Year 2, Month 6, Day 3: Rick’s A Dick

The Miami Herald’s Fred Grimm has a column reprinted in the Kansas City Star, noting the ignorance of Rick Scott and the problems it presents:

Climate scientists are lending their computer modeling and data analysis and research findings and learned assumptions to the new governor’s first state hurricane conference this week. Gov. Rick Scott seems fine with that, as long as the brainy guys confine their theories to the short term.

In his short speech opening the conference Wednesday, for example, Scott didn’t object to warnings that Florida is statistically likely to absorb a big hit in 2011. He promised Florida would be ready. “We’re going to be very prepared.”

Scott, however, only accepts climate science devoted to the upcoming hurricane season. When it comes to the long-term stuff – the overwhelming research that warns of man-made global warming – he remains Florida’s denier in chief.

Idiot. Buffoon. Psychopath. Sociopath.

Sent May 22:

Of course Florida governor Rick Scott has seen nothing to persuade him that global climate change is real and dangerous. He’s a perfect specimen of the modern Republican politician: obsessed with short-term gain, oblivious to long-term consequences. For Governor Scott and others of his ilk, “future generations” exist only as a phrase to be used in public in order to manipulate low-information voters. Like the Rapturists whose vision of the future ended last Saturday, these politicians think no further than the next election cycle; their corporate sponsors, similarly, think no further than the next fiscal year’s profits.

When it comes to the dangers posed by climate change, we need genuinely far-sighted leadership — leaders who are ready to confront the scientifically confirmed bad news head on and help all of us understand what we as a country need to do in order to secure a sustainable future for our descendants.

Warren Senders