Gore Speaks: Deniers Freak, Part II

"What you’re seeing these days is that the muzzlers and the naysayers [on climate change] are looking more and more like idiots." Eugene Linden , a science reporter, put it that way in an interview a couple of months ago, and it’s even more true today. Al Gore’s movie on the subject has the deniers in a tizzy.

Realistically–and unfortunately–Al Gore’s documentary is not expected to become a big hit. Movie City box office wiz David Poland expects it to come in dead last among major releases this summer. I fervently hope that he’s wrong about that it becomes huge, as big or bigger than Michael Moore.

Nonetheless, the early word has been very good, already convincing the likes of Arianna Huffington and Franklin Foer (editor of "The New Republic") that it could make a difference. No doubt millions of people will see it, sooner or later. And maybe that’s why the deniers are becoming so desperate.

Think I’m exaggerating?

Consider:

a)    ThinkProgress caught Matt Drudge’s right-wing tabloid site in an outright lie about it. Drudge was claiming that Gore and his team took a limo 500 yards from hotel to screening in Cannes.

In truth, they walked. After being caught, Drudge pulled the lie from his site.What’s delicious about this is not only the lying, but the hypocrisy. When has Matt Drudge ever put the planet first?

b)    When asked if he would see Gore’s movie, the Denier-in-Chief replied:

"Doubt it."  Which is pretend cowboy-speak for, not even if you put a gun to my head.

But it gets worse. Bush went on to duck responsibility, "And in my judgment, we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects, and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time, protect the environment." As many have pointed out, refusing to look at the facts of causation will only put off the day of reckoning, pushing us from inevitable climate changes closer to the possibility of disaster.

But when has the possibility of a disaster ever deterred the Bush administration?

c)   The pro-CO2 ads to be run this week by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which have the blogosphere in stitches.

d)    The uselessness of boilerplate Republican free market rhetoric for this issue, as  Digby points out: Dealing with global warming is the ultimate example of the common good  and it’s the most powerful issue upon which the right’s edifice of free market individualism crumbles into irrelevance.

Global warming is a mutual, planetary challenge and the conservatives and wingnut libertarians who see money as freedom can do nothing but put their heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t happening.

e)  And in a Washington Post op-ed, Sebastian Mallary points out how the Republican refusal to look honestly at the science of climate change has turned the candidate Bush once sardonically called "Ozone Man" into a genuine superhero of sorts. Science Man!

President Bush and the congressional Republicans have created a Ross Perot moment: a hunger for a leader with diagrams and charts, for a nerd who lays out basic facts ignored by blinkered government. By their contempt for expert opinion on everything from Iraqi reconstruction to the cost of their tax cuts, Republicans have turned Diagram Gore into a hero. By their serial dishonesty, Republicans have created a market for "An Inconvenient Truth" — the title of Gore’s movie.

Republican dishonesty reaches its extreme on the issue of global warming. Yes, climate science is complex, and nobody can forecast the earth’s temperature with complete confidence. But the fact that scientists don’t know everything isn’t a license to ignore what they do know: that the earth is warming, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising at an accelerating pace — and that these changes are driven at least partly by fossil-fuel consumption. The U.S. National Academies have confirmed this; their foreign counterparts have confirmed this; and so has the world’s top authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change . None of this is controversial.

Except among Republicans.