Super-blogger Andrew Sullivan has an intriguing feature on his site called The Odd Lies of Sarah Palin in which he catalogues the way the most popular so-called “conservative” in the country today lies seemingly reflexively, even about topics which are not the least bit controversial. (For instance, whether or not she consulted her daughters about accepting the nomination to be Vice-President last year.)
Well, here’s another one. Yesterday Palin published an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which she claimed that global warming is real, but “a natural, cyclical environmental trend.”
In an interview yesterday, Al Gore scoffed at her:
“The north polar ice cap has been there for 3 million years, the size of the continental United States, and it is disappearing before our very eyes. What do the skeptics think is causing that? Could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that we are putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere here every 24 hours and that these consequences have been predicted for decades by the scientists?”
Gore chuckled, then added, “It is not sun spots.”
“This is physics, it is not politics. Gravity is well understood. The fact that the earth is round is pretty well accepted now. The moon landing was not, as some claimed, staged on a movie lot. If there was a large budget from carbon polluters designed to promote controversy about those findings, I am sure we would have a debate about it. The fact that carbon dioxide is trapped in the atmosphere is not complicated. Not controversial. Not in dispute. And we are putting so much of it up there every day, that the heat buildup is proceeding as the scientists warned it would. There are lot of reasons why some people don’t want to accept that. It is, to coin a phrase, an inconvenient truth for many, but it is a reality that we have to accept and respond to.”
To which Palin tweeted:
“amazing 2 see Al Gore’s denial of the controversy–it’s like denying gravity”
One has to almost admire the audacity of her misleading. Gore did mention controversy, denial, gravity; so why not claim that he is denying the controversy as if he were denying gravity?
