Step aside, Moammar Gadhafi’s 100-minute UN General Assembly speech or Hugo Chavez’s 8-hour TV addresses: Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) had 8,037 words to share with his colleagues on climate change today.
In what was touted as a “major floor speech” on the eve of the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Kerry urged Congress to fight the “insidious conspiracy of silence on climate change — a silence that empowers misinformation and mythology to grow where science and truth should prevail.”
“Thomas Paine actually described today’s situation very well,” Kerry said. “As America fought for its independence, he said: ‘It is an affront to treat falsehood with complaisance.’ Yet when it comes to the challenge of climate change, the falsehood of today’s naysayers is only matched by the complacency of our political system.”
Saying that the danger posed by global warming “could not be more real,” the senator charged that in the U.S. “a calculated campaign of disinformation has steadily beaten back the consensus momentum for action on climate change and replaced it with timidity by proponents in the face of millions of dollars of phony, contrived ‘talking points,’ illogical and wholly unscientific propositions and a general scorn for the truth wrapped in false threats about job loss and taxes.”
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Johnson: ‘Prove Us Wrong or Stand Down’,
Putting the cart before the horse. If Kerry is really interested in science he would know that a hypothesis needs to be empirically verified before one can demand to be proven wrong. But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that expecting a politician to be scientifically literate is like expecting a dyslexic to ace a spelling test.
http://mises.org/daily/5892/The-Skeptics-Case