Palin versus Gore on Climate Change

I have made no attempt to deny over the past year my utter contempt for Sarah Palin, otherwise to be spoken of as Caribou Barbie, the Wasilla Whack-Job, or the grand priestess of American theo-fascist buffoonery. Until now, I had decided to ignore writing about her and the zombie masses that have flocked to her media-manufactured book tour out of sheer disdain. However, the Washington Post, in an attempt to completely repudiate itself as a newspaper, has decided to publish today (9 Dec. 2009) an op-ed written (or purportedly so) by Caribou Barbie, which lambastes scientists as opportunists and frauds, scientific debate as politicized drivel, and climate change mitigation as a massive exercise in liberal taxation and socialism.

I want to remind people, exactly what Sarah Palin believes in. First, she is a bigot who stated to her father, upon returning from a brief stint at Hawaii Pacific University, that she was "uncomfortable" around Asians and Pacific Islanders. “They were a minority type thing,” her father says, “and it wasn’t glamorous, so she came home.” She makes the claim in her pseudo-biography/ manifesto that she had a great deal of "affection" for her gay roommate from college (which no one can find), but opposes all rights for gay couples, opposes allowing gays to serve openly in the military, opposes gay-inclusive hate crimes legislation, and opposes the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

Second, she has no background and zero credentials to discuss any subject on science. Her entire history is one that dismisses empirical fact and core scientific knowledge for superstition, innuendo, and demonstrably false lies whenever it serves her personal or political needs. Palin is an evangelical Christian that believes in creationism, thinks that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and proposes that fundamentalist dogma should be taught in every public school; she is an adherent of end-of-times theology, which involves the conversion of the believers of Judaism to Christianity and the rapture; she has made proclamations for the removal of the constitutional separation of church-and-state; and she is against cell stem research or any scientific research that she arbitrarily dislikes. With respect to climate change, she has repeatedly clung to the odious supposition, without providing any corroborating evidence, that there is no man-made (i.e. anthropogenic) element to current atmospheric or climate changes.

In the WaPo op-ed, she specifically calls the stolen emails from climate researchers at the University of East Anglia, proof that, "Leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." Unwilling to address the science itself or the overwhelming consensus generated by scientists and climate researchers across the planet for more than 20-years, she states that, "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

This woman is an absolute ignoramus and demagogue, who will lie and distort any fact to empower herself and the theo-fascists in the Republican Party that have surrounded her.

In response to this exhibition of white-trash duncery and recycled claptrap, Al Gore has been asked on repeated occasions to address her complaints about the entire Climate change debate and the current United Nations Climate Change conference in Copenhagen (COP15). He states the obvious:

The global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths [sic] in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.

These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.

Reasonable people can argue and dispute matters of opinion, but facts as to whether humans have injected extraordinary levels of greenhouse-effect producing gases into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution is not subject to debate; it is a fact. There is no dispute that ocean levels are rising, whether the oceans are becoming acidified due to excess C02 in the atmosphere placed there by man, or even if this past decade and the decade of the 1990's have been the warmest in recorded human history. All these statements are facts that anyone can independently verify.

The twin forces of globalization and human tribalism have locked us all into a fearful downward spiral and there appears little hope that the majority of the human species is equipped to adjust to a low carbon economy, much less understand the dire situation we have created.

Nobel Prizes for just looking Fabulous!

Like everyone in North America I woke to the news that President Obama had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. For a moment I too thought it was a joke, then the full realization of this event dawned on me. I don't speak Norwegian, so I assumed a newly updated translation of "Nobel" to English was, "Yeah... you're not that fucking idiot Dubya, so here's something." Obviously, that has to be the translation, because in the past decade, the prize has been given to no less than four individuals who have called or at least implied that George W. Bush was a war criminal, torturer-in-chief, environmental terrorist, global miscreant, and the worst president in the history of the USA.

Consider that a year after Dubya was appointed by the Supreme Court and weeks after he had his bullhorn moment on top of the ruins of the World Trade Center NY, the Nobel prize (on its centenary) was given to the United Nations and its leader Kofi Annan in recognition of it and its leader's involvement in multilateralism, international cooperation, and peaceful conflict resolution. Whilst the world grieved for the victims of 9-11, those with a knowledge of global wars were kindly reminding their American counterparts, that a collective threat to international stability needed a collective response and not cowboy antics.

In 2002, the world watched as the Bush Administration gave the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon free reign in dealing with the Palestinians. A parallel and even more disturbing march towards invading Iraq was being sold front and center by Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, and the neocon trotskists. The Nobel committee looking for alternatives to the messianic-militarist's potential mayhem chose former US President Jimmy Carter, "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." This wasn't just a slap in Dubya's face; it was a shot by the international community against Bush's imperial over-reach and overt war-mongering.

In 2005, with not a milligram of WMDs to be found in the sands of Iraq and the further ramping up of neocon blather about invading Iran, the Nobel committee gave the award to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes and to ensure that nuclear energy for peaceful purposes is used in the safest possible way." The decider by this moment in history had demolished decades worth of bilateral and international nuclear, chemical, and bio-weapons anti-proliferation treaties, was posed to develop new generation of atomic weapons that would be smaller and more "usable", and had allowed -under his dismal watch- Pakistan and North Korea to engage in nuclear proliferation with actual rogue entities.

By 2007, the toxic-Texan had served his oily corporate friends well in deigning the existence of climate change, the scientific method, and fact based reality. His government had cut science research funding across the board to pay for their Middle-Eastern war-mongering, were pushing creationist dogma in research universities, were filling the FDA with Pharma lobbyists, NASA with college dropouts who were religious zealots, the Department of the Interior with sex and drug fiends who gave away oil & gas rights to energy corporations, and the EPA with lobbyists from major polluters. An entire decade had been lost to prevent a catastrophe that will undermine human civilization. To the American Taliban, everything they needed to know was in the Bible, so why bother with these inconvenient truths that humanity was destroying the planet. To wit, the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

And today, eleven months after his election to the presidency of the United States of America the award was given to Barack Obama, "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." After eight hard years of decay and decline, the Nobel committee said thank God we have someone who can pronounce "NUCLEAR" properly in the White House. Of course, this really was never about Mr. Obama per se. This was about demarcating the ideologues who allowed the American nation to be attacked by terrorists, wage two failed wars, allow an American city to be nearly destroyed by neglect, preside over two recessions, have the entire global economy nearly collapse due to their crony-capitalist mantra, increase global terrorism and religious extremism, exacerbate nuclear proliferation, and condemn humanity to a future of unknown environmental horror.

Is it any wonder that only 23% of Americans now identify themselves with the Republican party?