Michael Steele is a climate skeptic, it seems. The below from the New York Times’s Green Inc. blog, the first respondent to which seems not to have heard of the Medieval Warming Period or the Viking settlements that at first flourished (lasting some 500 years), and then died a frigid death, in Greenland.
In other news, the Times has elevated John Boehner to the Senate.
The Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, has weighed in on climate change.
In a March 6 radio appearance that is only now percolating through the blogosphere, Mr. Steele apparently fielded a skeptic’s question about global warming. As transcribed by the liberal blog, the Huffington Post, Mr. Steele thanked the questioner and replied this way:
We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.
Mr. Steele – the originator of the “drill baby drill” slogan that dominated last year’s Republican National Convention — appears to be aligning himself with Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has denounced the idea of a global warming catastrophe as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” and said that many of the Obama administration’s early moves amount to “environmental thuggery.”
Sen. [sic] John Boehner, the Senate [sic] minority leader, has described cap-and-trade as a “carbon tax that increases taxes on all Americans who drive a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch.”