Thursday, August 30, 2012

IPCC lead author Pierrehumbert does an extremely poor job of pretending he's a politically disinterested, just-the-facts man of science: He refers to "little fantasies that many of us progressives use to fend off the nightmare of a Romney win"

Paul Ryan on climate change: His environmental record is atrocious. - Slate Magazine
When it comes to climate change policy, as in so many other things, the Mitt Romney who was governor of Massachusetts is a man I could almost imagine voting for in a presidential election. One of the little fantasies that many of us progressives use to fend off the nightmare of a Romney win in November is the idea that he has flip-flopped so much on his way to a presidential candidacy that maybe once in office he'd flop back to the old Romney and give us a Nixon-in-China moment on climate change.
....
Like almost all Republicans, he supports the climate-killing Keystone XL pipeline...
With a track record like that, is it any surprise that Paul Ryan is the darling of the denialist crowd? S. Fred Singer, one of the favorite consultants of the Heartland Institute (responsible recently for this billboard) declared Paul Ryan to be "the perfect anti-Gore." Marc Morano, the Swift Boat mastermind who was point man for Sen. James Inhofe's jihad against climate science before setting up his own denial shop at ClimateDepot, has even more lavish praise for Ryan: “Rep. Paul Ryan has an awesome energy & climate record. It will be so refreshing to have a VP candidate who actually understands how warmists like James Hansen, Michael Oppenheimer, Michael Mann, Phil Jones, & Kevin Trenberth have perverted science and turned it into pure politics." What’s more, “According to his voting record on energy and oil, Ryan is about as conservative as they come.”

So yes, there can no longer be any doubt about what a Romney/Ryan victory would mean for those of us would like to preserve some chance that our descendants will be able to enjoy the same equable climate of the past 10,000 years, under which the rise of civilization was nurtured. There will be no Nixon-in-China moment, no silver lining; Christmas will bring only a lump of coal in the stocking, and we will have to suck on that.
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert - Slate Magazine
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is the Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He writes episodically for RealClimate.org.
More on Pierrehumbert

Revkin.net: Summer in Chicago’s more like New Orleans’ CO2...

[incredibly lame climate hoax video] Summer in Chicago’s more like New Orleans’ CO2 Blues Band (super-group: Pierrehumbert, Archer, Abbot).

No comments: