Lindsey Graham Isn't A Scientist, But He Thinks Scientists Know Stuff. He's Doomed.

Loath though we are to ever say anything especially nice about Lindsey Graham, given his penchant for wanting to send Americans to bomb as many distant lands as possible, we have to give him an "attaboy" on his remarkably sane remarks about climate change on that Seth Meyers TV show t'other night.

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It's kind of near the end of this clip right here (the 1: 53 mark), but you can enjoy the slagging on Donald Trump that precedes it:

Meyers notes that Graham, unlike most of his colleagues in the 2016 GOP primaries, "believes" in climate change and that it's caused by humans (yes, now is the time to point out that science is not a matter of "belief," and please, do go on about that for several paragraphs), and Graham replies, "Well, I'm not a scientist ..." But then, bless his heart, he takes that science-denier cliché and turns it on its head:

But here’s the problem I’ve got with some people in my party: When you ask the scientists what’s going on, why don’t you believe them? If I went to 10 doctors and nine said, "Hey, you’re gonna die," and one says "You’re fine," why would I believe the one guy?

It's a pretty good line, and would you believe that Graham actually thinks we need to do something about CO2 emissions, too? Yes, please pick your jaw up off the floor now. When it comes to what we need to do, he starts with the boilerplate stuff about "market-driven" and "business friendly" approaches, and then there's this typically Lindseyesque bit of ancient history from five whole years ago:

In 2009 and 2010, Graham joined with Democrat John Kerry and independent Joe Lieberman to draft legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Graham also openly embraced the issue, arguing in January 2010 that addressing climate change "is a worthy endeavor." And he did so acknowledging that he might get some political pushback on the issue [...]

Graham consistently made the point that addressing climate would be good for energy independence, job creation and national security.

It was all well and good for a few months. But then, just days before the trio was expected to officially introduce their climate legislation, Graham walked away from the effort, upset that Democratic leadership might move on an immigration bill before their package.

Hey, let's fix this in a bipartisan way! What, my bill doesn't get priority? Forget you guys, I'm taking my plug-in hybrid cars and going home. And then after that snit, he decided the bill he'd previously co-sponsored was now garbage, and announced he'd vote against it. Then he started saying that maybe the science on global warming had been "oversold" or was "alarmist," although he also said that CO2 emissions should be controlled, "whether you believe in global warming or not."

More recently, in 2013, he blurted out a fine bit of doublespeak, castigating the GOP for not having an environmental platform and saying that he once again thought that climate change is real, and man-made, but also complaining that "Al Gore has turned this thing into a religion ... You know, climate change is not a religious problem for me, it is an economic, it is an environmental problem."

So hey, if it weren't for Al Gore and all his hippie Druid flower children dancing skyclad around the altar of climate change while singing hymns from the UN's IPCC report, then Lindsey would feel a lot better about all this science stuff. Maybe he'd be happier if he knew that there are Jesus people who think climate change is real, too? Now, if we could just find a way to launch a military attack on global warming, he'd really find some enthusiasm on the matter.

[ TPM / HuffPo ]