When it comes to closing one's mind, shoving your head in the sand and ignoring objective reality, no on e does it better than today's Republicans and their masters in the Christofascist/Tea Party base of the GOP. A case in point is this year's climate data. January 2014 was one of the warmest January ever, yet because of localized cold weather in the eastern United States, the climate change deniers are maintaining that global warming is a hoax and that it is not happening. What's frightening is that the idiocy prone members of the GOP base can't see beyond their own back yard to realize that local experiences do not always tell the full story. A piece at Media Matters looks at the situation. Here are highlights:
Snowstorms and cold weather chills swept from the Midwest to the East Coast in January, closely followed by conservative media snow-trolls casting doubt on global warming. But what the conservative media didn't mention was that the world as a whole was experiencing warm temperatures, leading to January becoming the 347th consecutive warmer-than-average month and the fourth warmest on record.
On February 20, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), released the findings that January 2014 experienced global temperatures 1.17°F warmer than the 20th century average, making it the fourth warmest January on record. NOAA data shows that the last time the planet experienced a month colder than the 20th century average was February 1985 -- 29 years ago.
How could this be, when Fox News is telling you that the snowstorms in the United States are a reason to doubt global warming? The answer lies beyond the lower 48 states, which make up only 1.5% of the Earth's surface. While some regions in the contiguous U.S did experience a colder-than-average month (none a record cold month), most of the globe did not.
Further, while it may have felt like an unusually cold January, frigid winter temperatures used to be the norm in many parts of the country. NOAA's findings state that the cold air "blasts" through the Midwest and East Coast were "highly unusual compared to the 21st century, but not so unusual compared to the late 20th century." So the commotion in the conservative media over the recent cold weather spells may have been less about weather anomalies and more about weather amnesia.
Sadly, I increasingly find it difficult to have anything but contempt for Republicans and the knuckle dragging Neanderthals of the GOP base. One either needs to be clinically insane, have had a lobotomy, be a racist or a religious fanatic to be a Republican. Sane, rational individuals who rely on facts and logic simply are no longer welcome in the GOP.
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