By Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone
Earlier this year, the world’s top climate scientists released a definitive report on global warming. It is now “unequivocal,” they concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts, raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever, legions of Katrinas – unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming pollution, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “we are in deep trouble.”
    You would think, in the wake of such stark and conclusive findings, that the White House would at least offer some small gesture to signal its concern about the impending crisis. It’s not every day, after all, that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science – especially when it comes from international experts. So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming.
“We’re going to see a big debate on it going forward,” Cheney told ABC News, about “the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man.” What we know today, he added, is “not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to ‘solve’ the problem.”
(Original Article)