du Pont goes all Inhofe.
I missed this when it was first published, but our venerable former Govenor, Pete du Pont, is now a denier.
Al Gore said the other week that climate change is “a principle in physics. It’s like gravity. It exists.” Sarah Palin agreed that “climate change is like gravity,” but added a better conclusion: Each is “a naturally occurring phenomenon that existed long before, and will exist long after, any governmental attempts to affect it.”
Over time climates do change. As author Howard Bloom wrote in The Wall Street Journal last month, in the past two million years there have been 60 ice ages, and in the 120,000 years since the development of modern man, “we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings,” and of course this was before — long before — “smokestacks and tail pipes.”
In our earth’s history there has been both global warming and global cooling. In Roman times, from 200 B.C. to A.D. 600, it was warm; from 600 to 900 came the cold Dark Ages; more warming from 900 to 1300; and another ice age from 1300 to 1850. Within the past century, the earth has warmed by 0.6 degree Celsius, but within this period we can see marked shifts: cooling (1900-10), warming (1910-40), cooling again (1940 to nearly 1980), and since then a little warming. The Hadley Climatic Research Unit [sic] global temperature record shows that from 1980 to 2009, the world warmed by 0.16 degree Celsius per decade.
There is only one problem, as Media Matters points out:
Pete du Pont used data from the U.K.’s Met Office Hadley Centre, which he misidentified as the “Hadley Climatic Research Unit,” to suggest that climate change is not human-caused. In fact, according to the Met Office, “human activities like burning coal, oil and gas, have led to an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing an enhanced greenhouse effect and extra warming,” and as a result, “over the past century there has been an underlying increase in average temperatures which is continuing” and “[g]lobally, the ten hottest years on record have all been since 1997.”
[…]
There’s a 90 percent chance that an increase in global temperature since the mid-20th century is human-caused. In its 2007 Synthesis Report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that “[m]ost of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic [human-caused] GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations.” The report defined “very likely” as “>90%.”
NOAA: There is “no scientific debate” that human activity has been increasing greenhouse gases. On its website, the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration states: “Human activity has been increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (mostly carbon dioxide from combustion of coal, oil, and gas; plus a few other trace gases). There is no scientific debate on this point.”
So Pete du Pont praises Sarah Palin and then mis-characterizes the data from an organization whose name he gets wrong, and further fails to check the actual position of the aforesaid organization on climate change. Pete du Pont and Sarah Palin are right that Earth’s climate fluctuates over the eons. What they both fail to understand is that human activity is preventing those normal fluctuations and/or exasperating it. That is the whole f*cking point about the climate change “debate” that these deniers fail to grasp. I expect a know nothing like Sarah Palin to not understand that 2 + 2 = 4, but for Pete du Pont to engage in Inhofery, it is downright shocking.
Sounds like DuPont got George Will to write his op-ed. Will does the exact same thing except I think he gets the name of the center whose data he’s misrepresenting spelled correctly.
It seems like all the deniers have left is complete dishonesty.
Crazy Uncle Pierre has added some Imhofe to his Steve Forbes.
This is where the Celia Cohens and (before her) the Bill Franks allowed their fawning sycophancy to get in the way of telling the story of this phony ‘just like us’ billionaire.
Which is, duPont’s entire raison d’etre (French deliberately invoked) is to hoard as much wealth as possible in his inbred brood. Just like his ancestors who started the inbreeding process for that very reason. Just like his greedy GenX political wannabe Chateau Charlie.
Pete and his interns go crazy again.
PS to ES – Don’t dump on Bill Frank 20 years after his death. IV was a competent governor, largely hiding his ideology, then going post-gubernatorial crazy.
This hideous article may become IV’s legacy:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=65000578
JM-I actually wrote a letter to the editor back in, I think it was 1984, criticizing Bill Frank’s fawning over Elise (rhymes with ‘sleaze’) duPont when she ran against Carper. Frank wrote that he simply couldn’t get over the fact that Elise answered the door by herself instead of having the maid or the butler do it, I kid you not. That’s what I mean by the ‘Just Like Us’ billionaires next door portrait that was conveniently drawn by both Frank and Cohen. And it’s still around 30 years after Frank first created it.
Methinks this is not a new ‘meme’ by me by any means (repeat three times fast).
BTW, that’s some article you linked. Pete duPont on Al Gore and the Porn Belt. Whoa!
El Som, really? You were picking on Bill in ’84? He would have been almost 80 then, and you would have been… not.
Nice man. I liked him.
Bill was still writing then, he was the Journal’s most prominent columnist at the time, and he was shilling for the duPont legacy. A nice man he was. But he was paid to write as a columnist, he had a public forum, and he was misleading the public.
Are you saying that he should have gone unchallenged b/c of his age? Isn’t that age-ism? Besides, the letter was written in a humorous and snarky fashion. I’m not a Bulo-Come-Lately to snark.
I’m saying that his life experience may have made the phenomenon of a DuPont answering the door more actually impressive to him than it was to the wet-behind the ears snot that you were, at the time. 😉
One of my earliest memories is watching my Dad put on an ill-fitting jacket from the maitre D at a restaurant so he could take my Mom out to dinner. I thought he should punch the guy in the face and walk out. I was a natural “red-diaper baby.”
My experience with them hasn’t made the upperclass any more attractive to me. I know them too well. But as I get older I see individuals, and particularly the experience of those older than I am, in a different light. I have a little more generosity towards them because I realize how far my frame of reference diverges from young people now, and therefore how far they have probably come.
Maybe the world is entirely populated by self-aggrandizing sleeze-balls in the pay of “the Man.” But mine isn’t. 🙂
Frank wrote that he simply couldn’t get over the fact that Elise answered the door by herself instead of having the maid or the butler do it
Or as it is known in the du Pont family, “the last day we ever answered the door ourselves.”
Anon wrote:
“Frank wrote that he simply couldn’t get over the fact that Elise answered the door by herself instead of having the maid or the butler do it
Or as it is known in the du Pont family, “the last day we ever answered the door ourselves.”
Now, THAT’s pure comedic gold! Clip & e-Save it.
I can forgive Bill Franks for these allegations,if true.I’ll never forget that old man humping his ass around Vietnam to look up Delawareans and telling their stories.He could have Datelined from Saigon but he chose to spend his time in the bush and in the boonies,God bless him.
Pete Dupont was always my favorite republican, but then I could pick my favorite serial killer as well. But if any one SHOULD be a republican it,s PETE. His interest are what the party really represent. This just proves that the republican bag is so empty, their free market deregulation nonsence has blown up in our faces, they are left with anti-global warming craziness and an Alaskin airhead as there leader. All the being said, the current crop of dumbed down Democrates will keep them viable as a party.
Agree Ray K.