Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

ImpossibleHamster.org

I won’t claim to be able to support any of the scientific claims in these videos, but I wholeheartedly support the sentiment.

John Boehner in an amazingly ridiculous performance on This Week:

What becomes clear after all of this, besides the fact that John Boehner needs some remedial science classes (carcinogen!?!), is that the Republicans have zero policy ideas for climate change.  This really isn’t problem if no one thinks that uncontrolled carbon dioxide emissions are an issue, but a lot of people do.  So the GOP ends up in this weird position of simultaneously proclaiming climate change as a problem, but not doing anything to control carbon emissions.  It’s a strange sort of accommodating approach to two competing interests, and it leads to a completely incoherent policy.

Yet another example of the modern Republican Party:  The Party of No Ideas.

World-Renowned Climate Scientist Columnist George Frederick Will:

Chu recently told the Los Angeles Times that global warming might melt 90 percent of California’s snowpack, which stores much of the water needed for agriculture. This, Chu said, would mean “no more agriculture in California,” the nation’s leading food producer. Chu added: “I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going.”

No more lettuce for Los Angeles? Chu likes predictions, so here is another: Nine decades hence, our great-great-grandchildren will add the disappearance of California artichokes to the list of predicted planetary calamities that did not happen. Global cooling recently joined that lengthening list.

In the 1970s, “a major cooling of the planet” was “widely considered inevitable” because it was “well established” that the Northern Hemisphere’s climate “has been getting cooler since about 1950″ (New York Times, May 21, 1975).

Just about every blogger I read penned a takedown of this column, but personally I like Nate Silver’s the best.  Why?  He uses graphs.  I like those.  Also, there’s this:

And yet, according to George F. Will, many scientists were convinced in the 1970s that global cooling was a significant threat to the planet. And if those scientists were so wrong before, why should we trust them when they say that global warming is a threat now?

There’s just one little problem with this story, which reappears every so often in conservative discourse on the environment. Specifically, it’s a crock of shit.

There’s two graphs in particular I like to show when talking about climate change (both of which I lifted from this sweet free pamphlet from the National Academies).  FIrst, there’s this one, showing current atmospheric CO2 concentrations are at the highest levels ever seen by humans:

And then there’s the much more recent graph of the outlined section above:

So to all those deniers out there: you see how that graph goes straight up?  How could that possibly be normal?  Furthermore, seeing as every scientist on earth acknowledges that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, how could this possibly be no big deal?  Seriously, it goes straight fucking up. Through the god damn roof. It’s also an amazing coincidence that this ridiculous skyrocketing of CO2 concentrations just happens to coincide with the exact same time that we started burning a lot of carbon.

Get a fucking clue.