It’s too bad we can’t conduct an experiment: cut global CO2 production back to what the IPCC suggests for a few decades and see what happens.
April 8, 2012, 7:02 amMo says:
Whether present global warming was caused by increased anthropic carbon dioxide release is academic, really.
The important question is whether it can be slowed and halted by reduced anthropic carbon dioxide release.
April 9, 2012, 3:18 amRobert Nowall says:
I could cite and argue about all the notions of global warming, but I can see it’d be futile. Instead, I’ll let stand what I said last time—it’s a matter of “there’s a crisis, so give us ultimate power”—and ultimate power is really what they want.
I’ll add my own personal observations on global warming. I’ve spent more than thirty years observing a seawall near where I live. Sometimes the water’s come over it, sometimes it’s been so down you could walk out onto the sandbar. But it always returns to a point about halfway up the wall.
If global warming is happening, it would have been a steady rise. And who am I going to believe—my own eyes, or Al Gore?
April 9, 2012, 7:42 amAndreas says:
Assume that the US/the Western World/the entire world, out of whatever reason had a renewable energy production infrastructure owned essentially by those who own their house or some piece of land, or hold shares of such infrastructure on a regional level. And assume that this structure furnished enough electric energy to assure transportation, heating, cooling and satisfied all other needs.
April 10, 2012, 4:49 pmThis would mean energy-autarchy for most home-owners or tenants. This increases significantly perceived stability in public atmosphere as well as in economic matters. (E.g. money drained away for volatilely priced imported energy- carriers would remain in the region.)
Producing their own energy would make the people more self-reliant, more responsible, more sensible of technical matters which show them immediate benefits.
…
This could make the discussion, about whether global warming is caused by humans or non-existent, a lateral issue, even an aspect of minor importance in the reasoning why it seems right to pursue the vision stated above.