Yeah, you’re shocked
(Washington Post) President Obama’s new political group, Organizing for Action, last week released a new video that mocks Republican lawmakers for appearing to play down or dismiss concerns about climate change. Some of the clips are fairly interesting — or amusing, depending on your perspective. It has already been viewed more than 225,000 times on You Tube.
We’ve written before about the growing consensus among climate researchers that climate change is the result of human activity; there’s little debate about that among scientists, though surveys show increasing skepticism among the American public. But we were intrigued by the video’s claim that 240 House lawmakers had called climate change to be a “hoax.â€
Hey, Glenn Kessler, consensus is not science. Anyhow, let’s skip to the conclusion
There’s little evidence that a vote against this amendment meant that a lawmaker was affirming that climate change was a “hoax.†There are clearly lawmakers who voted against the amendment who believe that human activity contributes in some way to climate change — and the underlying bill actually states that there is “established scientific concern†that climate change exists.
Certainly there’s a strong strain of skepticism about climate change among Republican lawmakers, as demonstrated by a number of clips in the video. So initially we were tempted to conclude that this claim did not quite rise to Four Pinocchios. But the video seriously undercuts its credibility with the phony accounting on the amendment — and this sort of gamesmanship with congressional votes is simply not acceptable.
And 4 Pinocchios for the supposedly independent from Obama Organizing For Obama Action.
