GOP Uses Climate Change as Litmus Test

[Doug]

House Republican Leader John Boehner would have appointed Rep. Wayne Gilchrest to the bipartisan Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming -- but only if the Maryland Republican would say humans are not causing climate change, Gilchrest said.

"I said, 'John, I can't do that,'" Gilchrest, R-1st-Md., said in an interview. "He said, 'Come on. Do me a favor. I want to help you here.'"

Gilchrest didn't make the committee. Neither did other Republican moderates or science-minded members, whose guidance centrist GOP members usually seek on the issue. Republican moderates, called the Tuesday Group, invited Boehner to this week's meeting to push for different representation.

...

Gilchrest, who co-chairs the House Climate Change Caucus, has long been an environmental-protection advocate and has co-sponsored the Climate Stewardship Act designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 to 70 percent below 1990 levels.

He expressed his interest in the committee several times to Boehner and Minority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri, telling them the best thing they could do for Republican credibility was to appoint members familiar with the scientific data.

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, a research scientist from Maryland, and Michigan's Rep. Vern Ehlers, the first research physicist to serve in Congress, also made cases for a seat, but weren't appointed, he said.

"Roy Blunt said he didn't think there was enough evidence to suggest that humans are causing global warming," Gilchrest said. "Right there, holy cow, there's like 9,000 scientists to three on that one."

See here.

[Dardedar]

Material Shows Weakening of Climate Reports
By Andrew C. Revkin and Matthew L. Wald
The New York Times

Tuesday 20 March 2007

Washington - A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

the rest

DAR
This from the same government that is supposedly bribing scientists to make all of these reports showing GW.

Also:

Bill McKibben | Global Warming Can't Buy Happiness

Bill McKibben discusses an alarming White House report that was leaked
to reporters earlier this month. "The report, a year overdue to the
United Nations, said that the United States would be producing almost 20
percent more greenhouse gases in 2020 than it had in 2000, and that our
contribution to global warming would be going steadily up, not sharply
and steadily down, as scientists have made clear it must," McKibben
continues.

LINK

[Hogeye]

This from the same government that is supposedly bribing scientists to make all of these reports showing GW.

Governments are known to be both incompetent and inconsistent. Being driven by various special interest groups and factions, that should be no surprise. It spends to sue tobacco companies and, at the same time, gives out tobacco subsidies to farmers. The NSF shovels loot to NASA and GW alarmists, while at the same time some Executive branch guys censor resulting reports. What's new?

[Dardedar]

Why the Right Goes Nuclear Over Global Warming
By Jonathan Chait
The Los Angeles Times

Sunday 25 March 2007

Most of the heat is generated by a small number of hard-core ideologues.

Last year, the National Journal asked a group of Republican senators and House members: "Do you think it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of man-made problems?" Of the respondents, 23% said yes, 77% said no. In the year since that poll, of course, global warming has seized a massive amount of public attention. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study, with input from 2,000 scientists worldwide, finding that the certainty on man-made global warming had risen to 90%.

So, the magazine asked the question again last month. The results? Only 13% of Republicans agreed that global warming has been proved. As the evidence for global warming gets stronger, Republicans are actually getting more skeptical. Al Gore's recent congressional testimony on the subject, and the chilly reception he received from GOP members, suggest the discouraging conclusion that skepticism on global warming is hardening into party dogma. Like the notion that tax cuts are always good or that President Bush is a brave war leader, it's something you almost have to believe if you're an elected Republican.

How did it get this way? The easy answer is that Republicans are just tools of the energy industry. It's certainly true that many of them are. Leading global warming skeptic Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), for instance, was the subject of a fascinating story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago. The bottom line is that his relationship to the energy industry is as puppet relates to hand.

But the financial relationship doesn't quite explain the entirety of GOP skepticism on global warming. For one thing, the energy industry has dramatically softened its opposition to global warming over the last year, even as Republicans have stiffened theirs.

The truth is more complicated - and more depressing: A small number of hard-core ideologues (some, but not all, industry shills) have led the thinking for the whole conservative movement.

Your typical conservative has little interest in the issue. Of course, neither does the average nonconservative. But we nonconservatives tend to defer to mainstream scientific wisdom. Conservatives defer to a tiny handful of renegade scientists who reject the overwhelming professional consensus.

The rest...

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Darrel, it's simpler than that. Most of those hardcore GOP GW-deniers are also creationists. If god created the earth, man, and everything else on it then there can't be a process like GW.

[Dardedar]

BARB
If god created the earth, man, and everything else on it then there can't be a process like GW.

DAR
I don't see why not. The Bible has a verse or two saying the world would be so messed up in the last days that if God did not step forward to intervene "no life would be saved alive" or something like that. My mom who salivates and positively lives for the last days when Jehovah will come and kick butt against everyone except JW's, is very encouraged by any GW news. And she's not the only one. End Timer fundies also find reason for joy in war in the middle east, as you well know. It's all there in revelations. I work in churches a lot and saw a sign yesterday advertising an evening study group which shows how you can find out "how Iraq will turn" out etc. in the Buybull. It's all there in black and white and prophecied by God.

D.

[Barbara Fitzpatrick]

Yes, but it can't be a "process" and it most certainly can't be anything caused by human activity (except sin, of course). It's got to be a a "claymation" special - each movement is hand done by god is real time, photographed, and then the complete set of pictures run at speed to look like life.

[Dardedar]

Oh I see. God's in complete control. Well that's obviously true.