Global warming? What global warming?

Excerpts from:

Al Gore's Unlikely Helpers

By Sebastian Mallaby
Monday, May 22, 2006; A17; Washington Post

Republican dishonesty reaches its extreme on the issue of global warming. Yes, climate science is complex, and nobody can forecast the earth's temperature with complete confidence. But the fact that scientists don't know everything isn't a license to ignore what they do know: that the earth is warming, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an accelerating pace -- and that these changes are driven at least partly by fossil-fuel consumption. The U.S. National Academies have confirmed this; their foreign counterparts have confirmed this; and so has the world's top authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . None of this is controversial.

[...]

James Inhofe, the Republican who ironically chairs the Senate environment committee, has described global warming as the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." He avoids scientists who might put him right: His star witness at a hearing last year was Michael Crichton, a science-fiction novelist.

Then there is Conrad Burns, a Republican senator from Montana. "You remember the ice age?" he asked Environment and Energy Daily this month. "It's been warming ever since, and there ain't anything we can do to stop it."

[...]

Six years ago, Bush narrowly defeated Gore, apparently because voters thought he'd be a nicer guy to have a beer with. But after years of governmental bungling, of willful indifference to truth, the national mood seems to be changing. Voters have seen that nice guys can screw up. And technocrats with diagrams and charts have never seemed so interesting.

smallaby@washpost.com

(For the entire article, go here.)