“..what about the Dinosaurs?” Funny you should Ask….
June 10, 2014
More and more, politicians are being pressed on their understanding of climate science. Especially in places, like South Florida, where the ground is increasingly squishy.
See here.
Steve Benen for MSNBC:
There is an unfortunate irony to the politics of climate change. Florida faces severe risks from the climate crisis, arguably more than any other state, and yet Florida also has a habit of electing Republican policymakers who refuse to believe climate science, refuse to take the issue seriously, and refuse to even consider modest steps to address global warming.This includes Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), who recently responded to questions about the climate crisis by saying, more than once, “I’m not a scientist.” It also includes Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), whose climate denialism has fairly been characterized as “a train wreck of incoherence.”And it includes Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), who told msnbc’s Richard Lui this morning that it’s “foolish” to believe in climate change, adding that there are “scientists on both sides of the issue that say that’s it’s not settled.”The congressman, sticking to the usual climate deniers’ talking points, added that the climate does change – “it gets hot; it gets cold” – and it led to this curious exchange.“But, manmade, isn’t that the question?” Lui pressed.“Then why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Were there men that were causing – were there cars running around at that point that were causing global warming? No,” Miller concluded. “The climate has changed since Earth was created.”You can watch the video of this below. I’m reasonably certain Miller wasn’t kidding or trying to make climate deniers appear foolish on purpose.It just seemed to work out that way.
Below, very well done documentary on “South Florida’s Rising Seas”, by a South Florida PBS Station.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
June 10, 2014 at 9:22 am
If dinosaurs were as dumb as this guy Miller and the other Repugnant Party politicians, they never would have lasted long enough to be wiped out by an asteroid. Incredible!
June 10, 2014 at 1:03 pm
Don’t be so critical DOG. I was impressed that Miller didn’t claim that the dinosaurs are extinct because they couldn’t fit on Noah’s ark.
June 10, 2014 at 3:07 pm
I wonder if he even knows that they ARE extinct? After all, they have dinosaurs wearing saddles and people riding them at the creationism museum.
June 11, 2014 at 6:22 pm
Dinosaurs aren’t extinct. They are currently running my country.
June 12, 2014 at 7:01 am
No, they are humans running your country, and you are being unkind to dinosaurs to say this. Dinosaurs had a long and successful tenure on the planet—-160+ million years—-and managed not to destroy it by their actions.
And man’s destructive behaviors don’t go all that far back either. Only 8-10,000 years to the beginnings of human civilization, with most of the real damage done in only the last 200-250 years.
June 12, 2014 at 7:08 am
Good point. I wont refer to them as dinosaurs anymore. I’ll stick to calling them out of touch, antiscience, backward morons.
June 12, 2014 at 7:50 am
Works for me, but I would append “flaming anal orifices” to that, definitely so for the Repugs.
June 10, 2014 at 10:29 am
If only some prescient fellow would create a sort of academy of the country’s top scientists, specifically to assist the nation’s elected representatives by providing objective advice on those tricky to understand science matters. They could call it the National Academy of Sciences perhaps.
June 10, 2014 at 10:49 am
Naaah, it would never work. They’d just start talking about a lot of inconvenient truths and annoying the plutocracy who own the nation’s “elected” representatives. Anyone who tried to organize such a body might even get shot.
June 10, 2014 at 2:41 pm
“Erected representatives” would be quite apt!
June 10, 2014 at 11:37 am
Guys like this just TICK me off. What an arrogant know-nothing. Why do these ignoramuses get the podium all the time??
June 10, 2014 at 12:57 pm
Nothing new here. It’d be interesting to read the climate one-pager issued to every GOP politician.
June 10, 2014 at 2:00 pm
There is a precedent for Miami’s problem. The city of Baytown near Houston Texas abandoned a 500-acre subdivision as the area subsided into upper Galveston Bay due to groundwater pumping. This low residential area was slowly converted into salt marsh and a nature center.
There were some big but predictable hurdles. At first the residents insisted the City somehow protect their property with sea walls, pumps, etc. but the costs outweighed the benefits by a long shot. Eventually the homes were abandoned and the City purchased the empty lots. Some residents didn’t want to let go of their property even though it was under water at high tide so this took almost 20 years to accomplish.
Eventually the site was converted into saltmarsh through the removal of house slabs, driveways, natural processes and excavation of tidal channels.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from Baytown’s experience.
Wikipedia has a nice entry for it and the Friends of Baytown Nature Center has plenty of photos on their web page. You can also see the subdivision’s history via Google Earth’s historic photo sequence.
June 10, 2014 at 7:33 pm
[…] >readmore> ClimateCrocks […]
June 10, 2014 at 9:23 pm
Re; “Why do these ignoramuses get the podium all the time??”
Because these ignoramuses represent what the 1% who own the ignoramuses and the media want you to get as a message.
This is Propaganda 101. Push the dial back to the start of this video to get an insder’s view of why MSNBC censored Cenk Ugyur, Jesse Ventura and Phil Donahue for taking politically incorrect positions.
June 10, 2014 at 10:47 pm
Another sign the GOP is running off the rails. #3 House leader Eric Cantor tossed out in a primary. By a Tea Party guy named Brat.
You can’t make this stuff up.
June 11, 2014 at 3:43 am
I got a letter in the mail months ago asking me to donate to some fella from WV called Ken Reed, a local business owner, running to represent his area in the House. I looked online to see what he was all about, and found out he was republican and into oil, gas, and coal, like everybody else in WV.
In recognition of the finely written letter Ken sent me, I launched an anonymous, one man propaganda campaign against his Youtube channel where I pushed the talking points that Ken (who was supposedly going to show Washington his ‘business smarts’) didn’t understand the ‘free market’ regarding how Wyoming coal and the recently cheap natural gas were decimating the WV coal industry (already in secular decline), not Obama, and that he was greedily profiting by the asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that was being inflamed by coal particulates, as he was a pharmacy owner who sold inhalers, nebulizers, and steroids to the affected community members.
It was all fun and games until he turned the comments section off. However it turns out i was inadvertently helping his opponent – a Tea Party fellow that was flush with out-of-state cash, and the latter ended up winning the seat. Reed was already bat-sh*t-conservative. I wonder why the Tea Party would even bother….
June 11, 2014 at 6:28 am
Maybe because your boy was not as amenable to being controlled by Rove and the Kochs?
June 12, 2014 at 12:11 am
Probably something along the lines of this:
June 11, 2014 at 11:20 pm
Thanks. Good story. 🙂
June 11, 2014 at 3:33 am
Perfect. We should all donate to the Teaparty candidates in the primaries then watch them fall the Dem candidate in the election. Are Repubs that stupid? They keep losing like this. How long before they collapse entirely? Does anybody remember Sharron Angle? GOP. The party of tinfoil hat lunacy.
June 11, 2014 at 6:31 am
Don’t be so sure. Eric CAntor just lost his primary to a TP guy in VA, and the TP guy will likely win in November with no problems. CAnto is the only House Majotiry Leader in history to have lost his primary, and he outspent TP guy fy 40 to 1.
June 12, 2014 at 2:41 am
During the previous prez election, TP candidates helped Dems win the Senate. They lost many races like Sharron Angle with their escape from the insane asylum. Don’t know what the political experts say yet, but judging from Marco Rubios recent roasting over Climate Change, it may be to our advantage to have the most off their rocker TP candidates beat more moderate Repubs in the primaries. That was Harry Reid’s strategy. It worked. In some places, a cocker spaniel could win if it was TP. Then who cares. At some time in the not too distant future, we may need a second party that is less than moribund.
June 11, 2014 at 9:32 am
Whatever else one can say about the Tea Party zealots – they get out and vote. With our anemic voter turnout their small numbers have been decisive in a number of elections. The Democrats, and the moderate Republicans (if there are any), can only win if they get their supporters to go to the polls and vote. The millions spent on campaign ads is largely wasted because there aren’t that many ‘Undecided’ and the ads don’t change the minds of the die-hard. Have any of the readers here changed their minds based on the content of a TV ad? Me neither.
Far more effective, in my opinion, is grass-roots activism. If you want to make a difference get involved in the campaigns of the politicians you support. Stuff envelopes, enter data, work phone banks, participate in events . . . anything will help. This evening my wife and I are hosting our second event for the Wendy Davis campaign for governor, and we have a third event scheduled for late June.
Grass-roots involvement may not make a decisive difference – but non-involvement simply concedes the elections to the zealots. Can we really afford to do that?
June 11, 2014 at 8:24 am
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