Discussion: AZ Gov. 'Skeptical' That Climate Change Is Caused By Humans

“Next thing you’re going to tell me is that it’s winter in Australia when it’s summer here,” Mr. Ducey later said.

I’m 100% convinced Artemisia.
This guy Ducey, my new governor (unfortunately) has the brains of a gnat. We scientists could bury him in mountains of indisputable evidence and still he’d doubt the veracity that human dumped greenhouse gasses are changing the climate. It’s like trying to convince Orly Taitz that Obama wasn’t born in Kenya and that he is the legitimately elected POTUS. There’s nothing I could say, no evidence I could present to Doug Ducey that would convince him. Not only that, He will never be convinced that cutting taxes would lead to reduced state revenues. He is Sam Brownback 2.0
The truly sad part of this is his idiocy will reflect on all the residents of Arizona. We all will be thought of as uneducated rubes.

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Then you didn’t listen to Ducey’s “state of the state” address back in January less than a week after he took office. I did listen. I could havebeen convinced, had I not been a long time Arizona resident, that democrats had ruined AZ and that our state’s problems were their fault. But, AZ’s state House and Senate have been in republican hands for more than 45 years. Any debt …any problem are theirs.
Ducey is a tool and a tool of the extreme Tea fringe. He and his buddies in the legislature are gonna be seen as a cancer in AZ in years to come, even by republicans. We’ve had two other governors who thought AZ should be run like a business. Fife Symington (who ended up in prison) and Evan Mecham (who got removed from office cuz of incompetence. Ducey is of that mold. He thinks (and expects that) the state universities should be run as for profit businesses. That is what he told the Board of Regents three weeks ago. It was an order, not a request. Here’s a direct quote:
“As leaders who oversee our university system, you must recognize the
delicate balance between the growing needs of your institutions in a
competitive environment with a product that young people and their
parents can afford.
I urge you to approach this endeavor in a business like fashion
when considering whether to raise prices. I urge you to use a critical
eye as the Presidents make their cases to you.”

I am depressed.

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Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends upon his not understanding it.”

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He is a Republican. Enough said.

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As a comment to be made in the governor’s presence, how about:

Sure I know this is a gun, but I’m not convinced there are bullets in it, so I’m going to put it to YOUR head and pull the trigger anyway.

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Fortunately his opinion on what is causing his state to turn from a barely tolerable desert to a flesh-searing inferno is irrelevant. The grown ups at the national and international level need to be in charge on this one. Red state governors need to stick to what they do best: cutting funding to the neediest, bringing in non-union, low-wage companies, and Jesus-something.

This is what Ducey doubts:

Note that this is from NASA, not some questionable outfit

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enter preformatted text heresies George Carlin's capon Fucking idiots.

…and you still can’t fix stupid.

This from HuffPost:

“WASHINGTON – Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on Monday blamed
environmentalists for what she called a “man-made” drought in
California, which has led to the state’s first water restrictions.”

I didn’t know that environmentalists controlled rainfall patterns. Glad that’s worked out Carly.

Jeebers the right carries a lot of stupid.

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We really need to ask these folks, if they realize its getting hotter but humans don’t have anything to do with it, just what is causing it? After all, its not as if the viability of Arizona one of the States that will feel the greatest impacts of man-made global warming, isn’t at stake.

One really has to wonder about the sanity of the citizens of Arizona, when it comes to dealing with what is undoubtedly the greatest threat they have ever faced. However, rather than confronting reality, they elect this guy. What does this say for the future of Arizona? Perhaps those that are still sane will be are sane enough to either change the current political and environmental trajectory of the state or move out before water and value in home prices become a thing of the past.

He’s a douche, even his name says it. That map behind him shows every part of Arizona that can burn is under threat. And he’s skeptical? Being skeptical is waiting for evidence. Being a moron is denying it.

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I think it’s spelled “Douche”.

If you have an alternative explanation that credible scientists agree with, we’d all love to hear it, guv.

He continued : “I am sceptical, because I can’t see how moving million of tons of carbon fuels from the deep interior of the Earth and burning them off, while at the same time cutting down carbon-absorbing forests globably, how can that in any way influence the climate ? Can somebody please turn the Air-Conditioning a bit up, please ?”

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Considering that every model has shown an abysmal failure to actually predict the weather of the last three decades, and the predictions of a decade ago about the end of snow, open water at the Northwest Passage, the mass extinction of the polar bears, and a host of other cases being wrong, it’s not surprising to have some healthy skepticism. Did you hear the report a few months ago about the sea ice around Antarctica being far more extensive and thicker than predicted, and the chief scientist admitting he was totally baffled by that fact? The claim that 2014 was so hot, based on a hundredth of a degree, when the actual units recording the temperature are only good to a tenth of a degree of accuracy for any legitimate measurement? The statistical analysis of the British Meteorological Office of their data from 1850 to 2005, showing there is no significant correlation between CO2 levels and the recorded temperature? THAT sure did not get a lot of press! BTW, I have two engineering degrees from very reputable schools, including that one down the street from Harvard, so yes I do have a good grasp of what is involved.

The explanation is the climate has been changing since there has been a climate. Otherwise how do you explain that several millennia ago there was a chunk of ice over a mile thick sitting on Milwaukee, and that the Native Americans WALKED across the Bering Strait? A thousand years ago Vikings were farming on the South Coast of Greenland, did it for three hundred years. Remember the flap a few years back when a retreating glacier uncovered a Viking village, and how this was proof of global warming? I noticed no one was raising the point that said glacier must not have been there at one time, or the village would not have been built. Ever read Beowulf? The king’s home was heated by a firepit in the middle of the room. Can you picture a house in DENMARK heated that way??? And remember, that wasn’t a peasant hovel, that was the King’s hall!

Know about the Hudson Canyon? There’s a strange formation, like a river channel on the Continental Shelf, at the mouth of the Hudson. Not so hard to understand when you grasp sea level was about 500 feet lower than now from the Ice Age. So what made it thaw, Cro-Magnon steel mills and SUVs?

No,it was the failure to build water projects for decades to retain more water as the population grew. Green folks did not want to disturb the local equivalent of the snail darter, so no dams or canals.