Inhofe’s summer silence
James Inhofe goes for the front pages in the winter, with his igloo made following the record snowstorm in DC, but in summer, with record high temperatures, he is uncharacteristically silent. Timothy Egan has some fun with this in a column in the NY Times. From the column:
… Around Capitol Hill, I could not find what I was looking for: agitprop from the number one global warming denier, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. In February, remember, during a record snowstorm, Inhofe’s family constructed a primitive igloo.
“Honk if you love global warming,” was one of the signs placed in front of their snow cave. “Al Gore’s new home,” was another.
The snowy winter day was followed, all too quickly, by the hottest spring in Washington history. And then, early summer brought a spate of grim heat records around the globe. Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, much of Africa, Russia — all posted their hottest temperatures of all time, accompanied by forest fires, water shortages and crop failures.
Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and 2010 is on course to be the warmest year since record-keeping began, says the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Senator Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma, the National Weather Service issued a warning this week of “dangerous heat index values” of up to 110 degrees. A report from AccuWeather.com last month stated that, this year, “no other region has seen the variety of extreme weather” as much as Oklahoma.
Extreme weather. Perfect for an extreme politician, a man who won his senate seat in 1994 by using, as his slogan, the actual words of a cynical strategy to get people to think about anything but real issues: “God, guns, and gays.” Maybe, with this weather, God is trying to tell the senator something.
In Washington, I expected to see a homemade greenhouse constructed by Inhofe, complete with pithy remarks about the heat. No?
This is how he acts in his official capacity: when it snows, he makes fun of the consensus scientific view that the trend to a more inhospitable earth is incontrovertible. But during this heat wave, nothing. On his Web site, he’s still been highlighting a winter week when 49 of the 50 states had snow on the ground. There’s another reference to his much-quoted remark that global warming “is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” (Wait a minute: what about the Nigerian e-mail scam?)
And the official, taxpayer-funded site devoted to the Republican position on climate change — the minority page of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, where Inhofe is the ranking member — features a five-month-old video of Inhofe bloviating over the leaked emails of leading atmospheric scientists in England. He called it “the most significant scientific scandal of our generation.”
Surely, there would be an update, based on the latest of the independent investigations, the one released earlier this month, which found that “climategate” was much ado about poor e-mail etiquette, and nothing to do about hard science. Surely, he would want to set the record straight. But Inhofe did not post this update. If you relied on him, you would think it’s deep winter.
“The senator still believes global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” said Nat Dempsey, a spokesman for the Republicans on the Senate environment committee. He explained that the politicized igloo was the work of Inhofe’s grandchildren, and dismissed the recent heat records as a short-term phenomenon that should not be the basis for legislation.
True on the last count. Few things are more inane than trying to conduct public policy based on news of the moment, especially the weather. But that’s what we have with one side of the “debate” on climate change. I bring up the heat records to show that, if they were consistent with their calls for attention whenever it snows, Republicans would be alarmed during thermal meltdowns.
Senator Inhofe should be a harmless diversion, the kind of laughable fool that any state can kick back to the capital, where hard-earned ignorance is supported by a well-paid staff. But he is one of the lead Republican senators on climate change, and he doesn’t even believe the climate is changing. He gets his science from a dead fiction author, Michael Crichton, who wrote a fantasy thriller about climate alarmists. If Inhofe’s party wins control of the Senate, the igloo man will steer a significant part of American policy on this issue…
