Nothing shows how extreme Republicans have become more than climate change denial
by David Atkins
Regular readers of progressive blogs have heard the refrain a million times by now: the Republican Party has gone far off the rails into cuckoo land. It's true, but most of the proof is in the form of legislative tactics and empathy deficits. One could, in theory, chalk up wanting to cut Medicare and food stamps to a policy difference, and holding the debt ceiling hostage to extreme hardball politics.
But nothing puts the devil-may-care craziness of the Republican Party in perspective quite like the denial of the international consensus around climate change, which was reconfirmed by yet another UN report:
A United Nations climate science panel has concluded global warming is “unequivocal” and there’s at least a 95 percent chance human activities are the main driver of temperature increases over the last six decades.
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia,” states Friday’s report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes,” the report finds. “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”
"Extremely likely” in the UN’s parlance means at least a 95 percent chance. That’s greater confidence than the last big IPCC report in 2007, which found it “very likely” that human’s are the main cause, signaling at least 90 percent confidence.
There really isn't any question about this anymore. There hasn't been for quite some time, but every year the evidence becomes more definitive and enormous stakes become clearer.
Yet the Republican Party has grown increasingly defiant about not only climate change mitigation, but the very facts of climate change itself. This isn't a policy disagreement rooted in philosophical differences about who deserves what in society. Whether you're an economic royalist or a radical egalitarian, deeply religious or an atheist, you should be able to agree that letting climate change get out of hand with rising oceans, deserts, droughts, hurricanes, mass immiseration, crop shortages and inevitable war is a bad thing. Everyone should be able to agree on this, whether think think Wall Street tycoons are the heroes of Galt's Gulch or fat cat villains. This isn't really a question that's subject to political philosophy. It's a reality that we either deal with as a species in an intelligent way, or we don't and watch the world burn.
The fact that Republicans cannot seem to muster even an ounce of concern about the clear scientific consensus is a canary in the coal mine. If they're this intransigent about matters of life and death that aren't properly subject to political philosophy, just how extreme are their stances on more disputable matters?
We're well beyond simple partisanship at this point. To be a Republican official in early 21st century America is to belong not to a political party so much as a cult of big business and religion that allows no evidence to sway its belief system and no crisis to alter its principles.
That's a very dangerous thing, and it goes far beyond politics as usual. Every action the Republican Party takes, whether it be to take the debt ceiling hostage, threaten government shutdown over healthcare legislation they themselves had recently championed, or implement institutional rape by forced transvaginal ultrasound, needs to be seen in that light.
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