Sarah Palin responds to Al Gore on her Facebook page:However, he’s wrong in calling me a “denier.” As I noted in my op-ed above and in my original Facebook post on Climategate, I have never denied the existence of climate change. I just don’t think we can primarily blame man’s activities for the earth’s cyclical weather changes.Why would anyone think Sarah Palin denies the existence of climate change? Just because she put "climate change impacts" in scare quotes in her op-ed in today's Washington Post?
OK, so let's give Sarah that. It doesn't make her sound less dumb -- it makes her sound more ignorant that she apparently doesn't even know what a global warming denier is. I mean, does Sarah think there's anyone out there who's denying that Alaskan winter temperatures have shot up six degrees in my lifetime alone? No one's gonna drip melting glaciers on your leg and tell you it's raining. We're 25 years past that.
Being a denier is about blaming global warming on anything but us. Sunspots! Volcanoes! An interplanetary conspiracy! Whatever it takes to distract us for as long as possible from our addiction to the dirty fuels that deliver record profits to Big Oil & Big Coal.
The science is settled & scary -- manmade emissions are increasing temperatures, raising sea levels, and driving deeper droughts & stronger storms. We need climate action now -- both a global treaty in Copenhagen and a deal in the Senate -- to transition us away from expensive use of polluting fuels to efficient use of clean energy. Let's hope Sen. Mark Warner & Sen. Jim Webb take their cues from President Obama, not from science deniers like Sarah Palin.
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And I could do a whole other post on how she confuses climate & weather in that last sentence.
do it! everyone confuses the two -- some intentionally and some not.
Short version, and of course I have to use a baseball analogy -- one day's weather is like a baseball game, and climate is like a baseball season. Just like anything can happen in one game (I watched the gawd-awful Nats trounce the Red Sox in June), one day's weather is hard to predict. But over the course of a season, you can be almost certain the Red Sox will win 90+ games and the Nats will lose 90+ games. In the same way, the long run makes climate much more predicatable.
The science is definitly NOT settled. Not when there are 31,000+ scientists who disagree, not when it has been revealed that the famous hockey stick graph was fudged (result: Dr. Mann is being investigated by Penn State), and not when the CRU has been shown to be guilty of throwing out the raw data that didn't conform to the religion that is global warming (the anti-smoking folks have done that as well).
And no, I did not get that from Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.
It's been two years since the Gore-acle first announced that the polar ice caps would melt away "in 5 years". Even Gerd Leipold of Green Peace admits Greenpeace's claim that it will disappear by 2030 was a mistake. Why? Artic ice is growing again at a faster rate than at any time in recent years. The Antartic ice melt is at its lowest level in recorded history as well.
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