Al Gore has it exactly right. If Republicans can use Sarah Palin as a source, then Al Gore, who has actually studied this issue, deserves a hearing too:
Exactly, Al. Sarah Palin, please explain how a hacked email is going to un-melt the glaciers and sea ice, will undo sea level rise and will un-acidify the ocean. Global warming is not just numbers on a graph, it’s the effects we’re seeing all around us. Do the deniers need to be standing on a boat in what used to be part of Manhattan before they get this? The laws of physics don’t care whether you believe in them or not, they will occur no matter what. All the deniers are doing is making action to combat the problem even harder, but what do they care they’ll mostly be dead and gone when the big effects are kicking in mid-century. Also, I just love how journalists glibly assert that we can’t take action because it will cost money. Why is there an assumption that doing nothing is free?
Anyway, Gore asks the question that a Sarah Palin could never answer logically: Why are the polar ice caps disappearing? The batshit crazy deniers like Palin don’t know the caps exist maybe because she can’t see them from her house…
MITCHELL: Congratulations on the book. You write in your new book, “Our Choice,” “The global warming deniers’ arguments are fraudulent and often nonsensical.” Yet even today, one of the best-known voices in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, has an op-ed in the Washington Post, and she is escalating a major attack against Copenhagen and against — against the summit. Palin calls it “junk science.” She says, “The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst.”
What’s your response to that?
GORE: Well, you know, the — 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 (ph) 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.
MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.
GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a — a principle in physics. It’s not a question of debate. It’s like gravity; it exists.