In a 2010 Pew survey, only about one in six Republicans said they believed human activity was changing the climate. In a Gallup survey this March that phrased the question differently, 36 percent of Republicans said they believed pollution from human activities had contributed to “increases in the Earth’s temperature over the last century,” while 62 percent of Republicans attributed those changes to natural changes in the environment. Rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change has become an article of faith for virtually all elements of the GOP coalition. Even in a secular, well-educated state such as New Hampshire, for instance, University of New Hampshire surveys since April 2010 have found that only about one-fourth of Republicans believe human activity is changing the climate. National figures provided to National Journal by Gallup combining surveys from 2011 and 2010 show that college-educated Republicans are even more likely than their non-college counterparts to reject the notion that human activity is changing the climate.

Yes, being a college-educated Republican makes you less likely to believe that humans have contributed to climate change than if you were non-college educated.

[hits self over the head with a book]

Furthermore, this latest Gallup poll shows that Jon Huntsman has fallen to 1% while anti-science Rick Perry has surged to the lead of the primary race with 29%. I think this should put the subject of a ‘moderate’ Republican’s viability to rest for a while. Goodbye Jon Huntsman.

‘Moderate’ had become an obscenity for conservatives. Not even those who seemed like they had a semblance of levelheadedness, like Charles Grassley during the Health Care debate in 2009, could follow through with cooperation and waver from the inflexible stances of the far-right.

Enter: Jon Huntsman.

Coming out of the closet this past week was former U.S. Ambassador to China for the Obama Administration who has decided to speak sanity to craziness. Yesterday, during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” he called others in the Republican candidate field “unelectable” and “extreme.”  On Twitter, he boldly declared, “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Speaking about the his own party:

“Again, it’s talking about things that, you know, may pander to a particular group or sound good at the time, but it just simply is not founded in reality,” Huntsman added.

[…]

“I wouldn’t necessarily trust any of my opponents right now, who were on a recent debate stage with me, when every single one of them would have allowed this country to default,” Huntsman said. “So I have to say that there was zero leadership on display in terms of my opponents.”

Will moderation work for a Republican candidate during the primary stage of the 2012 election? Or does the Tea Party and Talk Radio contingent of the Republican Party have a monopoly over conservative thought?

Meet Todd Akin, who embarrasses and disgraces the great state of Missouri in the House of Representatives.

He loves climate change, and will bitterly oppose any and all efforts to fight it. And that’s because he thinks climate change is “when we go from winter to spring”. And he’s not shy about saying so in public:

This whole thing strikes me if it weren’t so serious as being a comedy you know. I mean, we just went from winter to spring. In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change. I don’t want to stop that climate change you know. Who in the world want (sic) to put politicians in charge of the weather anyways? What a dumb idea.

Who in Missouri would want to put this horse’s ass in charge of representing their legislative interests in Washington, D.C.?

But it gets better. You know how Akin knows that it makes sense to oppose climate change legislation? Because it’s opposed by a couple of Republican Congressmen who are not only doctors but, get this, they also graduated from high school science!

We’ve been joined by another doctor, a medical doctor but also a guy who graduated from high school science as well, from Georgia, my good friend, Congressman Gingrey. … So to have actually a guy who’s passed high school science is tremendously helpful. And Dr. Fleming from Louisiana.

(I hope you realized yourself that if Akin actually knows two people who graduated from high school science, that means he must be pretty smart too.)

The collective squirming Akin’s statements touched off in Missouri yesterday surely registered on the Richter scale?

(Akin has been in the House of Representatives for eight years. How he has managed to hide his light under a bushel all this time completely baffles me.)

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Lord, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I… no, no. I don’t, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core Commie works.

That said, yesterday’s announcement that California is planning to sue six automakers for contributing to global warming strikes me as rather absurd. The rundown from the The Washington Post via San Jose’s Mercury News:

California filed a lawsuit against the six largest automakers operating in the United States, contending that car and truck emissions are causing global warming, injuring the state’s environment, economy and endangering public health.

The complaint, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Oakland, is the latest escalation in an ongoing clash between states and the U.S. auto industry over global warming. The California complaint contends that under federal and state common law the automakers have created a public nuisance by producing millions of vehicles that collectively emit massive quantities of carbon dioxide.

(…)

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer pegged current damages at “tens of millions of dollars.” He said the amount could grow as the lawsuit fight continues over time.

“Money is being spent in our regulatory system preparing for small disruptions in the water supply due to the smaller snow pack, saltwater intrusion of the water supply, beach erosion,” Lockyer said in an interview Wednesday. “There is a lot of spending that is already ongoing that we are claiming. The point is, taxpayers shouldn’t pay for those damages, the industry should.”

This kind of lawsuit immediately reminds me of the lawsuits, both threatened and delivered, to cigarette companies for the dangers of secondhand smoke, or fast food restaurants for the health implications of absurd hamburgers. But there is one major difference—unlike the calories of a value meal, auto emissions have been regulated for years, and California has traditionally had the most stringent standards in the entire country. If the automakers have been meeting those standards, and there’s no indication that they haven’t, how can they be sued for following the state’s own regulations?

We might as well retroactively sue Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford for helping create the automobile culture in the first place.

As much as some of us would like to twist the knife into big business and celebrate a victory for the environment, isn’t this very much a backwards approach to lowering greenhouse pollutants? The correct way, of course, would be to legislate tougher standards that the auto manufacturers will have to abide by, but that would deprive Lockyer from his photo-op moment in the sun.

————-

Speaking of auto emissions and global warming, why hasn’t anyone come up with an idea to get some of the older cars, which have much looser emissions standards than any new car (yes, even Hummers), off the road? There are already programs that provide a credit to consumers who replace old appliances with newer, Energy Star compliant models, so wouldn’t it make sense to look into something similar for automobiles?

A man who had the world’s first successful penis transplant had to have the organ removed two weeks later because of a problem with his wife.

The 44-year-old father of three children was left with a 0.4 in stump and was unable to urinate or have intercourse after being involved in a car accident.

Surgeons at Guangzhou General Hospital, in China, spent 15 hours attaching a 4 in organ taken from a brain-dead 22-year-old man after his parents agreed.

The surgical team claimed the operation was a success. They said that, after 10 days, blood was flowing into the transplanted penis, that there was no sign of the patient’s body rejecting it and that the man was able to urinate normally.

However, in next month’s issue of the journal European Urology, they report that they had to remove the organ because of “a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife”.

Dr Weilie Hu, one of the surgeons involved in the operation, writes: “The recipient could urinate smoothly in a standing position at day 10 after removal of the catheter.”

Doctors have previously reconnected severed penises after accidents or attacks but this was thought to be the first time surgeons had claimed a successful transplant.

Local media referred to the man by the pseudonym Zhang and said that he was able to sustain an erection immediately after the operation, which took place a year ago. The operation was said to have cost £3,500.

“New technologies will change how we live and how we drive our cars, which all will have the beneficial effect of improving the environment,” Bush said. “And in my judgment we need to set aside whether or not greenhouse gases have been caused by mankind or because of natural effects and focus on the technologies that will enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment.”

Now, I’m not a scientist. But if we are going to put so much effort into new technologies that will “enable us to live better lives and at the same time protect the environment”, isn’t that kind of an admission that mankind is causing the problem to begin with? Because—on the off chance that the vast majority of the scientific community is wrong—if nature is to blame for greenhouse gases and global warming, then why bother with this cool new technology?

I don’t know either.

Our government doesn’t just run on what the Congress or the President does; there are also numerous regulatory agencies at work to make sure that proper guidelines are being written and enforced on everything from food safety to the stock market to what words can and can’t be said on television. One of the most prominent of these agencies is the FDA, which regulates pharmaceutical drugs, among other things.

You might remember a couple years ago when the FDA was mired deep in scandal over the drug Vioxx, which triggered serious accusations that the agency was more interested in rushing drugs to market than making sure they were safe. Now the Center For Public Integrity reports that FDA employees have been using a loophole to accept travel from groups linked to drug companies, research universities and other related corporate entities.

More than a quarter of all of the trips reported were sponsored by five groups with ties to the pharmaceutical, biologic and medical device industries: the Drug Information Association, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, the Parenteral Drug Association, the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering, and the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society. They were responsible for close to 1,000 excursions, spending more than $1.3 million to fly and host agency employees. Eleven drug safety board members were among the travelers sponsored by those groups. They took 55 trips costing approximately $75,000.

These groups do not describe themselves as trade associations. Instead, they promote themselves as scientific associations of individuals, apparently thereby skirting FDA travel sponsorship prohibitions.

Each of the five groups boasts board members with ties to medical and pharmaceutical-related firms, including current and former employees, contract workers and consultants. Many of the groups’ members have similar connections.

The FDA, of course, doesn’t see a conflict in this at all. And that’s the problem with (to take the Dem’s slogan) having a “culture of corruption”—what was once ethically questionable becomes the norm, even in areas of the government that don’t usually get much attention. And this is true no matter which party happens to be holding the political bullhorn at the time.

For several months I’ve been keen to thinking of BP (formerly British Petroleum) as a partial exception to the environmentally-myopic, profit-whoring giant oil companies we’ve come to know and despise. Their latest ad campaign, which chiefly spotlights the subject of carbon usage among individuals, is encouraging to say the least. If nothing else they have been able to say that they are the only energy conglomerate willfully attempting to use the mass media to acknowledge the problem of overconsumption and/or irresponsible energy use.

Unfortunately, while BP is out measuring everybody else’s carbon footprint (mine being 11 tons CO2 per year), they’ve forgotten to measure the giant oil footprint they left in the Arctic Ocean:

the region’s largest oil accident on record has been sending hundreds of thousands of litres of crude pouring into the Arctic Ocean during the past week after a badly corroded BPO pipeline ruptured.
[...]
Exploration Alaska, the BP subsidiary that operates the pipeline from which more than 910,000 litres of oil has leaked, has recently been fined more than $1.2m (£635,000) for its poor environmental safety record. [emphasis added]

Before you go thinking that this is just another example of a company not practicing what they preach, it gets worse. Try as they might to desperately rebrand the BP initials as “Beyond Petroleum”, they’re certainly sinking deeper into the petroleum business:

In the past 20 years, [BP] curtailed diversification efforts into animal feed, chemicals, minerals, and coal, and has acquired oil companies like Standard Oil, Arco, and Amoco. Today, BP is the largest producer of oil and gas in both the North Sea and the United States. BP’s 17,150 service stations—Amoco and BP in the East, Arco in the West—make it the second-largest marketer of gas in the United States. The company is sitting on 19 billion barrels of oil and gas reserves.

Well, 19 billion, minus whatever’s been dumped into the ocean.

Warmer temperatures over the past decade have sped up the march of Greenland’s southern glaciers to the Atlantic Ocean, where the ice and water they spill contribute more to the global rise in sea levels than previously thought.

Those faster-moving glaciers now dump in a year twice as much ice into the Atlantic as they did in 1996, researchers said Thursday. The resulting icebergs, along with increased melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, could account for nearly 17 percent of the estimated one-tenth of an inch annual rise in global sea levels, or twice what was previously believed, said Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Luckily Greenland’s proximity to the Thermohaline conveyor is an illusion too. Otherwise, we might be in trouble.