A Message From a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change
This piece is worth reading in full:
””My climate epiphany wasn’t overnight, and it had nothing to do with Al Gore.”
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I’m a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a Penn State meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me very uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern. To complicate matters I’m in a small, frustrated and endangered minority: a Republican deeply concerned about the environmental sacrifices some are asking us to make to keep our economy powered-up. It’s ironic. The root of the word conservative is “conserve”. A staunch Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, set aside vast swaths of America for our National Parks System, the envy of the world. Another Republican, Richard Nixon, launched the EPA. Now some in my party believe the EPA and all those silly “global warming alarmists” are going to get in the way of drilling and mining our way to prosperity. Well, we have good reason to be alarmed.”
Don’t Get Neil deGrasse Tyson Started About the Un-Science-y Politicians Who Are Killing America’s Dreams
As we’ve learned time and time again, when you need to hear someone kvetch hard about the state of science in this country, point your radio telescopes at Hayden Planetarium head Neil deGrasse. In the midst of the debt debacle, he responds to Bill Maher’s question about Washington’s possible assassination of the James Webb Space Telescope with a ranty explanation of how Congress is mortgaging the futuristic dreams Americans used to have. He ends with a good question: How far can science go in Washington when so few Congressmen are scientists?
See the full discussion here, and calm your Tyson-ish nerves with this relaxing Carl Sagan video.
Source: motherboard.tv
(Source: itsfullofstars)
