Rick Perry Should Be Confined to a Padded Room, Chapter One

Governor Rick “Crotch” Perry is somewhat of an expert at saying inane things, a trend that has accelerated since he declared his Presidential candidacy.  He flirts with secession, he accuses the Fed Chairman of treason, he was against cervical cancer before he was for it, he wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, he claims that there is a super-secret Constitutional clause allowing Texas to secede, bank regulation is unconstitutional, Social Security is unconstitutional, almost everything is unconstitutional, you get the idea.

So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he said something idiotic on the campaign trail today, an idiocy that has become an article of faith on the right:

Perry [stated] flatly that scientists drum up phony climate change data to make a buck.

“A substantial number of scientists [have] manipulated data to keep the money rolling in,” New Hampshire Union Leader editorial page editor Drew Cline quoted Perry saying on the stump in a tweet. Before that, Cline quoted Perry saying, “I do believe the issue of global warming has been politicized.”

Let’s suppose that climate scientists really did have a conspiracy to increase their funding.  Would they say what they are saying now?  Not in the least.

Climate scientists have already declared anthropogenic climate change to be real, and have already declared it be extremely serious.  That’s a lousy strategy for generating research dollars.  The better strategy would be to say that it could be serious, but we really don’t know, and there is still uncertainty, but we aren’t sure, and we really need $200 million more to figure it out.

As the science currently stands, the people looking to clean up are not climate scientists, but rather renewable energy experts, geo-engineering specialists, carbon sequestration inventors, fuel cell battery designers, etc.

I realize that this is a little too straightforward: “well, yes, that just shows how diabolical the conspiracy is!  They are pretending that the science is certain, so that when we accuse them of making it up, they can wriggle out of it by using your argument!”  Cue crazed-dilated eyes.

Maybe it would have been better if we had let Texas secede in the first place.

Note: I added “Chapter One” to this post because I think we going to have many, many more of these.

climate denial, Governor Rick Perry, secession