Sarah Palin on Global Warming:
Sarah Palin Washington Post Op-Ed bashing Copenhagen global warming summit has critics steaming mad
By Ethan Sacks
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Wednesday, December 9th 2009, 11:44 AM
Sarah Palin, pictured during a book signing in Virginia, is weathering a storm of controversy over an op-ed slamming the Copenhagen global warming summit.
Sarah Palin's Op-Ed in Wednesday's Washington Post slamming the Copenhagen climate change summiteers for using "agenda-driven" global warming science has heated up critics' temperatures.
Pointing to "Climate-gate," the leaked e-mails from a British climate research center last month that suggested that scientists inflated evidence to pad their case for global warming, the former Republican vice presidential nominee went rogue in her op-ed piece about how the U.S. shouldn't pay -- literally and figuratively -- for untrustworthy science.
"The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse," Palin wrote.
Storm clouds quickly rolled across the Blogosphere.
"By 'radical' [environmental movement], Palin means the overwhelming scientific consensus: virtually every major science academy in the country," wrote the Atlantic's political blogger Marc Ambinder, in a paragraph-by-paragraph response to Palin's op-ed.
Calling the Palin piece "falsehood-laden," Media Matters for America blogger Jeremy Schulman ripped Palin for distorting the nature of the e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit Phil Jones, the scientist at the heart of the e-mail flap.
Schulman pointed to The Post's own reporting, which found that the scientist used the phrase "hide the decline" to refer to substituting more accurate data for flawed, tree-ring data.
But most damning was a blog item from The Post's own Joel Achenbach: "Ms. Palin lives in the Arctic. She can see the North Pole. She has field-dressed moose on Denali glaciers. What she knows is that there's still a lot of snow out there. There's ice all over the place. Frankly, it's way too cold. Warm things up a bit and Alaska might actually be habitable!"
Conservatives, however, were quick to champion the former Alaska governor’s call to protect American taxpayers' wallets with a wait-and-see approach, that "our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policy-making is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda."
Declared the Red Hot Right blog, "Extremely well-written, factual, Sarah's article goes straight to the heart of the matter and shows that she's totally up on the real science, not the bull--- being spewed by the high priest Algore of the church of global warming alarmists."
