Now that the Republicans are in complete control of Congress, what do you think their going to do about climate change (especially since 2014 is now the hottest year since climate measurements started)? They haven’t formally announced their strategy for dealing with climate change, but I have a feeling it’s going to involve trying to stop scientists from making accurate measurements of the average global temperature. After all, if there’s no statistics showing global warming, then there’s no global warming, right?
Ok, I confess: I’m not using a crystal ball here. I’m using Google.
An amendment from Representative Scott Perry (R–PA), adopted on a voice vote, would bar spending money on a number of government climate assessments and reports, including the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment (NCA). The president has used the most recent NCA, released last month, to bolster his Climate Action Plan to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
This is actually a pretty ingenious, if nefarious, plan. By cutting funding on climate assessments, and shutting down remote weather stations, the Republicans can, in effect, make all those pesky facts go away. And if some non-governmental agency or organization steps in to re-activate those weather stations and take accurate measurements of climate trends, all the Republicans have to do is to accuse them of bias, and call their results “unofficial.” It’s the environmental equivalent of taking the battery out of the smoke detector so it won’t wake you up at night.
Conspiracy theory? We’ll see. Somebody remind me next December to check up on this prediction, and if I’m wrong, I’ll say I’m wrong. But somehow I don’t think I’m going to be wrong.
You already know this but actually they can’t.
They can ignore the facts and the reality but that won’t make reality go away. And this is pretty obvious to almost everyone and ignoring that fact won’t make that go away either.
Sometimes I do grimly wonder what if anything it would take to make some of these pitiful fools see reality. I don’t want t o see what it will take – or much they can ignore before they get to that point. But I have a feeling (for those who don’t die first still in locked into denial) we’re going to find out over the next few years or decade or so.
PS.
Hey, just me remind me to remind you of this okay?
Incidentally, Greg Laden for one under-estimated how hot the last year would be – see :
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2014/07/23/how-warm-will-2014-be/
Noted because it points out again that the so-called “Alarmists”* are actually being more conservative than their, opponents ahem, overheated rhetoric would claim & because, yes, I like that blog and there’s a lot of other good climate change stuff there too worth reading if I may say so, please.
If I remember right one of the Carolinas, north/south, passed a state law that essentially removed the ability of anyone withing, or working for, the state to even mentioning global warming in any official document. If you can’t speak or write about it, in effect, goes away. I remember watching a video of an official trying to deal with the consequences of the rising ocean and speak about it without any mention of why any of it was happening. It was slightly surreal to see a man talk about storm damage, erosion as rising seas invade the land and aquifer without any mention of why it is happening.
You see the same sort of thing with guns. People dead by the scores but nobody in power can draw any conclusion about what might be done. Lots of hand wringing, pearl clutching, and lamentations then … nothing.
The same goes for the economy. The plutocracy runs the economy into the ditch. Talking heads openly and passionately speak of the hardships of the poor and ever diminishing prospects of the shrinking middle class, then …
In each case remedies, or at least correctives, are not unknown. They are known and pretty simple. It comes down to the fact that a relative wealthy and powerful few see no advantage in correcting the situation. The suffering of the wider public and nation be damned.
ie:
blogs.hbr.org/2014/05/5-dirty-secrets-about-the-u-s-economy/
Gee, sort of like forbidding the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the CDC from keeping any statistics on gun-related incidents, via riders on their funding in 1996. If they prevent anybody from doing any research that might poke holes in their cognitive dissonance bubble, they can live happily ever after.
They have been using this tactic for a long time. The Deep Space Climate Observatory went into LITERAL cold storage for a decade to keep it from providing ironclad evidence of atmospheric warming. http://www.universetoday.com/118310/politics-kept-a-mission-in-cold-storage-for-10-years/
Philip K. Dick’s definition of reality comes to mind: