’)Sarah Palin’s op-ed in today’s Washington Post, timed for Copenhagen (pictured),
begs for scrutiny, and she’s getting it.
Palin says: The e-mails reveal that leading climate “experts” deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.
Joseph Romm, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress: No, they don’t reveal that.
Seriously, does the Post have any evidence that records were deliberately destroyed? In fact, that is a right-wing myth debunked weeks ago (see “Santer, Jones, and Schneider respond to CEI’s phony attack on the temperature record“) and again here.
Is the Post the least bit concerned that the “hide the decline” email was not about any nefariously “manipulated data” — everything was done in plain sight — and it was not about hiding a decline in global temperatures, but involved one small dataset.
Palin: President Obama’s proposal calls for serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions. Meeting such targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax plans, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs
Dean Baker, Co-Director, Center for Economic and Policy Research: She notes that the measures to contain global warming are projected to lead to job loss, commenting on a $4.2 billion fund to retrain workers. Of course, almost every policy leads to some job loss. For example, Governor Palin’s proposal to destroy Alaska’s environment to get more gas and oil would lead job loss in the shipping and dock industries for those involved in importing oil, if her claims about the impact of this oil on imports were actually true.
Of course, Ms. Palin apparently does not care about workers enough to suggest any fund to help these people get new jobs.
And former Washington Post correspondent Molly Moore, who is now Senior VP of Sandersson Strategies, says:
How seriously can you take the climate change views of Sarah Palin, a woman who thinks the best place for Alaska’s wildlife is on a dinner plate next to the mashed potatoes? (True statement, straight from her ghost writer’s keyboard.)
Couple Palin’s unconstructive and poorly researched commentary in The Washington Post today with the Republic congressional spoil sports who Politico reports are coming to Copenhagen to dump on global efforts to preserve the planet for their children and grandchildren and you get the perfect portrait of Ugly Americans.
Ouch!
