Q: How can you tell which Republican politicians are not global warming deniers?

A: They’re the ones who aren’t in office.

Former Republican Representative from New York Sherwood Boehlert had an excellent piece in the Washington Post this Friday about the issue: Can the party of Reagan accept the science of climate change?

Boehlert retired in 2007, and any remaining GOP non-deniers have now been replaced with Tea Party extremists. So I found this sentence kind of poignant:

Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world’s top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.

I’d like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information too, but if there’s ignorance at work in the anti-science GOP, it’s the kind that’s deliberately impervious to information. And there are big companies with big money, big influence, and big stakes in making sure the ignorance persists.