The GOP’s War on Science Endangering America: Climate Change, Evolution, Regulation

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http://www.juancole.com/2014/01/endangering-evolution-regulation.html

The GOP’s War on Science Endangering America: Climate Change, Evolution, Regulation
By Juan Cole | Jan. 18, 2014

The Republican Party is increasingly emerging as an anti-science party. Since American greatness was built on its science and technology (and not on the odd cult of biblical inerrancy), this development is a danger to the republic, and, indeed, to the world. The US used to be about solving problems, about a can-do spirit, not about denying concrete reality.

First, it was reported that the percentage of Americans who do not believe climate change is happening has risen by 7 points just since April. We are going backwards! Americans also believe that scientists are more divided on the issue than they actually are. In fact, almost all climatologists (99.9%), and indeed almost all scientists in the hard sciences agree that humans dumping 35 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually is causing global climate change. Most dissenters are engineers and the denialist engineers are a small number.

Media hype of the non-existent “pause” in warming may be in part to blame. Some of the supposed “pause” hyped by denialists came from gaps in the measurements in the arctic. Some came from the warming being displaced from land to the seas (hence Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines). Far too many journalists are scientifically insufficiently literate to treat such claims with the scepticism they deserve. And some journalists, as with many of those at Fox Cable News, are corrupt and willing to misreport for a paycheck if Roger Ailes orders them to.

There is no secret that oil, gas and coal billionaires are pooling millions of a dollars a year to do propaganda to the public to try to convince them that burning fossil fuels is quite all right. If they were proper human beings, they’d get out of that business and invest in wind, solar, wave, and geothermal. But they’re not. They’re greedy and want us to burn through their reserves of fossil fuels. If we do that we could well make the climate unstable for future generations and even threaten human life on earth. You have to be a monster to kill your great grandchildren.