GOP Global Warming Denial Watch: Pat Toomey
As if to illustrate my point that every single GOP candidate in this election is a denier of global warming, even Philadelphia’s Pat Toomey (considered one of the few remaining moderate Republicans) is toeing the anti-science line.
My view is: I think the data is pretty clear. There has been an increase in the surface temperature of the planet over the course of the last 100 years or so. I think it’s clear that that has happened. The extent to which that has been caused by human activity I think is not as clear. I think that is still very much disputed and has been debated.
Toomey is peddling a “soft” kind of denial; he admits that the atmosphere is warming, but claims there is “very much” doubt about whether it’s caused by human activity — and that’s flat out wrong. The fact is that there’s an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists, based on volumes of hard evidence, that human production of CO2 is the main cause for global warming.
In a way, this kind of deliberately ignorant doubt mongering is even more insidious than the outright denial of people like Sharron Angle and James Inhofe, because it seems more reasonable and more convincing — but it’s just as much of a Big Lie.
