Year 2, Month 7, Day 18: Look Before You Leap!

James Inhofe is still an idiot. Witness, for example, this AP article printed in the Greenfield Reporter (IN):

TULSA, Okla. — Sen. James Inhofe says he believes a swim earlier this week in algae-laden Grand Lake made him ill.

Inhofe told the Tulsa World that he took a routine dive into the lake Monday morning and that night he was “deathly sick.”

Oklahoma authorities warned people Friday against swimming in the lake, saying potentially toxic blue-green algae had been detected. They’ve also advised against water skiing and other activities that would bring people or pets in contact with the water.

The algae would undoubtedly do a better job as Senator. Sent July 2:

James Inhofe’s excellent adventure — diving into Oklahoma’s Grand Lake — wound up making him seriously ill. No wonder: the surface of the water was covered with a blue-green scum which the senator had never before seen, despite decades of living on the lake shore. It’s unsurprising that Mr. Inhofe didn’t look before leaping, since the senator has made a successful political career out of a public contempt for facts, prediction, and analysis. If he’d bothered to investigate the algae, he would have learned it was exceptionally poisonous — up to 18 times more toxic than the warning level used by the World Health Organization. If he uses his convalescence to do some more research, he might learn that according to an April 4 paper in the journal Science, the cyanobacteria that laid him low thrive and flourish in the weather extremes that are a consequence of (you guessed it!) global warming.

Warren Senders