Katherine Bagley of InsideClimate News
tracked down five climate scientists ...
...who identify themselves as Republican [and] say their attempts in recent years to educate the GOP leadership on the scientific evidence of man-made climate change have been futile. Now, many have given up trying and the few who continue notice very little change after speaking with politicians and their aides.
"No GOP candidates or policymakers want to touch the issue, and those of us trying to educate them are left frustrated," Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a registered Republican, told InsideClimate News. "Climate change has become a third rail in politics."
Republican climate scientist
Barry Bickmore
In fact, past support of policies to regulate carbon dioxide, a global warming gas, is being used to question the fitness of candidates to become the party's nominee. During a speech this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Rick Santorum tore into his GOP presidential rival, former Gov. of Massachusetts Mitt Romney, for buying into man-made warming and supporting the nation's first cap-and-trade program known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Romney later opposed the scheme but Massachusetts did participate, and it has benefited from the nearly $500 million in economic activity the program has brought to the state. [...]
A Tea Party favorite, Santorum has called global warming "a facade," "a hoax" and an example of the "politicization of science." Both Romney and Newt Gingrich, another candidate for the party's nomination, have stepped away from their previous stances that humans are contributing to global warming in order to convince restive voters and donors that they are conservative enough to be the party's luminary. [...]
Brigham Young University geochemist Barry Bickmore is a Mormon and active Republican, serving as a county delegate for the GOP from 2008 to 2010. Bickmore first got involved with his party's handling of climate change when he and other scientific colleagues in the state banded together to try to stop a 2010 Utah resolution that cast doubt on climate science and urged the Environmental Protection Agency to halt its efforts to regulate carbon emissions. The scientists said the resolution was riddled with scientific errors, but it won passage anyway.
Bickmore has since reached out to his state's U.S. senators, Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, both Republicans, with offers to educate them on climate issues. Lee has yet to respond. Bickmore did convince Hatch's office to remove a fake climate data graph from his public website. The web page, Climate Change 101, is still full of misinformation, Bickmore told InsideClimate News. [...]
"[Hatch] didn't believe anything I was trying to tell him," said Bickmore. "He would come back and say that he knew some person who was a lead author of the IPCC [the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] ... and they told him this, that and the other thing." But the people he cited, Bickmore said, were prominent skeptics like John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric scientist at MIT. "The information [they were telling the senator] is wrong, and these scientists are in the minority."
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:
Let's face it. The Democratic Leadership Council has never gotten a lot of love around here.
No surprise there. When your philosophy of governance sucks that much ass, and you lose every election you contest on its tenets, you're just not going to get love from a community that's come together to find ways for Democrats to win. It's just not gonna happen.
But through it all, the DLC always at least pretended that the "D" meant something.
Then, they put Harold Ford at the helm, and it all fell apart. [...]
Tweet of the Day:
Caroline Heldman on #EdShow - "Republicans only want government small enough to fit in a woman's private parts." #waronwomen #gop
— @mitchellhirsch via TweetDeck
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