Stupid Is Becoming GOP Brand On Climate Change [Picture]

Louisiana’s Governor Jindal may have been totally “serious” in his warning to the Republican National Committee gathered for a post mortem on Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012, but his party paid no heed. Instead it has embraced stupidity with renewed passion as it parades toward the 2016 election.

The stupidity Jindal spoke of is not low intelligence or IQ, but rather the choice not to use what intelligence and knowledge we have. It is willful stupidity. One of its most dangerous manifestations is climate change denialism–the refusal to accept that rising global temperatures caused by emissions of greenhouse gases are a growing threat to human well-being and national security.

On one side we have the voice of science: “Based on well-established evidence, about 97% of climate scientists have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening” (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2014 ). The national science academies of the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany and seven other nations issued in 2005 a joint warning about the dangers of human-caused climate change, and called for preventive measures.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is trying to prepare. Its 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Road Map is clear: “While scientists are converging toward consensus on future climate projections, uncertainty remains. But this cannot be an excuse for delaying action.”

This document echoes the concerns of scientists world-wide about such disturbing facts as rising global temperature and increasing frequency of extreme weather. Accelerated melting of glaciers, and of sea ice and ice sheets in polar regions are causing sea levels to rise. The World Bank projects that in ten years “at least 65 percent of city dwellers on each continent” will reside in vulnerable low-elevation coastal zones.

According to the DOD, “In places like the Hampton Roads region in Virginia, which houses the largest concentration of US military sites in the world, we see recurrent flooding today, and we are beginning work to address a projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years.”

On the other side, a Republican peanut gallery tries to drown out all these warnings with a chorus of “I’m not a scientist, but. . . .” In an August 11 survey by NPR, only 2 GOP presidential candidates (Jindal and Graham) were willing to say they would do something about global warming if elected.

Even if a Republican president tried to address climate change, he or she would be blocked by Republicans in Congress. According to the Center for American Progress , “53 percent of House Republicans and 72 percent of Senate Republicans deny the occurrence of human-caused climate change.”  source