Republicans Refuse to Accept Overwhelming Evidence of Dangerous Climate

Change
In putting together the following, I have used Calibri (this typeface) for my words and Times New Roman for
passages that I have excerpted from different sources. Any rewording of these passages by me is in Calibri. This
was put together by a friend of mine.
"You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan

"When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather: for the sky is red.
And in the morning, It will be foul weather to day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can
discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?"
Jesus

Recent research and catastrophic weather events provide increasingly clear warnings that our environment is
being radically transformed into one much less welcoming to people, animals, or growing things. Yet most
Republican politicians have decided that it is politically expedient and financially beneficial to deny the threat
of climate change. All of the Republican presidential candidates who used to believe in climate change have
suddenly decided not to believe anymore. Every Republican Representative voted to reject the following
statement: ‘‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in
global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea
level.’’ Even as new catastrophic weather events follow hard on those of last year, the House cut $1.2 billion
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency responsible for weather
forecasting and hurricane tracking, and voted to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. The
Republican-dominated House denied any money to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which our
nation had pledged to support, and slashed the budget for Energy Information Agency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/opinion/05sat4.html In response to President Obama's request for $400
million for the World Bank’s clean technology fund, $95 million for the bank’s program to prevent
deforestation and $90 million for its program to help at-risk nations cope with the effects of a warming planet
by, for instance, developing drought-resistant crops, the House answered with zero funds. Two Republican
congressmen--including Bill Posey (R-FL) and Sandy Adams (R-FL)-- proposed eliminating NASA’s climate
change research capability entirely.
House Republicans voted to defund energy innovation programs and subvert decades of environmental
protections by passing budget bill HR 1. According to former McCain advisor and Moody’s chief economist
Mark Zandi, the Republican funding cuts would cost 700,000 American jobs.
Meanwhile, a series of violent storms and tornadoes that struck the South on April 4 was followed by a host of
new tornadoes later in the month, a total of 875 for April, blowing away the previous record of 546. Risk-
modeling company AIR Worldwide estimated the tornadoes caused $3.7 billion to $5.5 billion in insured losses
industrywide. The years 2008 through 2010 were already the industry’s costliest for thunderstorm damage—
which includes hail, tornadoes and other severe storms—with a total tab of $30 billion, said Robert Hartwig,
president of trade group Insurance Information Institute, via a Wall Street Journal report, but 2011 is on track to
exceed any of those three. In May, major flooding on the Mississippi got the nation's attention until a new series
of tornadoes, with the largest one demolishing much of Joplin Missouri, demanded notice. As I write this, news
comes of another major tornado in Oklahoma and more predicted.
Given the extreme weather we have had this spring we must wonder whether these events are caused by global
warming:
According to NCAR's Dr. Kevin Trenberth, it's misleading to ask whether global warming is responsible for a
given weather event: “There is a systematic influence on all of these weather events now-a-days because of the
fact that there is this extra water vapor lurking around in the atmosphere than there used to be say 30 years ago.
It’s about a 4% extra amount, it invigorates the storms, it provides plenty of moisture for these storms and it’s
unfortunate that the public is not associating these with the fact that this is one manifestation of climate change.
And the prospects are that these kinds of things will only get bigger and worse in the future.”
As was true last year, extreme weather hasn't been confined to our country:
http://climateprogress.org/2011/05/16/nasa-hottest-april-record-colombia/

NASA’s [James] Hansen had predicted back in October that “It is likely that 2012 will reach a record high global
temperature.” An El Niño would make that an extreme likelihood.
We have, as reported, seen almost unbelievable extreme weather in this country (see Hell and High Water: Weather
Channel labels Texas drought and Mississippi floods truly “exceptional”; Masters: This is “only” a “1-in-100 to 1-in-300
year flood).”
We have also been seeing record-smashing extreme weather around the globe, from England to Canada, from Colombia to
China — but the U.S. media is so focused on the Mississippi that these events have received little attention here.

April was the hottest in the Central England Temperature record going back some 350 years:
UPI reports “Canada’s central province of Manitoba braced Thursday for the worst seasonal flooding in 300 years, local
officials said.” Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has more here:
The flood is being called a 300-year flood, and damages are already in excess of $1 billion. In neighboring Alberta, the
reverse extreme is causing havoc: severe drought and strong spring winds have made ideal conditions for wildfires.
And Colombia has been hit by “11 months of nearly nonstop rain” displacing over 3 million people. Masters again has
details:
“Some parts of the country have been set back 15 to 20 years”, said Plan’s Country Director in Colombia, Gabriela
Bucher. “Over the past 10 months we have registered five or six times more rainfall than usual,” said the director of
Colombia’s weather service, Ricardo Lozano. Up to 800 mm (about 32 inches) of rain has fallen along the Pacific coast of
Colombia over the past two weeks (Figure 3). The severe spring flooding follows on the heels of the heaviest fall rains in
Colombia’s History. Weather records go back 42 year in Colombia. Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos said, “the
tragedy the country is going through has no precedents in our history.”
… See also my [i.e. Joe Romm's] December 2010 post, Heaviest rains in Colombia’s history trigger deadly landslide.
China has been hit by a devastating drought. The NYT reports today that:
A severe drought along the Yangtze River region in central China has rendered nearly 1,400 reservoirs in Hubei Province
temporary unusable, devastated farm fields and made drinking water scarce, according to a report on Monday by Xinhua,
the state news agency. The drought, which has lasted for five months, has brought water levels in the middle part of the
Yangtze down to a near-record low.
AFP published this picture with the caption, “Chinese fishing boats are seen stranded [on] a dried up river bank along the
Yangtze river. Drought on the massive waterway has led to historically low water levels that have forced authorities to

halt shipping, the government and media said Thursday”:

In his October analysis, Hansen warned, “Given the association of extreme weather and climate events with rising global
temperature, the expectation of new record high temperatures in 2012 also suggests that the frequency and magnitude of
extreme events could reach a high level in 2012. Extreme events include not only high temperatures, but also indirect
effects of a warming atmosphere including the impact of higher temperature on extreme rainfall and droughts.”
I [Joe Romm]’ve often said of our current extreme weather, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Unfortunately, we may not have
to wait that long to see the weather of the last year topped.
Republican legislators aren't listening. A report ordered by Congress from the National Research Council to
offer “action-oriented advice” on how the nation should be reacting to the potential consequences of climate change
concluded that not only is global warming real, but the effects are already becoming serious and the need has
become “pressing” for a strong national policy to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases.
But Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, who has been leading the charge against further regulating
carbon emissions, swiftly dismissed the council’s findings in an interview Thursday. “I see nothing substantive in
this report that adds to the knowledge base necessary to make an informed decision about what steps — if any —
should be taken to address climate change,” Mr. Barton said. [Joe Barton was the representative who apologized to
BP.] Meanwhile, Texas is experiencing the driest seven-month period ever with no relief expected,
accompanied by 10,000 wildfires that have scorched 2.5 million acres in all but two of Texas's 254 counties.
NOAA reported that April 2011 saw “wildfire activity that scorched more than twice the area of any April this
century,” most of it in Texas. How did Texas Republicans, which control all three branches of state
government, respond?
Governor Rick Perry officially proclaimed three “days of prayer for rain” — starting on Earth day.
Texas lawmakers are set to slash funding for the agency responsible for fighting wildfires in the midst of a
historic wildfire season in which some 2.5 million acres have burned.
The Texas Forest Service faces almost $34 million in budget cuts over the next two years, roughly a third of the
agency's total budget. The cuts are in both the House and Senate versions of the proposed state budget.
Texas legislators, like Oklahoman Senators, seem determined to ignore studies such as the one released last
October by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) that warned, “The United States and
many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming
decades … possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been
observed in modern times.”

“The number of days per year in which temperatures are projected to exceed 100°F by late this century” on
our current (high) emissions path, A1FI
Source: National Academy of Sciences

The National Research Council report followed one by the working group commissioned by the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences that agreed that action is urgent:
The primary triggers for ice ages and inter-glacials are well understood to be changes in the astronomical
parameters related to the motion of our planet within the solar system and natural feedback processes in the
climate system. The time scales between these triggers are in the range of 10,000 years or longer. By contrast,
the observed human-induced changes in carbon dioxide, other greenhouse gases, and soot concentrations are
taking place on 10-100 year timescales –at least a hundred times as fast. It is particularly worrying that this
release of global warming agents is occurring during an interglacial period when the Earth was already at a
natural temperature maximum.
The time to act is now if society is to have a reasonable chance of staying below the 2° C guardrail. [An
increase of 2o C is often seen as the maximum increase possible before global warming becomes dangerous. But
a less optimistic study concludes that, despite high-level statements to the contrary, there is now little to no
chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2°C. Moreover, the impacts associated
with 2°C have been revised upwards, sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold
between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change.]
Emission sources for air pollutants and greenhouse gases coincide, and a combined policy strategy reduces the
cost of counteracting both these threats to human health and the well-being of society. These mitigation
strategies must be pursued simultaneously and as aggressively as the dictates of science demand. Together they
have the potential to restore the climate system to a safe level, and reduce climate injustice. But time is short.
Warming and associated effects in the Earth System caused by the cumulative CO2 emissions that remain in the
atmosphere for millennia may soon become unmanageable.
http://climateprogress.org/2011/05/16/national-academy-of-sciences-media-coverage/
Last year, the U.S. National Academy of Science, the equivalent of the Supreme Court of science — a body that is ultra-
conservative from a scientific perspective — reviewed the scientific literature in a major report and concluded:
A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human
activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems….
Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many
independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small.
Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system
is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.
Their final report, issued this May, pointed out the misleading confusion created by deniers:
Most people rely on secondary sources for information, especially the mass media; and some of these sources
are affected by concerted campaigns against policies to limit CO2 emissions, which promote beliefs about
climate change that are not well-supported by scientific evidence. U.S. media coverage sometimes presents
aspects of climate change that are uncontroversial among the research community as being matters of serious
scientific debate. Such factors likely play a role in the increasing polarization of public beliefs about climate
change, along lines of political ideology, that has been observed in the United States.
Now the Australian Climate Commission has issued a new report that restates many of the conclusions of the
other reports:
It explains that climate science “is being attacked in the media by many with no credentials in the field…. By contrast to
the noisy, confusing ‘debate’ in the media, within the climate research community our understanding of the climate
system continues to advance strongly.”
These are the main conclusions of the report:
1. There is no doubt that the climate is changing. The evidence is overwhelming and clear.
2. We are already seeing the social, economic and environmental impacts of a changing climate.
3. Human activities – the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation – are triggering the changes we are witnessing in the
global climate.
4. This is the critical decade. Decisions we make from now to 2020 will determine the severity of climate change our
children and grandchildren experience.
– Without strong and rapid action there is a significant risk that climate change will undermine our society’s prosperity,
health, stability and way of life.
Wikipedia's article, "Scientific Opinion on Climate Change" reports that
[n]ational and international science academies and scientific societies have assessed the current scientific
opinion, in particular on recent global warming. These assessments have largely followed or endorsed the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) position of January 2001 which states:
An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the
climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50
years is attributable to human activities.[1]

No scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion; the last was
the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, which in 2007 updated its 1999 statement rejecting the
likelihood of human influence on recent climate with its current non-committal position."[2][3]
The Wikipedia article "Climate Change Denial" discusses the history of doubt manufacturing and how the
techniques, organizations, and some o f the same people, well funded by vested interests, worked to create
uncertainty about whether cigarettes caused cancer, whether DDT was more harmful than beneficial, and
whether acid rain, the ozone hole, or second-hand smoke were problems. It touches on Republican strategist
Frank Luntz, who, in 1994, according to a leaked memo, advised members of the Republican Party, with regard
to climate change, that "you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue" and
"challenge the science" by "recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view."[8] In 2006, Luntz stated that
he still believes "back [in] '97, '98, the science was uncertain", but he now agrees with the scientific consensus.
[40]

One of several bogus compilations professing to demonstrate that many climate scientists reject the reality of
anthropogenic global warming--this one claiming to list 900 peer reviewed research papers by deniers--is
analyzed here. Nine of the ten most prolific contributors were scientists funded by Exxon or by think tanks
funded by Exxon. Some of the papers listed did not address the question of global warming and many were by
scientists who, when contacted, said "Using our paper to support skepticism of anthropogenic global warming is
misleading" and wanted their names removed. 131 papers were published in Energy and Environment, which
has been described by Gavin Schmidt of the science blog RealClimate as having "effectively dispensed with
substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor's political line."
The great majority of Republican legislators likewise find it in their interest to become deniers and supporters of
the oil companies that fund them. Six Republican Senators alone received twice as much in career oil industry
contributions as the 48 Democrats and two independents who voted in favor of repealing the subsidies. As the
nation increasingly moves from a moderate climate to one characterized by regions plagued by torrential rain
and others enduring prolonged drought--and some with both, so that dried soil washes away in violent storms
and floods, one wonders what it will take for voters to recognized that they have been duped. Hopefully it will
not require the triggering of feedbacks such as a runaway release of the 1.4 billion tons of frozen methane now
beginning to leak from the Arctic Sea permafrost that will make global warming impossible to stop until it runs
its course, assisted by the methane now being released from the Arctic tundra that alone is predicted to reach 1.5
billion tons of carbon per annum before 2030.
Lincoln asserted that you can't fool all of the people all of the time, but modern Republicans, relying on right-
wing think tanks that have for decades perfected methods to create doubt and on Frank Luntz's research on spin
language, seem to be guided instead by H.L. Menken's aphorism, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the
intelligence of the American public." Republican denial of global warming for political advantage, despite
overwhelming evidence that it is real, increasing, and dangerous, deserves both Jesus' censuring words to the
Pharisees and the Sadducees: "O ye hypocrites," and the unforgettable image Republican Gerald Ford evoked in
response to Nixon 's Watergate scheme: "If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be turning over in his grave."