For many years now Republican congressmen and presidents have tried to downplay the issue of climate change. A leader in this group is Senator James M. Inhofe from Oklahoma. He has railed against it being the basis for America doing anything to curb our environmental excess in at least 8 floor speeches.
It is no secret he receives money from big oil and other large corporations. While Senator Inhofe is very adept at using small facts to draw a large, distorted picture, this should not be hard to see through. Sometimes it is hard to fathom why anyone would want to see the continued spoiling of our planet. An old adage may help: power and money corrupt.
One of his favorite tactics is to quote some scientist or scientific research such as the global warming “hockey stick”, and prove them wrong by means of character assassination. In his eighth speech the senator gave as evidence that David Deming, an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma's College of Geosciences was contacted by a “prominent global warming alarmist” just prior to 1998 when the hockey stick idea was released, and told that scientists for global warming had to get rid of a period of global warming in medieval times to further their cause.
Sounds pretty cloak and dagger, doesn't it? Except that scientist don't really run around trying to erase facts to further their ideas. Actually, that's something politicians have been known to do.
This technique is one well honed and often used by republicans. If you say something enough times, and you flood the media with it, enough people will believe it's true. Take, for example, the rhetoric about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction before the war. See the American public's response to that, and then see if Iraq actually did once we went in there. It's interesting that Senator Inhofe chastises the media for giving coverage to this problem. I guess they should limit themselves to his ideas.
Senator Inhofe likes to use the fact that scientists have long said, and still do say an ice age will be coming. Don't you think they should be trying to hide that just like the medieval warming?
We are well aware of the cycles of the planet and yes, eventually we expect to have another ice age. Why wouldn't we, since it's happened repeatedly already?
Does this mean we aren't actually changing the balance of the planet with our burning of fossil fuels and our heavy human population? Was there as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere during the last ice age or during that warming trend in medieval times? Obviously not. Can we compare our current population to the population of medieval times? 6,605,008,900 to maybe 100 million in the eleventh century. Europe at that time only had about 39 million people. That's a greater difference than most people can fathom. Let me help. It takes ten of the one hundred millions just to make one billion, let alone 6.6 billion.
The point is that while there may have been a warming period back then, it has nothing to do with the fact that we have now overloaded the earth with carbon dioxide. To use the one fact to try to get people to think we don't have a problem is either ignorant or criminal. There is actual scientific evidence of the massive build up of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
Just as there is actual evidence of the ice melting in the artic and Antarctic. Senator Inhofe said “There have been recent findings in peer-reviewed literature over the last few years showing that the Antarctic is getting colder and the ice is growing…” I'd love to see that evidence, since the evidence to the contrary is well documented.
Senator Inhofe goes on using the same tricks and skewing the data. While the idea of global warming is not a proven fact, it's obvious to anyone who looks honestly at the data that we have made enormous changes to our planet and things won't be the same 50 years from now.
Does anyone besides Senator Inhofe really think flooding the atmosphere with toxic gas isn't going to have an effect? Maybe we should hear his ideas on chemical dumping near his home. Don't worry Senator, it won't have an effect…two cavemen dumped some chemicals near their cave a long time ago and they were alright.
