Mitt Romney: Climate change is real, but addressing it would be wrong

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 10:41 am Tuesday, Sep 4

Science Debate is a group that's working to get political candidates in the United States actually talking publicly about issues of science and technology policy. In 2008, they tried (and failed) to get Barak Obama and John McCain to agree to a live, televised science debate. But they did get both candidates to send in written answers to 14 key questions.

This election cycle, Science Debate sent out a new set of 14 questions—all chosen from a crowdsourced list. Today, they announced that they'd gotten answers back from both Obama and Mitt Romney. You can compare the candidates side-by-side at the Science Debate website. I have to say that, while I disagree with a lot of Romney's conclusions, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of thought and time his staff clearly put into writing some very long and detailed responses.

Perhaps most surprising was his response to a question about climate change. Instead of attempting to flatly deny the evidence, Mitt Romney has apparently moved on to acknowledging that climate change is happening—while simultaneously overplaying the uncertainty surrounding specific risks, and claiming that even if climate change is a big problem there's nothing we can really do about it anyway ... because China.

Personally, I think that's pretty interesting. Climate scientists, and the journalists who write about them, have been talking, anecdotally, about seeing this exact rhetorical shift happening in conservative circles. It seems that the Republican presidential nominee is now one of the people who acknowledge climate change exists, but would still rather not take any decisive steps to deal with it.

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http://boingboing.net/2012/09/04/mitt-romney-climate-change-is.html

And I do so love this comment:



I admire the Romney/Ryan campaign for keeping any shred of truth out of any of their messaging so far. It has, by far, been the most consistent that they have been on any issue.

Complete Commitment To Complete Bullshit
Romney 2012

and the one that follows it:

I like to look at it as the pathological prevarication path to power. It has more alliteration.

and finally:

They've passed through Denial into Anger. I look forward to the Bargaining stage, where Mittens attempts to outsource the environment to China.