Sunday, December 20, 2009

Sarah Palin makes even less sense now she’s a climate change denier.

From the Washington Monthly, here is one of her tweets on Twitter about her new favorite subject, the Great Big Climate Change Hoax.

In a late night posting on her Twitter feed, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to blast climate change believers Friday, calling the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark a representation of man's "arrogance," for believing people have an impact on nature.

"Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature," Palin tweeted.

"Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," the former Republican vice presidential nominee wrote.



Uh huh. It’s “arrogant and naïve to say that man overpowers nature.” I guess she is unfamiliar with things like the Chernobyl accident which has rendered huge amounts of land in the former Soviet Union uninhabitable for centuries, mountaintop removing mining, clear cutting of forests, or having rivers and lakes so polluted that, not only can’t people actually go in them, but they actually used to catch fire.

Maybe she’s talking about a global scale, not just localized impacts on the environment caused by mankind’s activities, although I would argue that chopping down the Amazon rainforest is having a global effect. Maybe she thinks that the Earth is so huge that it will be able to absorb anything that mankind chooses to do.

This is the same kind of thinking that Americans held in our early history, which lead to the slaughter and near extinction of what used to be vast herds of buffalo. They are there for the taking. Mankind is the master of the planet, and what self-respecting master of anything willingly puts rules on himself? We can do anything we want! We can overfish the oceans so that the population of jellyfish has exploded due to lack of predators. Rules are for wimps and liberals. After all, photographic evidence of receding glaciers is easy to ignore when you have "Climategate" to talk about.

It’s all part of the conservative thought process. No restraints on anything that they want to do, and to fight tooth and nail against anything that their perceived enemies are for. I don’t know if this attitude comes from what they think are the teachings of Christianity or not. It seems likely to me. We are, after all, God’s chosen people. We’re special. I saw one quote sometime last year about God and climate change. Some person (I wish I had kept this quote) said something like, “God won’t let the Earth be destroyed.” I thought THAT statement was the epitome of arrogance. God will save us from anything that we choose to do. Except when God Himself chooses to destroy the Earth in Armageddon. Or maybe, this perspective on the universe is more rooted in the deep psychology of conservatives. I don’t know the answer.

There are two things that spring to mind when I see something like Princess Sarah’s statement above. One is that she is somehow one of the leading lights of the new conservatives. This person doesn’t even seem to have enough on the ball to qualify as a third grade teacher.

She is also so lacking in science that she doesn’t know the different between an eon and an ion. But I suppose that’s about par for the course for someone who has stated that living in a place where you can see Russia somehow gives her credibility in international diplomacy, and that Africa is a country.

God, this country is so screwed up.

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