California Still In The Race For Wackiest Wingnut

by: Tom B

Fri May 27, 2011 at 21:49:33 PM CDT

We all had a good laugh when Inhofe built his little Al Gore igloo and claimed there was no such thing as global warming because it was by God snowing where he was that day and until today, that probably stood as the most vivid example so far of the absolute total ignorance of the reprehensibly  unqualified sluts that we keep right on sending to Washington.

But today... at least in my humble opinion... Inhofe was knocked off that perch and even better, by someone from MY state.  Our winner... and new champion is Congresswhore Dana Rohrabacher (R-Buffoon County CA) who according to Wonkette Jr. actually put on the display described below.

Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher is a senior member on the House Committee on Science, so it's no surprise that he's ... uh, insane? This is Rep. Rohrabacher's big idea about how to fix the Global Warming crisis: "Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rain forests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?"

He posed this compelling scientific question to the Obama Administration's climate change envoy - we have an envoy for that? - during a congressional hearing on global warming. It's good, we guess, that all the Republicans aren't totally denying there's such a thing as global warming and melting icecaps and drowning baby polar bears. But maybe they shouldn't think about it at all.

   "Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?" [Rohrabacher] continued.

   Forestry experts were dumbfounded by Mr. Rohrabacher's line of questioning, noting that the world's forests currently absorb far more carbon dioxide than they emit - capturing roughly one-third of all man-made emissions and helping mitigate climate change.

"From the Times story being cited:

He's seriously confused," said Oliver Phillips, a professor of geography at the University of Leeds in Britain and an expert on terrestrial carbon storage. "He's just got half of the equation. Natural things decay, of course, but they also grow."

The idea that cutting down forests would result in a net reduction of emissions is "crazy," Dr Phillips added. "The need is to reduce deforestation."

Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University, found another hole in Mr. Rohrabacher's logic. Roughly 75 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the natural world come not from above-ground biomass, but from the soil, she said. "You don't even want to give this guy another wacky idea, but he forgot about soil," Dr. Law said.

And then, they heard a ga-Zump! They looked and saw something pop out of the stump. It was sort of a man. Describe him? ... That's hard. I don't know if I can.

He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy.

"Mister!" he said with a sawdusty sneeze, "I am the Lorax.. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I'm asking you, sir, at the top if my lungs ..."

And then Dana Rohrabacher had the Lorax charged with Patriot Act violations/Environmentalist Terrorism. And a few decades later, the Lorax died in his aluminum cell at Guantanamo Bay, his little head resting in the lap of Bradley Manning.

Somewhere, not so many miles away in Florida, Barack Obama played a round of golf, where the grickle-grass grows. [NYT]