THE INHOFE FACTOR

Weather Bane
Timothy Egan, July 21, 2010 (NY Times)

"…During a stroll around the capital, I sweated through two shirts…The humidity stung…Around Capitol Hill, I could not find… the number one global warming denier, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma. In February…during a record snowstorm, Inhofe’s family constructed a primitive igloo [to satirize the idea of climate change]…

"The snowy winter day was followed, all too quickly, by the hottest spring in Washington history… Last month was the hottest June ever recorded worldwide, and 2010 is on course to be the warmest year since record-keeping began…"

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"In Senator Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma, the National Weather Service issued a warning this week of “dangerous heat index values” of up to 110 degrees. A report from AccuWeather.com last month stated that, this year, “no other region has seen the variety of extreme weather” as much as Oklahoma.

"…[Inhofe] won his senate seat in 1994 by using, as his slogan, the actual words of a cynical strategy to get people to think about anything but real issues: 'God, guns, and gays.' …[W]hen it snows, he makes fun of the consensus scientific view…But during this heat wave, nothing. On his Web site, he’s still been highlighting a winter week when 49 of the 50 states had snow on the ground. There’s another reference to his much-quoted remark that global warming 'is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.'"

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"And the official, taxpayer-funded site devoted to the Republican position on climate change — the minority page of the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, where Inhofe is the ranking member — features a five-month-old video of Inhofe bloviating over the leaked emails of leading atmospheric scientists in England…Surely, there would be an update, based on the latest of the independent investigations…which found that “climategate” …[had] nothing to do about hard science…Inhofe did not post this update…[He] dismissed the recent heat records as a short-term phenomenon that should not be the basis for legislation.

"Senator Inhofe should be a harmless diversion…But he is one of the lead Republican senators on climate change, and he doesn’t even believe the climate is changing..I rely on the experts, those people who’ve devoted their lives to understanding changes in the earth’s temperature, to guide political leaders…If my doctor brought me biopsy results showing cancer, I would do something about it. Inhofe would likely call the doctor an idiot, say the biopsy was a hoax and have me skip merrily to an early death…"