Earth To The Three Scientists: The Climate Is Changing

Earth To The Three Scientists: The Climate Is Changing

The three Republican candidates for the United States Senate publicly embraced extremism over settled science at their debate in Knoxville this week, declaring that global climate change was not occurring and offering no solutions.

Demonstrating the extreme Washington partisanship that keeps the nation from moving forward and solving problems, the Republicans denounced the findings of the nation's top scientists Thursday night at the Howard Baker Center on the University of Tennessee campus, a campus that designated the entire Spring 2005 semester as "the environmental semester."

U.S. Senate Candidate Harold Ford, Jr., today released the following statement in response:

"We need a new generation of leadership that embraces the best ideas, not the most extreme. It does not matter that the ideas are Democratic or Republican, only that they are good ideas.

"Good ideas are based on facts, not narrow ideology. Pretending the world's climate isn't changing is like pretending the world is flat, or that men didn't walk on the moon. You can pretend all you like, but it doesn't make it so.

"My opponents should have spent some time in the UT labs before trying to pass themselves off as experts. They could have read the 2001 report from the National Academy of Sciences that begins, ‘Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities.' Or they could have stopped off to see Senator Baker, who had the vision to write the Clean Air Act and base it on science.

"Given a choice between statesmen like Howard Baker and the National Academy of Sciences on one hand, and my opponents on the other, I think Tennesseans know who was working for positive change, and who is advancing a narrow ideology.

"I do agree with one thing Van Hilleary said last night. He said, ‘The only way you can really determine how we will be once we go to Washington is how we've always been.' When it comes to electing partisanship over solving problems, my opponents are all the same. And you can't have change with more of the same."

The president of the Knoxville League of Women Voters asked all three Republican candidates the following question last night: "The overwhelming body of reputable scientists have found that the mean temp of earth in increasing, and we that we are approaching what is known as the so called tipping point, where irreversible damage will occur to our planet and way of life. Do you agree that the scientific debate on global warming is over? If so, what steps would you support to take us back from the tipping point?"

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