This is possibly the way the World Ends....if we let it.

So, these are some things said by politicians lately, that have me pretty concerned:

Fred Upton (new head of the House Energy Committee):

I have said many times, and there was a report a couple of weeks ago that in fact you look at this last year, it was the warmest year in the last decade, I think was the numbers that came out. I don’t —I accept that. I do not say it is man-made.

This is what the House Energy & Commerce Committee is like.  Go ahead, read that. Smarmy, incompetent goofballs. You know what one House member said recently on Real Time with Bill Maher? US Rep Jack Kingston said he thought the science should be left out of the debate on global warming. (Yeah. Fucking science. How does that work?) He also said he doesn't come from a monkey. Pure genius. (HBO prunes the Youtubery, but it's a pretty popular show. You might have caught it. It's on On Demand.)

This is the current US Senate Committee on Environment and public works-- that had had  Sen. James Inhofe as a massively clueless member, once. He is a climate change skeptic. He's also pretty darn stupid.

How stupid is he?

He's ssooooooooo stupid, actually thinks we're in the third year of a cooling phase..really.  He said it out loud where people could hear and everything, and because, duh, civility! nobody pointed and laughed and asked him to pull the other one. Because science is complicated and all the data isn't in and reasonable people can disagree.  But, I gotta say, the high tech, complicated stuff that gets used for the question "Is it getting warmer around here?" is a thermometer and a calendar.

The way the denialists work is by just....denying. The way they win battles is by not getting called on it in a swift, no-b.s. manner. It seems to me that part of the "fuzziness" around this issue is the claim that the "politics" around the issue is "controversial" or "contentious." But here's the thing: I know politicians can be political. Lobbyists are political. The process of obtaining grants and funding can have a political side...but know know what isn't political--

A thermometer!

So what do I think is just kicking the ass of the world right now?  Stupidity. Sheer, staggering unfathomable willful ignorance. But we do have a treatment for it. Information.

EDIT: I can spell, honest.  Poorly, indifferently, awkwardly, and correctly. It's all spelling, actually. Albeit awkward as hell in a post on teh stoopids. Oh well--I admit I'm fallible.