This a TP cross-post.
Millionaire businessman John Raese, running as the GOP Senate nominee to fill Robert Byrd’s West Virginia seat, wants to take the state back to the 19th century. Not only does he want to return capitalism to the era before child labor laws, Social Security, and civil rights laws, he also promotes a pre-industrial vision of science. In an interview with Real Clear Politics, Raese said he has “zero” trust that “human activity is contributing to climate change”:
The oceans that surround the world produce 185 billion tons of CO2 per annum. Man per annum only produces six billion tons, so what could possibly be the concern? One volcano puts out more toxic gases-one volcano-than man makes in a whole year. And when you look at this “climate change,” and when you look at the regular climate change that we all have in the world, we have warm and we have cooling spells.
Although Raese is well-versed in conspiracy-theory talking points, they’re as nonsensical as his desire to abolish the Departments of Energy and Education. Human activity puts about 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, well over 100 times as much as all the volcanoes in the world. The oceans actually vent about 332 billion tons of CO2 per year, but also absorb that much. Human emissions have disrupted the balance of the carbon cycle, leading to rising concentrations of greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 40 percent, and global temperatures are on an inexorable rise, overwhelming any natural cycles.
Far from protecting West Virginia’s coal industry, Raese’s desire to abolish the Department of Energy, kill the Recovery Act, and deny global warming would end federal policy to support advanced coal technology, the only hope for this 19th-century fuel in the 21st century.
– Brad Johnson
JR: For the record, we do have warm spells and cold spells in the paleoclimate record — but it isn’t random, as the deniers imply, it is driven by external forcing. Now, humans are boosting CO2 14,000 times faster than nature, overwhelming slow negative feedbacks. Now, there are multiple indicators of a human fingerprint on climate change.
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Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
John Kenneth Galbraith once said that moneymaking ability occupies a peculiar and isolated part of the human brain, unrelated to its other functions. This guy is a perfect example.
GOP = Grumpy Old People
Like I always tell my students, “Democracy” is merely a method of selection. It tell us nothing about good government.
Yes, Theodore, yet another wealthy and wrinkly caucasian male who denies the science behind AGW.
My apologies to more senior readers here, who obviously do not fit the above profile– but what is it with the tendency with those in denial to very often fit the wealthy, wrinkly, caucasian male profile?
A democracy is government by the people. A plutocracy is government by millionaires.
If after looking at the fifty thousand paid lobbyists in DC and the billions spent on election cycles, we call our national hypocrisy a “democracy” then our delusion will soon provide dissolution of the American experiment.
Fossil zombies on the march.
Good thing I had to go to lunch,I was going to make a snarky joke about it but it occurred to me at lunch that just maybe this guy really does believe it. Notice the figure he gives for human CO2 production? It’s roughly what the USA produces each year. Only white Amerikans are REALLY human. (Europeans don’t count because they let “fags” live and give them way too many rights like marriage!!!they’re too sissified to be real men) Talk about freudian slips.
Err, Joe, not to be a prude, but there is a pretty risque ad on the RHS panel (lots of cleavage), above the ad for your book. Some people may object. Ad asks you to flip the image left or right.
Joe, speaking of crusty climate change deniers running for congress, did you notice this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/09/24/peter-defazio-concerned-taxpayers-ambush_n_738532.html
http://www.artrobinsonforcongress.com/issues.html
At first I couldn’t quite place the name, since I read of him awhile back as Arthur Robinson. Yep, the “31,000 scientists” petition guy – running for my district’s seat! Do these guys have a knack for persistence or what?
Just goes to show that having lots of money and being intelligent are not necessarily mutually inclusive!
Cheers – John
This guy earned his money the old fashioned way. He got it from daddy. Why anyone gives this guy any consideration is beyond me. The man is a throwback to the good old days of the robber-barons. This November is going to be a disaster for the country if guys like Raese even get a look from the voters. However, you can’t go wrong estimating the smarts of the average American.
The Greeks had it right. Money is the enemy of Truth.
Neeeeed braiinnnns!
Mike Roddy #1, that is a lovely quote from Galbraith, but I would amend it slightly. The money-making ability resides, not in a particular part of the human brain, but in a certain pathopsychology. Its features have been well established-gigantic egotism, lack of human empathy, indifference to the suffering of others, readiness to lie, without conscience, to gain advantage etc. Those whose characters express these features were once known as psychopaths, but nowadays it has been euphemised to ‘sociopath’. Whatever you call them, they are the capitalist type par excellence, and that system nurtures and favours them, so talk of ‘reforming’ capitalism or using ‘market solutions’ to save humanity is pure, unadulterated, and probably mischievous and disingenuous bunkum.
So this person gets an interview with “Real Clear Politics” where he spouts a load of “Genocide Only Party” BS, full of errors and inaccuracies that would be noticed by a well educated ten year old, yet the individual interviewing him did not apparently take him to task on the spot…
Why not, what is wrong with journalism at the moment, it would appear that the profession is filled by a bunch of cowards scared of their own shadows. If journalism in all it’s forms is not free and truthful on all subjects then what does that tell you about the country in which it resides and the people that read what is produced?
Let’s create a new paper called the “Daily Joe” to work for it journalists with “kahones”, a penchant for the truth, relevant qualifications, and wholesome slice of professionalism will be required…
Are there any journalists with those qualities left or have they all gone extinct, preyed upon by the likes of the “Reich Ministry of Propaganda” and the alleged bastion of “Fair and Balanced” news… the Fox network (shudder) .
OregonStream (#8) – Good catch! Arthur Robinson is among the most rabid deniers of climate change among scientists.
Robinson founded the prestigious-sounding Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and appointed himself professor there despite the fact that the “campus” is his barn and other outbuildings many miles from even Cave Junction, Oregon, which isn’t exactly Cambridge England or Massachusetts, and as far as I know has no students.
As a response to Kyoto in 1997 Robinson sent out a petition to have anyone with a BS or other science degree sign and ended up with 31,000 signatures (out of ten million Americans with BS or other science degrees) over maybe a decade of intense effort.
The petition was sent with the exact formatting and type of a National Academy of Sciences (or NSF, I forget which) paper, and the august body censored this fraud. Despite this, writing his own campaign Robinson biography calls himself “A man of integrity.”
His Wikipedia biography is the most hilariously one-sided I’ve read, and Wikipedia has two warnings about this pabulum.
I recently met my first girlfriend’s father, a volcanologist who proudly told me he’d signed Robinson’s petition. “Gee, so you know more about atmospheric science than all atmospheric scientists put together. Are any of them ignorant and arrogant enough to claim they know more about volcanoes than you do?” I should have said instead of my lame “Oh? Really? Hmmn – I’d love to hear your talk but I, uh, have to rearrange my sock drawer.”
I would call that volcanologist, and Robinson, uneducated men – except maybe in their very narrow fields.
Robinson is to be resisted at every turn of his wingnuttery.
This is the4 guy who said he “Made his money the old fashioned way, by inheriting it”.