Ron Johnson’s Little Stretch Of The Imagination
Republican Senate candidate Ron Johnson, challenging incumbent Russ Feingold, doesn’t believe that there’s any reason to take action to deal with climate change. Johnson asserts that scientific models signaling a link between global warming and human industrial activities that lead to high carbon dioxide emissions are “crazy”. “It’s far more likely that it’s just sunspot activity,” Johnson says. “I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change. It’s not proven by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Any stretch of the imagination” is a very large piece of territory, of course. I can imagine that gravity has been proven to exist by scientific experiments, but I can also imagine that Creationists’ claims that the earth is just 6,000 years old have been proven.
What about proof for human industrial causes for global warming? Can Ron Johnson really not stretch his imagination enough to consider it? Two new comprehensive reviews of scientific research into the matter, one by the National Academy of Sciences, and another by an international team of climate experts, have found that the evidence for anthropogenic causes of global warming are overwhelming.
Ron Johnson’s imagination must be pretty small, if it can’t even encompass these sources. But then, Johnson shows some quite extraordinary imagination in claiming that it’s sun spots that have caused climate change. There isn’t any scientific study claiming to show that sun spots are the cause of global warming that has withstood review.
Why does Ron Johnson have such a selective imagination? Perhaps it has to do with the fumes he inhales at his place of work. He runs a business that makes plastics. That’s an industry that emits a high amount of greenhouse gases.
Does Ron Johnson’s way of making money have no influence over his ideas about climate change? I can’t stretch my imagination that far.
[...] no Democratic opposition in today’s congressional primary. Aiming for the GOP nomination are Ron Johnson, who embraces the Cold Earther belief that human-caused global warming is a hoax, Stephen Finn and [...]