I would never vote for a climategate denier."What would you think if your government didn't believe in gravity? If your senator alleged that, because they couldn't see it, perhaps it didn't exist. To many, this might seem absurd—the science is enough to know that it's real."
The Climate Change Deniers in Congress
"Almost 30 years ago, a NASA scientist named James Hansen pleaded with Congress, under the Reagan Administration, to accept the evidence and do something about it. "It is already happening now," Hansen said before a Congressional committee in 1988."
"Fast-forward three decades, and the United States is facing one of its most anti-science Congresses in history. Many members of the Senate and House of Representatives have gone on-record to denounce climate change as a hoax. Others have proven through their votes that regulating greenhouse gas emissions is not a priority. And still, some state representatives claim to believe in human-made climate change, but consistently support policies that would erode initiatives to combat it."
The colors used here are no mistake. The alignment between a representatives position on AGW and his political party is almost perfect. And you can see many instances of the same reasoning you'll find here on this forum, in the halls of our Congress. The most common answer seen from our representatives is that the Earth's climate has always been dynamic and that the changes over the last century and a half are simply Mother Nature at work. Unsurprisingly, that reasoning is as easily refuted as all the rest. Of course the Earth's climate is dynamic, but through its very long history, that dynamicism has resulted in changes orders of magnitude slower than the changes we are witnessing now. And the various variable factors that naturally control our climate: ex solar irradiance and orbital mechanics, indicate that we should be cooling now. But, of course, we are not.
So, once again, would you vote for a representative that didn't believe in gravity? What if he thought we were all actually held down by magnetism or by wee demons trying to drag us to Hell? Would you vote for a senate candidate that believed the Earth was flat, that humans had never traveled to space, much less the moon? Would you vote for a presidential candidate who believed that modern medicine was an evil to be eliminated from modern society? The belief that the rate of warming we are currently experiencing is a natural climatic change (or a lie constructed by thousands of corrupt scientists) and that human GHG emissions have no involvement, is just as false and just as dangerous.
I can excuse a congressman who doesn't have the extremely deep understanding of the science that I do. Very few people on this planet do or are even capable of that. And they were getting mixed messages from people claiming to be scientists.
However, when the climategate emails were released by a whistleblower in 2009, the entire debate in congress should have been over, once and for all. The people on the CAGW side of debate were shown, by their own words, to be complete frauds. The IPCC was shown to be a completely farcical institution.
And people like Crick and OldRocks/Matthew were proven to be a bunch of idiotic fucking dupes.
