Why the Oceans Rise according to Republican

[_Hawkeye]

Hol... eeee.... crap

Republican lawmaker: Rocks tumbling into ocean causing sea level rise

"Every time you have that soil or rock or whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, because the bottom is moving up" - Representative Mo Brooks (R–AL)

[_DarkHelmet]

Just add it to the long list of stupid things climate change skeptics have said. His job isn't to convince people like you or me. It's to keep people like subgenius and ajax skeptical of climate change.

[_Some Schmo]

The main reason the GOP stinks is that they spend all their time swimming in BS.

Man, I wish more Americans knew what classical conservatism is. The problem is that the worst offenders are GOP pols.

[_subgenius]

I wish more Americans knew what classical conservatism is.

wow, arrogant much?

What makes you think that more Americans don't already know? Just because people do not agree with you does not mean they lack knowledge - in fact, it is more believable that the more informed an American becomes, the more they won't think like you think.

You, no doubt, sincerely held belief that stupidity is the only thing standing between a conservative becoming a mouth drooling liberal like yourself is indeed a bigger problem for this country than any tweet could ever be.

[_EAllusion]

I wish more Americans knew what classical conservatism is.

wow, arrogant much?

What makes you think that more Americans don't already know? Just because people do not agree with you does not mean they lack knowledge - in fact, it is more believable that the more informed an American becomes, the more they won't think like you think.

You, no doubt, sincerely held belief that stupidity is the only thing standing between a conservative becoming a mouth drooling liberal like yourself is indeed a bigger problem for this country than any tweet could ever be.

One reason to suspect most Americans don't have an understanding of historical iterations of conservatism is that most Americans do abysmally on knowledge surveys of far more basic material on politics and history. Most Americans don't know the three branches of government in the US. Expecting a different result on a much more difficult subject is like expecting someone who can't pass a 3rd grade math test to do really well on the SAT.

But, you probably already knew that. Well, maybe. I wouldn't expect you to do well on those knowledge surveys either. And I don't mean your trolling character. I mean you, the person with the unearned condescension doing the trolling character.

[_MeDotOrg]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the takeaway to a United States House Member claiming the oceans are rising because of boulders shouldn't be a discussion of classical conservatism. It should be a discussion about monumental stupidity.

[_Themis]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the takeaway to a United States House Member claiming the oceans are rising because of boulders shouldn't be a discussion of classical conservatism. It should be a discussion about monumental stupidity.

I think it is more about monumental gullibility to believe something monumentally wrong so as to not have to accept the obvious evidence they desperately do not want to believe. I suspect it may not be obvious to many like this politician since I doubt they have even looked at the available evidence. The sad thing is the only reason they have not to believe human caused global warming is because the liberals/left do.

[_EAllusion]

When Republicans took the House in 2010, they made a deliberate effort to stock the committee on science space and technology with scientific ignoramuses. I still don't know what the long-game was with that. Was it merely about petrochemical friendly policy and getting global warming skeptics on the committee naturally would also lead to areas of ignorance on other subjects? Maybe, but I'm not sure. What is clear is that somehow our system of government got us into a situation where we picked some of the most scientifically ignorant people in the country to oversee our federal Congressional's oversight of science, space, and technology. It's a profound failure of the system.

[_Gunnar]

The Most Anti-Science Congress in Recent History Is Now in Session.
From the linked article:

After the sweeping Republican victory in November, which wrested the Senate from Democrats, both of the House's legislative branches are now controlled by politicians who either willfully ignore, disavow, or deny outright some of the best-supported science produced in the modern era. The notion can still seem bizarrely dissonant—we're in a new scientific renaissance; we're on the verge of 3D-printing human organs, we're landing probes on comets, and the GOP's party line is to entirely disregard the legion of scientists who point out that our greenhouse gases are trapping excess heat.

Anyone who thinks this is a good thing is woefully and dangerously ignorant!

The ​paleoclimatologi​st Michael Mann, whose work has been instrumental in reconstructing past climate records, and who has been a ​favor​ite target of climate denier attacks, says anyone who holds science in high esteem should probably be actively worried about this 114th Congress. He is.

"As a nation, we have always led the world when it comes to technological innovation and scientific progress," Mann told me. "Our quality of life has benefited greatly from our commitment to unfettered scientific exploration. Now, with a Congress that is firmly controlled by those who possess an antipathy toward science, all of that is threatened. It is a matter for great concern among all of us."

You'd be hard pressed to find another time in modern history when scientists were so under siege, Mann said. Or, for that matter, when both branches of Congress were controlled by politicians so contemptuous of science.

We, as a nation are in serious jeopardy of losing our once vaunted leadership in science and technology (if we haven't already lost it) because of this, and, apparently, some of the dullards who now control the congress not only don't care about that, but seem to be actually gloating over it!

How can that possibly be? How can so many public leaders, seeking to govern a rich, technologically advanced, thoroughly modernized nation, who are at least intelligent enough to run a savvy campaign to get themselves elected, be so confounded by what amounts to very basic science? How have we come to see the rise of what may be the most anti-science Congress in recent history?

Oreskes says that this strain of science denial originated as a political strategy much like the one Congresses past deployed to shield tobacco companies from the powerful, emergent consensus in the medical establishment that cigarettes caused lung cancer. She authored a book, ​Merchants of Doubt, that "showed how the strategy of denial came from the tobacco industry, and was applied to acid rain, ozone, etc."

"In that sense," she said, "this is old news. However, what is really terrifying about what is going on now is this: In the case of tobacco, the industry was in sustained denial for decades."

The fossil fuel industry, a major Republic​an donor, has a vested interest in preventing or delaying restrictions on carbon pollution, the necessary step to combatting climate change. Oil giants like Exxo​n and industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute have spe​New Testament a fortune lobbying Congress to oppose climate measures and, as with the tobacco fights, funding pseudoscientists and front groups to seed doubt about cli​mate change in public forums. Thus, Republicans often renounce scientific findings in order to justify advocating coal, oil, and gas interests, as when they call for clean air protections to be struck down, or for the construction of a tar sands oil pipeline like the Keystone XL.

"This is an overall, leadership-led agenda," David Goldston, the director of Governmental Affairs for the Natural Resources Defens​e Council, told me. "And that agenda explicitly involves trying to undermine a wide range of environmental protections. They've been very explicit that they want to block any and all action on climate change." Congressional Republicans, from the leadership down to the rank-and-file, have clearly demonstrated they will deny science in order to justify doing so.

"There were politicians from tobacco states who defended the industry (and Jimmy Carter notoriously said that they were going to make 'even safer' cigarettes)," Oreskes said, "but the defenders of tobacco never controlled both houses of Congress. They did not have political leaders who made it a point of pride to reject well-established science. Our political leaders never defended tobacco disinformation in this systematic and sustained manner that the Republican leadership has defended fossil fuel disinformation."

Physicist and climate expert Joe Romm, who runs Climate Pr​ogress and served as an advisor on Showtime's global warming series A Year of Living Dangerously, echoes Oreskes' analogy.

"Scientists are now as certain that humans are the primary cause of climate change as they are that smoking is harmful to your health," Romm told me. "The hammerlock science deniers have on the Senate and House shows that the political strength and disinformation campaign of the fossil fuel industry is of a vastly greater scale than the tobacco industry's ever were."

Why is it so difficult for certain conservative members of this forum to acknowledge the glaringly obvious vested interest of the fossil fuel industry in denying the reality of man made climate change--no matter how often and egregiously they have to lie to promote their selfish agenda? What makes this whole climate denial issue particularly egregious is that even many conservatives who deny climate change apparently know it is real, but oppose doing anything about it for strictly political reasons.

So it likely is with the party as a whole. In 2005, the conservative columnist David Brooks wrote that, "Global warming is real (conservatives secretly know this)." Shortly before that, the infamous Luntz memo leaked, which was meant to advise Republicans on opposing climate measures, and noted explicitly that "the scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed." The room for reasonable doubt was shrinking, and Luntz suggested Republicans—who at that point were reluctantly agreeing with the science (even George W. Bush pledged to fight climate change in a State of the Union address)—fabricate some of their own. "Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."

Republicans took his advice, to spectacular effect, and, after years of repeating 'the science isn't settled' like a mantra on campaign trails, and with the help of fossil fuel industry contributions, a phony 'climategate' scandal, and a Tea Party caucus intent on maintaining ideological purity, willing to punish candidates who endorse climate science, the party eventually convinced itself of the veracity of its own cynical anti-science proclamations.

There is a ray of hope, though. Perhaps this cynical and criminally irresponsible anti-science attitude of current Republican, conservative leadership can begin to be reversed in this year's midterm election cycle:

Still, even as climate denial reaches its apogee in Congress, there are signs that this historic science-forsaking frenzy may be on the wane. A majority of the public strongly believes that climate change is happening, and most believe that it is caused by humans. The same is true even of Republican voters, a new Yale ​poll shows, providing even further evidence that it is the donations-soliciting party leadership that outspokenly denies climate change, not its science-literate constituents. The notion that climate change is a hoax ​was ​voted "lie of the year" by PolitiFact readers.

This shifting attitude may be why industry-friendly candidates had to resort to the now-infamous "I'm not a scientist" dodge on the 2014 campaign trail, in order to avoid incriminating themselves as dullards to an increasingly climate-observant public. And Republican Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) was forced to say not only t​hat he was sorry, but to stress that yes, he actually believed in manmade climate change to appease his voters, who made a stink when he claimed that global warming wasn't caused by humans, and that Greenland had been melting long before the Industrial Revolution.

I fervently hope that the Trump's election hasn't put an unrecoverable kibosh on efforts to effectively address these issues.

[_Some Schmo]

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the takeaway to a United States House Member claiming the oceans are rising because of boulders shouldn't be a discussion of classical conservatism. It should be a discussion about monumental stupidity.

Agreed. My comment about conservatism was just something I've been thinking about a lot lately.