Just wow. Sarah Palin, best known in the science arena for her mocking of research on fruit flies, now has the most stunning thing up on Facebook about "ClimateGate." Let me give an opening quote from it:
The president’s decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe’s call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.
Adam Siegel has a thorough debunking of Palin's latest, so I won't go through it in detail. But I will note that she shows an utter ignorance of basic climate science, confusing climate and weather and claiming that global warming is happening but it's being caused by "cyclical weather changes" (huh?):
Policy should be based on sound science, not snake oil. I took a stand against such snake oil science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population has increased. I’ve never denied the reality of climate change; in fact, I was the first governor to create a subcabinet position to deal specifically with the issue. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. But while we recognize the effects of changing water levels, erosion patterns, and glacial ice melt, we cannot primarily blame man’s activities for the earth’s cyclical weather changes. The drastic economic measures being pushed by dogmatic environmentalists won’t change the weather, but will dramatically change our economy for the worse.
Again, read Siegel on this. It's very simple: Palin epitomizes the Republican War on Science, and the fact that, even with Bush gone, it is still being waged.
