Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Does even he know what his point is?

Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a Republican from the suburbs of Detroit, is an opponent green jobs, any attempt to reduce carbon dioxide production, and, in general, a climate change denier. I can't say he's registered very prominently on my radar; I had a vague idea who he is, but thought of him as not much more than a supporting cast member to the star nincompoop, James Inhofe. However, today he got my attention with this piece of world class incoherence.
Remember, the people who talk about the melting of the glaciers and others -- imagine if you were in a peninsula around 1000 BC or so or earlier, and your name was Tor and you were out hunting mastodon and you didn't notice that the glaciers were melting and leaving the devastating flooding in its wake that became the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan. So, what I think that what we have to do is go back in history and look at this and realize that the Earth has been here a long time. To take selective periods of time and say that somehow this proves that there's a man made global warming occurring is absolutely wrong.

McCotter delivered this in a very matter of fact tone as if he was explaining something obvious. He seems to think he has a point of some sort. There is so much wrong in this short exposition that it needs to be taken apart phrase by grammatically incorrect phrase.
...imagine if you were in a peninsula around 1000 BC or so or earlier, and your name was Tor and you were out hunting mastodon...

Why should we be taking lessons on anything from someone who is this monumentally ignorant of geology and history? He seems to think that 1000 BC is a really, really long time ago and the world was populated by cartoon cavemen at that time. By 1000 BC, the ice age had been over and the mastodons extinct for 8000 years. Egyptian civilization was over 2000 years old, Sumer and Babylon had risen and fallen as had the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. Oh, and Paleo-Indians were not named Tor, unless McCotter thinks America was first settled by Vikings 2000 years before Vikings existed.
...and you didn't notice that the glaciers were melting and leaving the devastating flooding in its wake that became the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan.

What is he getting at here? If you were a caveman who didn't notice devastating flooding going on around you then... what? That flooding would later make some nice lakes and the state McCotter represents, which means what? Tor didn't notice dramatic climate change going on around him so we shouldn't either? Climate change leads to Michigan so it's a good thing? If you were a caveman who didn't notice devastating flooding going on around you, then your line went extinct with the mastodons; take that, you liberals? Really, he thinks he has a point, but can anyone tell me what it is?
To take selective periods of time and say that somehow this proves that there's a man made global warming occurring is absolutely wrong.

Why shouldn't we be looking at the period in which we have been pumping unprecedented amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere--gasses that have been absolutely proven to cause an increase in the surface temperature of the Earth via a mechanism known as the greenhouse effect?

McCotter is clearly someone who suffers from delusions of adequacy. He seems to believe that being able to string a bunch of words together into a Plainesque sentence substitute is the same as making a devastating argument. It's not, though, I have to admit, it does have a certain entertainment value.

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