re: #194 publicityStunted

Yeah - I saw that. Pretty funny.

But I would guess that it has more to do with the extreme weather than it does with Perry.

“Skeptics” have been trying to attribute changing views on climate change to “Climategate,” even though they have no data to support that attribution. I think that it is more likely that a couple of cold winters explained changing public viewpoints.

And now I think that the recent extreme weather is having the opposite impact.

People are inclined to view climate change through a short time frame.

The poll I linked showed that Demz think that warm weather is evidence of climate trends but not cold weather, while Repubs think that cold weather is evidence of climate trends but not hot weather. Unfortunately, climate change has been a proxy for political battles - and that is the entire focus of someone like Perry. Who knows what he really thinks about climate change (or creationism, or vaccines, or anything controversial)? We’ll never know. What we do know is what he thinks he can milk for political expediency - and he’s definitely on board with exploiting climate denialism. Looks like that may not work out too well if we keep getting extreme weather (although a cold winter will help him out).