Right-wingers sure love to mock science, don't they? Here's another one (a Pajamas Media/New York Post wingnut), who thinks his own ignorance is absolutely hilarious.

To review, global warming and climate change are terms that describe two different phenomenon. It's really not that complicated, if you're an upright walking biped who breathes through their nose.

And the next time some winger pulls the 'CLIMATE CHANGE' HAHAHAHAHA card, remind them it was Frank Luntz who encouraged that terms use.

Joe “Smokey Joe” Barton, a Texas congressvarmint from outside of Dallas says that climate change is a God-thing and he has Biblical proof.

Smokey Joe got that name because he is pretty much owned by the petrochemical industry. If something ain’t polluting the air, Joe is losing money.

Joe says that you can have “an honest disagreement about the causes of climate change”. You know, like you can have an honest disagreement about gravity or what causes pregnancy or whether is the earth is flat. These, of course, are all things based not on knowledge or science; but on opinion. My opinion is the babies are delivered on a turnip truck and hidden in hospital nurseries until you come get one. And what’s your opinion?

See, this make science tests so much easier.

So, Smokey Joe says –

“I would point out that if you’re a believer in in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change and that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

And to think that there are people who call themselves Christians who seriously doubt the existence of Noah and think maybe this was an allegorical story.

Additionally, remember God’s promise after the flood? “I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be cut off by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

So, unless stupidity is going to be the way God destroys the earth – which from the looks of things might in be very strong contention – Smokey Joe is gonna have a hard time blaming this one on God.

Personally, I think climate change is caused by the carbon put out by Republican brains going up in smoke.That’s my opinion and it’s every bit as solid as Joe’s opinion.

I admit, I'm a sucker for the "it's unusually cold today in the part of the world I live in; therefore, Al Gore is fat" SRWT. So knock yourself out, Donald.

Meanwhile.

Also.

Idiots.

Greg Palast explains why the Koch brothers want that pipeline built!

One would think if this was not a foregone conclusion and President Obama was serious about weighing the environmental impact of the pipeline, he would have assigned this report to the Environmental Protection Agency and not the State Department. But I suppose we'll finally see how "serious" he is about climate change when he makes his decision. I'm sure he'll keep in mind the evidence collected by activists of bad pipeline welds that make environmental disaster that much more likely (ha ha, just kidding!):

WASHINGTON — The State Department issued a revised environmental impact statement for the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline on Friday that makes no recommendation about whether the project should be built but presents no conclusive environmental reason it should not be.

I suppose those environmental scientists and climate change experts who are freaked out enough by the impact of this pipeline that they chained themselves to the White House fence were consulted about this?

The 2,000-page document also makes no statement on whether the pipeline is in the United States’ economic and energy interests, a determination to be made later this year by President Obama.

But it will certainly add a new element to the already robust climate change and energy debate around the $7 billion proposed project. The new report does not make any policy recommendations, but its conclusion that the environmental and climate change impacts are manageable could provide Mr. Obama political cover if he decides to approve the pipeline.

I suppose this is all part of his new "bipartisan, market-based solution" to climate change. Oh, and his adviser tells us this "can't be a Washington-centric solution", so if you have a Republican governor, sorry about that. And the options that allow the president to make meaningful change without Congress? Might affect the economy, so those things aren't being considered. (Of course, Hurricane Sandy didn't affect the economy at all. Uh huh.) Bold!

Although the study will help guide the president’s decision, it does not make the politics any easier. Environmental advocates and landowners along the route have mounted spirited protests against the project, including a large demonstration in Washington last month. They say they view Keystone as a test of Mr. Obama’s seriousness about addressing global warming.

The president faces equally strong pressure from industry, the Canadian government, most Republicans and some Democrats in Congress, local officials and union leaders, who say the project will create thousands of jobs and provide a secure source of oil that will replace crude from Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and other potentially hostile suppliers.

Even though that oil will be exported on the world market, not for the U.S., and incidentally will make the Koch brothers even richer by an estimated $2 billion a year.

The draft report, which updates a 2011 study that essentially gave the project a green light, weighs the impacts of the pipeline, which would carry about 800,000 barrels a day of heavy crude oil from tar sands formations in Alberta across the Great Plains to Gulf Coast refineries.

Livestreaming here.

Frances Beinecke:

The Natural Resources Defense Council, 350.org and Sierra Club are hosting the biggest climate rally in history this Sunday in Washington, D.C.. We expect tens of thousands of people to join us in calling for immediate climate action. I urge you to add your voice to the growing chorus.

The time is right for this rally.

President Obama underscored his commitment to fighting climate change in both his Inaugural Address and his State of the Union Address. Now he has two critical opportunities to turn those words into deeds. We want him to know that when he takes these bold actions to stabilize the climate, the American people will support him every step of the way.

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"If Congress won't act, I will."

Here's the key difference between President Obama's State of the Union speech of 2013 and his speeches of the past: He reached past his own cautious nature to paint a vision for progress with a very broad brush.

This was not a speech about what is possible, but rather, a speech for what is right. We can dicker over whether he should have said minimum wage should be $15 per hour instead of $9 per hour, but the fact is that until his speech, it wasn't even on the radar.

Nor was climate change. Not really. Or universal pre-Kindergarten. None of those things were on the front burner before his speech, but they are all part of the larger progressive vision now, well-articulated and philosophically compatible with what most of us who call ourselves progressive stand for. I wanted him to go big and he did.

The importance of what the president said doesn't rest in what action Congress will take. We know Congress won't take any action. But while President Obama had the attention of the country and the media for an hour, he shamed Congress while laying out specific policy objectives for a progressive and sustainable agenda.

The clip at the top deals with climate change and his policy objectives. While offering Congress the opportunity to pass legislation to deal with the issues of infrastructure, preparation, and carbon emissions, he also promised them that if they didn't deal with it, he would. Republicans should take him at his word on that. For progressives, it offers some solid evidence that these proposals are not just mere words on the page, but meaningful policy initiatives.

More broadly, though, this speech was intended to set priorities and an agenda on his terms, rather than the Republican mantra of debt and deficit. He got that part out of the way in the beginning, then proceeded to the larger vision of investment.

If we can keep this initiative moving in this direction, whether it be guns or climate change, there should be a wave by 2014 that not only brings the Congress back into the hands of not just Democrats, but progressives. This speech wasn't mere talk. Policy initiatives are underway. The grassroots infrastructure created by OFA is in place. There won't be much cooperation from the media and there certainly will be wailing from Republicans, but if we ignore it and keep the push for these policies moving, there's no reason why November 2014 can't come back our way, gerrymandering or otherwise.

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If you're Al Gore and you own 20 percent of Current TV, and Current TV is sold to Al Jazeera, which is owned by Qatar's royal family, and Qatar's royal family also profits from oil trading, have you sold out the cause of global warming?

That's the question Howie Kurtz brought up on Reliable Sources this morning. I think it's a manufactured issue, but Dana Milbank begs to differ, saying "[H]e's been a big spokesman on global warming, a principled man and now he is this big, fat target." Continuing his rant, Milbank said Gore is "worth $300 million more than Mitt Romney and basically he's seen as a guy now who enriched himself, rather than advancing his cause -- opening up to the criticism of people like this global warming denier."

The Blaze writer Amy Holmes was predictably banal in her response, claiming Gore has "been telling the rest of the world to, you know, restrain and constrain our spending while he personally is becoming a wealthier man through, you know, his attack on Mother Nature."

What does that even mean? Does anyone think Al Gore bought Current TV in order to further his cause around global warming --so he could make a boatload of money on climate change? Really?

Finally, what does Mitt Romney's wealth have to do with it, anyway? Gore's wealth has come from sitting on the boards of Google and Apple after he left public office. He cashed in. Did anyone decide he was insincere about global warming because of those affiliations?

Gore and his partner Joel Hyatt bought a struggling cable network for $70 million in 2004. When Current was sold in 2013 for a price reported to be about $500 million, Gore's profit would be 20 percent of that sale price, less any financing that may have been obtained between 2004 and 2013. I have no idea what those financing arrangements might have been, but they either financed or else put their own funds in over the years in order to keep the doors open on what wasn't a particularly profitable enterprise.

For its part, Al Jazeera needed a channel with carriers. They have online traction, but were having difficulty finding cable carriers that would include their channel. By purchasing Current, they hoped to use Current's position as a channel already carried to build a news network competitive with CNN, which might explain why Time-Warner cable dropped Current the day the deal was announced.

I'm sure Comcast will follow suit, because when you own everything from cable to internet to pipeline to content creators, why bother with any voices you don't like?

At any rate, I'm having a great deal of difficulty connecting his sale of Current TV to Al Jazeera with a sellout of his credibility on climate change. I also don't view him as the sole authority on the question, but he is one who has credibility simply because he has been passionate and has put his money where his mouth is.

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While there is a vast chasm between rhetoric and reality, however, it's hard to not be optimistic that President Obama made specific mention of actively working towards solutions to deal with the very real fact of climate change in his inaugural address.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

Laying out an agenda to deal with climate change may be the single most important legacy that the Obama presidency could have. It's hard to look at the devastating hurricanes in both the Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard, the fires in the West, earthquakes due to fracking, droughts in the Midwest and not come to the obvious conclusion that we're facing some very real threats that will magnify exponentially the longer we avoid dealing with it. Chris Hayes:

[W]hen it comes to domestic and economic policy the president isn’t really the most pressing issue. If you were to start listing the obstacles to climate progress in order you’d start with the major fossil fuel companies themselves, you’d then go to the conservative noise machine that has converted climate change into a culture war issue, another example of out of touch elites trying to tell you what to do, and then the House Republican caucus, which almost unanimously committed to the most depraved kind of denialism, then Senate Republicans who managed to kill the last big climate bill and then Democrats from coal country and other regions that depend on fossil fuel extraction, then Democrats who say they care about climate change but wouldn’t go along with the kind of reform of the filibuster that would make a Senate climate bill a reality and only after that would you get to President Barack Obama.

For this reason, it’s somewhat perverse to focus discussions of climate policy exclusively on Barack Obama. But Barack Obama is also the most powerful person in the world who says he’s committed to averting climate disaster, and with acknowledging that comes some responsibilities. It turns out that even short of congressional action there are a number of extremely significant things the executive branch could do to reduce emissions, develop alternatives and move us closer to the radical, generative transformation of our industrial life we must have very soon. The environmental protection agency actually has the legal authority to begin regulating carbon under the Clean Air Act–no need for congressional approval. The executive branch is such a massive purchaser of energy, vehicles and equipment, it could use that purchasing power to create new, vibrant markets for clean energy.

And the White House currently has the authority to block the Keystone XL pipeline, which would pipe extremely carbon intensive tar sands oil from Canada to refineries in Texas. If that pipeline is built, it means a huge new source of emissions into the foreseeable future. The cliche about second presidential terms, one with, I think, a good deal of truth to it, is that in a second term, a president’s attention turns to leaving a legacy. I am almost certain that 50 or 100 years from now, the only issue that will really matter to people is what we did about the climate.

Yesterday, the president of the United States held a press conference with the DC elite press corps. They had the opportunity to ask the president what our government is doing about the nation's most serious problems.

There were no questions about the climate change emergency.

There were no questions about the 400,000+ Americans killed by cigarettes each year.

There were no questions about ways to get millions and millions of unemployed and hurting people into jobs.

There were no questions about what we should do about our crumbling infrastructure.

There were no questions about the huge trade deficit that drains hundreds of billions out of our economy.

There were no questions about the trade agreements that pit our workers against exploited, underpaid workers in countries where people have no say, thereby undermining our democracy, wages and middle class.

There were no questions about the government's failure to hold banks and banking executives accountable for fraud and other crimes.

There were no questions about worsening income and wealth inequality, with all income gains going to the top 1% and the bulk of new jobs being low-wage jobs

There were no questions about the obesity/diabetes epidemic, and the possible link to corn syrup.

There were no questions about the crushing student-loan debt that holds so many of our younger people back.

There certainly and for obvious reasons were no questions about what the government is doing to fight media concentration, with most media now owned by only six giant corporations.

There certainly were no questions about how we are going to return to democracy from this corporate/billionaire plutocracy.

There were no questions about the influence of money over our government and the things we talk and even think about.

But the influence of the billionaires and their corporations over our government and our media and the things we talk and even think about is WHY there were no questions about any of these problems. The solutions to the problems are obvious, but are being blocked. We are even being blocked -- by money -- from even talking about the problems, never mind solving them.

This Is Not About Ideology

Getting paid by corporations to block government action from helping We, the People but hurting corporate profits isn't an ideology, it's corruption.

Getting paid by corporations to cut taxes and regulations for corporations isn't an ideology, it’s corruption.

Getting paid by billionaires to cut taxes for billionaires isn't an ideology, it is corruption

Call it what it is, don’t launder it by calling it ideology. It is corruption.

--

I am a Fellow with Campaign for America's Future. Follow me and CAF on Twitter:

Rolling Stone has been covering Australia's global warming extremes for two years, and they've stepped up their coverage in light of the continent's current extreme heat emergency:

Though Australia's existing heat record, set in 1960, still stands for the moment, officials believe it may soon be surpassed. The nation's Bureau of Meteorology has been open about the impact that rising greenhouse gases are already having there: The agency's website declares that Australia is "experiencing rapid climate change," including more frequent heat waves and changing rainfall patterns.

The current heat wave has produced above-average temperatures for 80 percent of the country – the nationwide average on Monday was 104 degrees Fahrenheit – and scores of wildfires. The state of New South Wales, home to Australia's most populous city, Sydney, is facing its greatest fire danger ever, officials say. In some areas of the state, the official fire danger rating is "catastrophic.

"Nor are heat waves and wildfires Australia's only climate woes. Decades of drought are causing the salination of groundwater in the nation's prime agricultural region; warming and acidifying oceans are killing the Great Barrier Reef; and extreme storms are increasing. As Rolling Stone's Jeff Goodell reported in 2011, the tendency of climate change to "amplify existing climate signals" means that already extreme places like Australia will be the first to experience the kind of major impacts that could be in store for the rest of the world.

"Australia is the canary in the coal mine," said David Karoly, a climate researcher at the University of Melbourne, in that story. "What is happening in Australia now is similar to what we can expect to see in other places in the future."