Year 2, Month 10, Day 12: The Real Threat is Teh Gayz!

The Boston Globe for October 8 notes that UMass Amherst has also gotten one of the Regional Climate Science centers. Good for them:

The federal government yesterday awarded the University of Massachusetts Amherst a multimillion-dollar grant to host one of eight centers around the country to study the local effects of climate change.

The Northeast Climate Science Center will study how climate change affects ecosystems, wildlife, water, and other resources from the Great Lakes to Maine and down to Missouri. The $7.5 million grant over five years will sponsor research at UMass Amherst as well as at institutions in Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts.

I used this as the hook for a generic anti-Republican screed. Bad for them. Sent October 8:

It’s good to hear that the Department of the Interior is still funding scientific research, as demonstrated by the recent award to start a regional climate science center at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

During the hysteria of a presidential election season, we can anticipate criticism of the UMass center and its companions elsewhere in the US from the various GOP aspirants. After all, why should the government spend money on researching climate change, a phenomenon which Republican political strategists assure them doesn’t exist?

There has never been a more determined effort to marginalize actual science than we’re now seeing from the conservative political establishment in this country. At a time when America and the world are facing the single most significant threat in human history in the form of a runaway greenhouse effect, the conservatives’ ideological crusade for ignorance and wishful thinking is a suicidal folly.

Warren Senders