assholeofday:Charles Krauthammer, Asshole of the Day for May 8, 2014by TeaPartyCat (Follow @TeaParty

assholeofday:Charles Krauthammer, Asshole of the Day for May 8, 2014by TeaPartyCat (Follow @TeaPartyCat)Charles Krauthammer isn’t a stupid man. He is smart and articulate. But he’s also arrogant and willing to carry water for his party and ideology, even when evidence doesn’t support it. In that way he’s like fellow Fox News commentator George Will, who has been featured on this site several times.So when the White House issued the climate change report, he dismissed it, because no one in his party believes in climate change any more, even though many of them did a decade ago. In fact what’s really odd is that Republicans showed a sharp decline in belief in climate change in 2009, suggesting that the election of President Obama somehow made many of them abandon science. Seriously— take a look at the chart showing belief over time from 2006 to 2013 in this Pew poll.But it’s not enough for Krauthammer to just dismiss it. Nope, he goes full denier calling climate change a superstition:Appearing Tuesday on Fox News’ “Special Report,” the conservative pundit rejected the consensus of between 97 and 98 percent of scientists who believe climate change is real and is fueled by human activity.“It’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with pollution of carbon,” Krauthammer said. “It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament, it’s in the rain dance of Native Americans — if you sin, the skies will not cooperate.”Krauthammer further shed doubt on the White House’s newly released climate change assessment by arguing that climate science is too unstable to predict weekend weather forecasts, let alone global trends several decades out.“Ninety-nine percent of physicists were convinced that space and time are fixed, until Einstein working in a patent office wrote a paper in which he showed that they are not,” he said. “I’m not impressed by numbers, I’m not impressed by consensus.”He’s equating an overwhelming consensus of scientists with superstitions like rain dances. He’s not, you’ll notice, offering any argument against it. No facts!He also sneaks in that if meteorologists can’t predict the 10-day forecast, then scientists can’t predict larger global trends. He’s equating different types of science and trying to make them the same.What’s particularly insulting here, besides that superstition slur, is that he says he’s “not impressed by consensus”. OK, sometimes consensus is wrong. But if you’re going to doubt consensus, shouldn’t you be educated in the subject you’re dismissing? Shouldn’t you have some alternate theory to explain the data? Or make some argument that the data is not conclusive?But he doesn’t make a case. He just dismisses it as a morality tale that goes way back and then claims 98% of scientists are therefore all fools. And for that, Charles Krauthammer is the Asshole of the Day.It is Charles Krauthammer’s first time as Asshole of the Day, but one of many, many winners from Fox News.Full story: Talking Points Memo -- source link

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