Excerpts: James Inhofe

In Australia, some  aboriginals believe that the moon was a man who, instead of dying, threw his bones into the sea, then rose into the sky.  The lunar cycle comes from the man regaining his mass by eating lotus roots.  The rising and setting of the sun, similarly, is explained by the actions of the sun goddess, who carries a torch across the sky, dipping it in the water in the west and using the embers to find her way under the earth back to her starting point in the east.   Dawn and dusk are attributed to her body paints.

Potomac Land has many such myths to explain natural phenomena, too. These folktales are so powerful that no scientific advancement or discovery can sway the faithful from their belief in the mythology. 

One such adherent is Jim Inhofe, who served as chairman of the Senate environment and public works committee.  No quantity of scientific evidence could sway the Republican from oil-rich Oklahoma from the central myth of his existence:  that global warming was bunk.  "With all the hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science," he said in 2003, "could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it."

Among scientists, this position was about as credible as Holocaust denial or flat-earth theory.  The National Academy of Sciences concluded that, "In the judgment of most climate scientists, Earth's warming in recent decades has been caused primarily by human activities that have increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere."  The rising temperatures caused by heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it concluded, will cause rising sea levels, severe storms, and disruptions to water supplies and living things.  The United Nations, the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union have arrived at similar conclusions.  Even the Bush administration, a skeptic on global warming, said it was "likely due mostly to human activities." 

But this means nothing to the man from Oklahoma, who drives a Hummer to work to show his view on conservation.  On the Senate floor in September, 2006, he proclaimed that global warming "the most media-hyped environmental issue of all time."  He denounced "an unprecedented parade of environmental alarmism," which he said was refuted by even a cursory review of "the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1850… Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland."

This non-sequitur led Inhofe to affirm to the Senate that global warming was a natural phenomenon that had nothing to do with mankind. "My skeptical views on man-made catastrophic global warming have only strengthened as new science comes in," he said. "In fact, after years of hearing about the computer generated scary scenarios about the future of our planet, I now believe that the greatest climate threat we face may be coming from alarmist computer models."

He blamed global warming on the spirit world. "God's still up there, and we still have the cycles every 1,500 years or so," he told senators.

The midterm elections of 2006, which put the global-warming alarmists in control of the Senate, unnerved Inhofe. He called a press conference to attack a children's book on global warming produced by the United Nations.  "The book is about a young boy named Tore who lives in an Arctic village," Inhofe announced. "Tore loses a dog sled race because he crashes through the thinning ice allegedly caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions."  Inhofe railed against this "unprecedented attempt" to "instill fear in young, impressionable minds."   Later, speaking to a conservative group in March, 2007, he quarreled with a Bush administration proposal to list polar bears as a threatened species. "They're overpopulated," he declared. "Don't worry about it: The polar bear is fine." His staff handed a paper that including the claim that "MARS HAS GLOBAL WARMING DESPITE ABSENCE OF SUVs."

Even Inhofe's fellow Republicans have found words such as "ridiculous" to describe his beliefs.  But that is of little concern to Inhofe, who has dubbed the Environmental Protection Agency a "Gestapo bureaucracy" and likened its administrator to Tokyo Rose.  He said the Kyoto global warming treaty "would deal a powerful blow on the whole humanity similar to the one humanity experienced when Nazism and communism flourished."

"I have been called -- my kids are all aware of this -- dumb, crazy man, science abuser, Holocaust denier, villain of the month, hate-filled, warmonger, Neanderthal, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun," he announced. "And I can just tell you that I wear some of those titles proudly."

His private life is equally exciting. An airplane pilot, he has twice had crash landings, once when a propeller broke and again when a rudder malfunctioned on a plane built by his son. As for his family, he boasted that their "recorded history" has not documented "any kind of homosexual relationship." But even that is tame compared to Inhofe's most fervent belief: the need to end global warming worries, or, as Inhofe calls it, "climate porn."

 Copyright 2007-2008 by Dana Milbank