How To Wage a Campaign When Your Record Is a Disaster

Mark Fiore: The Political Attack

Those Darn Scientists!

Drat those pesky troublemakers! We keep coming up with cappa stories about stuff and they keep dragging in facts! Who needs ‘facts’? They just get in the way.

A Bush administration report suggests that evidence of global warming has begun to affect animal and plant populations in visible ways, and that rising temperatures in North America are due in part to human activity.The report to Congress, issued Wednesday, goes further than previous statements by President Bush. He has said more scientific research is needed before he imposes new restrictions on greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

In 2001, after the release of a National Academy of Sciences report on global warming, Bush said the concentration of greenhouse gases has increased, in large part, because of human activity, but he emphasized that other factors could have influenced warming. Referring to the NAS report, he said, “We do not know how much effect natural fluctuations may have had on warming.”

He’s right, you know. ‘Natural fluctuations’ are entirely and completely unpredictable. You can’t know about things like that. Who do you think they are, scientists? Oh, wait….

We’ll just have to bide our time until the ocean washes over NYC and NJ drops into the sea. Then we’ll be sure–that it happened, not that global warming was the reason. With the oil and gas industries at stake, we can pretend there’s no such thing as ‘global warming’ for millenia, and as long as they keep paying us, we WILL!

Several administration officials characterized the study as a routine annual summary of scientific research on global warming. John H. Marburger, the president’s science adviser, said the report has “no implications for policy.””There is no discordance between this report and the president’s position on climate,” Marburger said.

But environmentalists and conservatives said the report reveals contradictions within the administration’s stance on global warming.

Jeremy Symons, who heads the National Wildlife Federation’s global warming program, characterized the study as “nothing new in terms of the science of global warming, but this is definitely new in terms of the administration’s position.”

Those darn scientists thought it was a routine report because everything in it has been known to the scientific community for years. They forgot Cardinal Science Rules #1 (‘NO science is to be considered valid if doing so directly affects the oil industry or any other corporate product in an adverse way’) and #2 (‘ALL “science” must be cleared by the political section; any scientific conclusions deemed harmful to the Would-Be-Emperor’s re-election effort or in contradiction of fundamentalist Xtian fantasies are to be destroyed’).

No worries. Karl will make sure this never happens again.