Legum’s New Line

Michael Steele, former Lt. Governor of Maryland and now chair of the Republican Party, recently guest hosted Bill Bennett’s radio show. During the show, he announced his belief that the earth is cooling. HuffPost has the transcript:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.

It’s worth noting that, among the scientific community, the fact that the earth is warming is not the subject of any debate. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of hundreds of distinguished scientists, concluded in 2007 that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.” The panel concluded that it was “very likely” that most of the warming since the mid-20th century was due to human activity.

The head of Republican party, apparently, does not have much use for science.

Also, as Huffington Post notes, Greenland’s “name was derived…from Erik the Red, who wanted to trick people into going to that island as opposed to the more hospitable Iceland.”

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