GOP Climate Denier Profile: Rep. Joe Barton
For a perfect example of the willfully, pig-headedly ignorant Republican position on climate change, check out this video from C-SPAN of Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tx).
The first question from C-SPAN’s moderator: “What causes, in your perspective, global warming?”
Barton’s reply:
Well, the short answer would be God.
Which might be OK if it really was just “the short answer.” The problem is that for Barton, this is the only answer.
Watch and weep. Where does ignorance this impenetrable come from? Perhaps … the energy industries?
It’s like a six-course meal of stupid. Barton is the archetypal anti-science climate change denier. He categorically rejects all of the scientific evidence, from all of the sources.
And Barton, of course, is also a creationist. At a recent Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing titled, “Preparing for Climate Change: Adaptation Polities and Programs,” one of the “experts” called to testify by Barton and his GOP anti-science cronies (in addition to complete wacko Lord Christopher Monckton) was Dr. E. Calvin Beisner (PDF link), a young earth creationist. A quote from Beisner’s testimony:
The naturalist, atheistic world view sees Earth and all its ecosystems as the result of chance processes and therefore inherently unstable and fragile, vulnerable to enormous harm from tiny causes. The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God’s creation and providential preservation and therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating–like the product of any good engineer who ensures that the systems he designs have positive and negative feedback mechanisms to balance each other and prevent small perturbations from setting off a catastrophic cascade of reactions.
Here’s Barton at this ludicrous hearing; his solution to global warming? Find some shade.
Frank says: