During the presidential campaign, Sarah Palin burbled:

You’ve heard about some of these pet projects they really don’t make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.

…and the crowd cheered! This was a watershed moment; one of the first times I realized how dangerously, self-satisfiedly ignorant Palin is, and her willingness to pander to the anti-science base of the Republican Party.

In fact, fruit fly research is tremendously valuable in genetics and molecular biology, and has led to important medical breakthroughs — including for special needs children with autism. You’d think someone like Palin, with a special needs child of her own, would understand the value of this kind of research — but there she was, mocking fruit fly research (in Paris, France! guffaw!) for a cheap round of applause.

Today in the Washington Post, Palin demonstrates again her astonishing ignorance on scientific issues, weighing in on the phony “Climategate” scandal with her trademark total lack of comprehension and promoting every single false and debunked claim about the CRU emails: Sarah Palin - Copenhagen’s political science.

With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point.

The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is one of the most reputable and respected centers of climate science in the world, and as far from the “radical environmental movement” as it’s possible to get.

And isn’t it clever how Palin uses the “tipping point” catch phrase of the climate change movement against them? Actually, no. It isn’t. The idea that a few stolen and cherry-picked emails are going to destroy mountains of scientific evidence from many different sources isn’t clever — it’s stupid.

The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

Throughout this ludicrous op-ed, Palin confuses the terms “climate” and “weather,” and uses them interchangeably. I’m not going to link to refutations of everything that follows, because there have been numerous posts at LGF over the past week on these subjects. Just scroll down the page and you’ll see how dishonest Palin’s claims are.

The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records…

This is false. No records were “destroyed.” A small amount of data from one dataset was discarded almost 30 years ago, but all of the original data is still available from the NOAA.

… manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures …

This is false. No data was manipulated, and nothing was “hidden.”

… and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.

Also false. Here’s the real story.

What’s more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.

False again. This video does a good job of explaining the truth behind this dishonest claim (and several other “climategate” falsehoods).

Palin concludes with a call for Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen climate summit.

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.

It’s not surprising that Palin thinks Obama should just quit. That’s her tried and true method when the going gets tough.

You almost have to laugh, when the idiot who mocked life-saving fruit fly research, and thinks the most reputable climatologists in the world are “radical environmentalists” pretends to be an expert on “trustworthy science.” Or you might want to cry instead, because this one-woman factory of stupid has somehow become a reputable political figure, with an op-ed in the Washington Post.

Shame on the Washington Post for publishing this dishonest and misleading pile of nonsense. Are all of your fact checkers on vacation?