Nothing illustrates the dumbdownification of United States politics than the political position of denying climate change.
This is akin to denying that the sun rises in the East or that the sky is blue.
This week it was revealed that in 2011 Florida Governor Rick Scott's Republican administration banned the words "climate change" and "global warming" from all official communications including reports and e-mails.
The ban on using "climate change" and "global warming" at the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was demonstrated when a fact sheet was being prepared for the DEP on Floridian coral reefs for the state's Coral Reef Conservation Program. The writer was instructed not to make any reference to climate change. When volunteers attended a 2014 meeting the Coral Reef Conservation Program held to train volunteers to conduct presentations on coral reef health in Florida, two volunteers said they were told very firmly not to address climate change when talking about threats facing coral reefs. Apparently Governor Scott is "not convinced" that climate change is real.
"The biggest problem I have was that there was absolutely no mention of climate change and the affect of climate change on coral reefs," Doug Young, president of the South Florida Audubon Society and a member of the Broward County Climate Change Task Force said to the media. "The two young women, really good people, said, 'We are not allowed to show the words, or show any slides that depicted anything related to climate change.'"
Of the fifty U.S. States, Florida is the one that will be most negatively affected by climate change. The State has been called "ground zero" for sea level rise and rising sea levels are already having an impact in Southern Florida.
The state does not have a ban on referring to sea level rise, but stating that the cause is climate change is disallowed.
Climate change denial however reached its zenith in idiocy with the appointment of Senator James Inhofe as the majority chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Inhofe's proof that climate change is a hoax was illustrated in a rather silly stunt where he brought a snowball into Congress and cited the Bible as the authority to back his position.
"I take my religion seriously," Inhofe wrote. "This is what a lot of alarmists forget: God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains."
Inhofe quoted one of his "favorite Bible verses," Genesis 8:22, to back up his claim. The verse reads, "As long as the earth remains, There will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer."
In a radio interview, Inhofe said it was ridiculous that scientists continue to address global warming. "The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous," he said.
Inhofe has been able to spout his nonsense on FOX television and in his book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.
Inhofe has accused the EPA of being a Gestapo bureaucracy. He has said that the environmental movement reminds him of the "Third Reich".
Inhofe's silliness extends to foreign policy. He blamed 9/11 on God saying it was a form of divine retribution for failing to defend Israel. "One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States of America is that the policy of our Government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate in a significant way against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them."
The Paris International Conference on Climate Change is scheduled for December 2015. It can be predicted that there will be a lack of leadership from the United States, Canada, China, Japan and Australia on this threat.
The pressure therefore is on Europe to offer guidance and proposals to address what Inhofe denies is a grave threat to humankind.
With the international scientific community overwhelmingly in recognition of the threat of climate change, will the world instead look to leadership from politicians whose "science" comes from the pages of an ancient book that did not even recognize the existence of the continents of South and North America, Australia and Antarctica?
Denying climate change is simply a willful, malicious, self-serving and appallingly ignorant form of ecological insanity.