Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Spilling the end game before they can coat it in frankl luntz-approved dogwhistles.

“woke” is the new caravan.

White supremacy is terrorism.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Not all heroes wear capes.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

This blog will pay for itself.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

No Justins, No Peace

Meanwhile over at truth Social, the former president is busy confessing to crimes.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

You are here: Home / Climate Change / How about that weather? / Open Thread: A Snowball’s Chance In Hell

Open Thread: A Snowball’s Chance In Hell

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When future generations look back at us in a century and ask “Why didn’t we do anything about climate change in the early 21st century?” they’ll just roll this video of Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe throwing a snowball at the Senate floor.

We are ruled by morons.

Open thread.

Reader Interactions

50Comments

  1. 1.

    Jerzy Russian

    I don’t have sound at the moment. Is there a transcript I can point and laugh at?

    Edit: Never mind. I looked at the linked article, and pointed and laughed at that.

  4. 4.

    Frankensteinbeck

    They won’t ask. It will be accepted historical fact that racist backlash after desegregation began a decades-long period in the US where reactionaries dismantled as many liberal government protections as possible in angry protest. It will be as tidy and dry as the Reconstruction. It may not make much sense, but it will be obviously true.

  5. 5.

    balconesfault

    I’ve been offering the opinion that a century from now, George W. Bush won’t be hated for crashing the economy … he won’t be hated for the Iraq War and all the costs and deaths.

    He’ll be hated for having pledged to regulate CO2 as a pollutant during his campaign … and then immediately renegging on that promise.

    Had the US signed onto Kyoto, and pushed CO2 controls as a basis of our trade policy – we could have done something then. Bush has this one laid directly in his lap.

    Oh, and it goes without saying that Al Gore is fat. Just ask Fat Tony.

  6. 6.

    Bobby B.

    …and the whole Senate, dems and repubs alike, continued to draw their salaries and healthcare in perpetuity.

  7. 7.

    shortstop

    Seriously first-world complaint here, but it annoys me that I have to pay good money to an office supply outfit for original forms 1099 and 1096 because the IRS insists the downloaded version is unacceptable (they can’t scan it because of sooper majick magnetic inks) and they DON’T FOLLOW THROUGH on multiple requests to mail forms to us. And no, these are not available at my library or PO.

  8. 8.

    Punchy

    So the presence of snow precludes the presence of a warming Earth?

    He couldn’t possibly believe that his peers are that stupid, so I’d have to believe that he finds his constituency to be uber idiots, and so that’s his audience. And god damn, that’s some USP-grade stupid if they’re behind him on this.

  9. 9.

    Jerzy Russian

    Was the gentleman from Oklahoma home schooled? I am suddenly seeing ads from the Keystone school all over this blog.

  10. 10.

    shortstop

    @Belafon: Not defending AT&T’s stance on net neutrality by any means, but those techs are unionized (fortunately for them) with generally decent salary and benefits packages. Don’t worry, though; as president, Scotty Walker would take care of those ridiculous private-sector unions just like he dispatched the evildoing teachers in ‘sconsin.

  11. 11.

    The Moar You Know

    they DON’T FOLLOW THROUGH on multiple requests to mail forms to us.

    @shortstop: The GOP slashed their budget almost 20% this year. There’s nobody there to send you forms.

    Or, for that matter, do an audit.

    That’s not an accident.

  12. 12.

    Violet

    @shortstop: Is there a way to photocopy a downloaded form to get different ink? That sounds like a right pain. Have you checked with Yutsy to see if he has any suggestions?

  14. 14.

    shortstop

    And the worst thing about Inhofe’s little show wasn’t his idiotic policy position; it was the huge self-satisfaction with which he chuckled at his hy-larious joke. Apart from everything else, I can’t forgive these people for never being funny and being too unsophisticated to realize how uncomedic they are.

  18. 18.

    forked tongue

    As a commenter said on Wonkette, this will shut up all those climate researchers who claim winter doesn’t happen any more.

  20. 20.

    shortstop

    @Violet: Well, I already bought the forms package a month ago when I had to issue 1099s, so it’s solved for this year at my own expense. I’m just reminded of it today as I mail 1096* and realize that no forms ever showed up in the mail in the intervening month.

    *Yeah, at almost the last possible moment. So? ;)

  21. 21.

    KG

    @shortstop: yeah, because meanwhile, here in Southern California, I’ve worn a jacket all of twice this winter… and no, it’s not just because it’s always awesome here.

  23. 23.

    Crashman

    Might need to inscribe that scene on a series of stone tablets for posterity, because that’s the only way we’ll be able to remember it once global warming is done with us.

  24. 24.

    SRW1

    Sorry, I don’t want to be ageist, but the real problem here lies with the voters in Oklahoma. Inhoffe is just an 80 year old fool who is beyond the will and the mental capacity to change. All of that was known when he ran for and won reelection in 2014.

  26. 26.

    sharl

    @SRW1: Yep (bolding is mine):

    Scott Klein ‏@kleinmatic

    Beat his last opponent by 40 pts. RT @thehill: Sen. Inhofe throws snowball on Senate floor to disprove climate change

    Quinn Norton ‏@quinnnorton

    [email protected] @thehill It’s going to be so hard for teachers to explain latter day America to children. “Look, they just went insane…”

  27. 27.

    Iowa Old Lady

    @sharl: I sometimes think of a scene in Babylon 5. when Delenn talks about the war between humans and Minbari after an incident of mistaken shooting, if I recall correctly. She says the Minbari all went insane together. That’s us.

  28. 28.

    Elizabelle

    @SRW1: The 80 year olds will be gone, but look what their uneducated voting is bringing down on their families’ heads. Do you think Oklahoma is going to have all the water it needs, in perpetuity?

    The Guardian this week, about periodic and serious water shortages in urban Sao Paulo, Brazil. This world is coming, faster than anyone thinks.

    On the third day without water, residents set out rows of plastic chairs in the communal area and held an emergency meeting to discuss the problem. But to Berger’s dismay, the meeting quickly descended into furious argument:“I’d always imagined people would try and help each other out in a crisis situation,” she says. “But it’s not what happened at all.”

    Her complex had purchased a truckload of water halfway through the crisis, at the beginning of February: 90,000 litres, costing R$5,400 (£1,225). When they tried to agree on how future water purchases should be split between residents, an argument broke out almost immediately. “People were really, really shouting at each other,” says Berger. “I left after a while – I couldn’t stand it. I heard one person saying that elderly residents are at home all day and use more water, so they should pay more.” Others argued that since some flats had several residents, the cost should be divided per person, and there was even a suggestion that people with dogs should pay extra – “because they bathe them”.

    “It was like a horror film,” says the building manager, Maria Aurilene Santana. “No one seemed able to agree on anything.” When a small amount of water finally trickled into the tanks Santana says “people were filling buckets, grabbing as much water they could.” According to a crisis report published on 9 February by the pressure group Aliança Pela Água (Water Alliance), whereas catastrophic situations like flooding often fosters solidarity, a lack of resources tends to do the opposite, leading to chaos and even violence. In Itu, a city 100km from São Paulo a desperate water shortage in late 2014 led to fighting in queues, theft of water, and the looting of emergency water trucks, which are now accompanied by armed civil guards. These events left many paulistanos wondering how the hardship might play out in their own pressurised and densely populated city.

    When these water shortages come to America, bear in mind that we have a rageaholic gun-owning component that does not like to pay for anything.

  30. 30.

    Petorado

    Inhofe and his ilk have put cement shoes on the “world’s greatest deliberative body” and dumped it in the river.

  33. 33.

    catclub

    @shortstop:

    I already bought the forms package a month ago when I had to issue 1099s

    I am confused. I have had to go and issue all 1099’s via the IRS/Social security site. But I don’t need any forms – they just generate PDFs.

  34. 34.

    shortstop

    @catclub: You e-filed your 1099s, yes? If you’re mailing (have already mailed) them to contractors, the IRS won’t accept pdfs downloaded from the site, only originals. I had to let my longtime accountant (who always handled this) go and haven’t started with the new one yet, so I’m pinch-hitting on this portion of things until next week. I didn’t have many contractors this year, so I just old-schooled it with mailed forms to keep things going until the new accountant takes over. So I guess I don’t really have any cause to complain. ;)

  37. 37.

    Matt McIrvin

    By the way, I know really, really smart, technically educated people who are hip-deep in climate denialism. Compartmentalized thinking and rationalization are amazingly powerful. They think climate scientists are the denialists.

  41. 41.

    lumpkin

    I wish Inhofe could throw a few of those snowballs out this way. We got almost no snow in the mountains here in the west. Gonna be a real bad summer for wildfires if things don’t change in a hurry. Too bad our media is so east-coast centric. All the weather news is about the snow, but the bigger and potentially much more catastrophic weather situation this year is the western drought. For some reason it’s a lot harder for people to see that as an issue when they are temporarily discomforted by a little extra cold and snow, especially with the usual hysteria associated with these minor inconveniences. Next summer while our forests are burning up, never to return, ya’ll on the east coast will be drowning in storm surges and still won’t hear anything about it.

  42. 42.

    boatboy_srq

    @Parfigliano: I’d agree except that the wingnuttiest always seem to live upstream (WV, KS, MO, TN, GA, AL etc) not the places where most people live (NY, CA, FL etc). If they wind up with no water chances are a lot of the rest of us will be going without first.

    Some of that is already happening: my mum had to vacate her home in FL because the well went salt (thanks in no small part to excessive well-drilling on the aquifer for new construction, which sucked Gulf water into the aquifer). Her choices were: a) drill a new well (cost: $10k per attempt and a crapshoot whether each attempt would find fresh water); b) buy a full desalinization plant (to replace the reverse osmosis equipment already in place, at $20K less a couple hundred to return the two-year-old RO unit); c) deal with the salt intrusion for the 6+ months it would take to get the county to run the pipes for the municipal water supply (6+ months that had been rolling for over 10 years in that community, so no guarantee that the deliverable was at all accurate); d) move into assisted living (at $3K-6K/mo). ALF solved the water problem and others at the same time.

  43. 43.

    RP

    We are ruled by morons.

    Of course we are.

    Since our system is self-rule, what does that say about the governed?

  44. 44.

    gratuitous

    Well played, Sen. Inhofe. Snow in February. Really, really cold in winter. I stand agog at your ability to run rings around us all logically. Perhaps next you’ll bring us a lion stamped “Property of the Zoo”?

  46. 46.

    SRW1

    @Elizabelle:

    Sorry, I am a bit late to respond, but I don’t quite get your reply. I think the blame will be on all those who voted for the know quantity Inhoffe, independent of their age.
    The number 80 and the reference to ageism was not intended towards elderly voters, but the fact that Inhoffe turned 80 years old recently and that I essentially accused him of age-related obduracy.

  48. 48.

    sharl

    @Matt McIrvin: There is actually a name for this kind of thing: the Salem Hypothesis:

    np. Conjecture that an education in the engineering disciplines forms a predisposition to {SciCre} viewpoints. Due to longtime t.o. regular {Bruce Salem}. New SciCre or {TAE} posters whose credentials include EE, CSE, ME, or other brands of engineering are noted as “data points for the Salem Hypothesis”. (My own personal experience indicates that of engineering disciplines, EE’s are most often encountered in SciCre-ist postings. I don’t believe that I have ever seen a chemical engineering SciCre-ist, on the other hand.)

    As far as I can tell, to this day it still isn’t based on any “hard” behavioral science studies – I’m guessing that’s what got its original entry at Wikipedia zapped – but rather a whole lot of anecdotal observations from folks who work with engineering and technician type folks. (I can contribute a few supporting anecdotes myself, fwiw.) It came from the old Usenet Talk.Origins discussion forum on the origins of life, evolutionary biology, stuff like that,… but IMO would seem to apply to atmospheric global warming discussions as well.

  49. 49.

    boatboy_srq

    @gratuitous: I think Inhofe got used to the AGW-triggered milder DC winters. The snow seasons were getting shorter and shallower until the last couple years. So he’s convinced himself that AGCC is a hoax because it’s colder this year, and conveniently forgets that it was unseasonably warm at this same time ten years ago.

    @Villago Delenda Est: Inhofe is one cold b#st#rd: snow doesn’t melt in his hand even on the well-heated House floor.

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