Republican Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Rob Johnson, the future opponent of Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, has said that people who believe in global warming are “crazy” and that the idea of climate change is “lunacy.”   He is also quoted as saying, “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change.  It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination.”   See the full article with many other choice quotes here.

Al Gore might respond–‘I hope he is correct.’  Gore, in his NY Times Op-Ed “We Can’t Wish it Away,” states, “It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

Gore continues, “I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.”

I also hope that that climate change is really no big deal, but I question the basic choice to not deal with potentially serious or catatrosphic risks due to environmental degradation, even if the risks are potentially low-probability (and climate science suggests they are not).  And this does not even consider the major national security and economic concerns of America’s dependence on oil.

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