Rick Perry denies Texas is toast

SUBHEAD: Presidential candidate Rick Perry doubles-down on Climate Change denial to woo nutjobs.  

By John Laumer on 1 October 2011 for TreeHugger -  
(http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/10/texas-getting-barbecued-while-rick-perry-doubles-down-climate-denial.php)

 
Image above: The TExas Pride Barbecue Restaurant. From original article.
 
Where I live in Southeastern Pennsylvania garden vegetables lie unharvested, rotting in the mud. Lancaster farmers will be hard pressed to harvest their corn and uncovered firewood piles are ornamented with white fungus. We have it good compared to Texas, though. Farmers and wildlife in the Lone Star State face a bleak future brought on by sustained, extreme drought.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is more focused on fanning the flames of climate denial than addressing the loss and misery. No matter that the shadow of extreme drought roughly outlines his State's shape (see graphic below). Interviewers and presidential debate hosts dare not raise the obvious irony , lest they lower ad revenues by appearing to take the side of science and rational inquiry.

 
Image above: Map show all of Texas as the center of a large, long term drought. From (http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/).


LA Times covered Perry's climate change double-down.
"Great," replied Perry, strolling with a hand-held microphone in front of a crowd at the Adams Memorial Opera House in Derry, N.H. "I'm ready for you this time."
Perry said that "just within the last couple of weeks, a renowned Nobel laureate" had said that it was "not correct" to say that there was "incontrovertible" evidence that global warming is man's fault. "There are scientists all across this country who are saying that," Perry said, adding to that his own conclusion that climate change science "frankly is not proven."
The scientist, whom Perry never named, is Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel laureate for work involving superconductors. A longtime skeptic of global warming, which he has described as "a new religion," Giaever resigned recently from the American Physical Society after it issued a policy statement that "evidence is incontrovertible: global warming is occurring."
Giaever told the London Sunday Telegraph, "Incontrovertible is not a scientific word. Nothing is incontrovertible in science."
Echoing those words, Perry told the town-hall questioner: "He said there is not incontrovertible evidence, and here's my point. The climate has been changing ... for thousands of years, and for us to take a snapshot in time and say...'The climate change that is going on is man's fault, and we need to jeopardize America's economy [to fix it.]' I'm a skeptic about that."
Perry is doing what his campaign contributors want. Only the broadcast media editors and executives can be blamed full on. It is they who let it go unchallenged, preferring the role of circus ring master for their on air staff. I want Walter Cronkite back.

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