Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Alaska whose vacation home was recently raided by the FBI, and who made over $800,000 from a shady real estate deal last year, has come up with a brand-new theory of global warming. He told a CBS reporter in Alaska:
"We're at the end of a long, long term of warming, 700 to 900 years of increased temperature, a very slow increase. We think we're close to the end of that. If we're close to the end of that, that means that we'll start getting cooler gradually, not very rapidly, but cooler once again and stability might come to this region for a period of another 900 years."
This was Stevens' way of telling the villagers of Shishmaref, which is being washed away by rising waters, despite the Army Corps of Engineers' construction of massive sea walls, that they're on their own.
It'll be interesting to see if the denialists at Planet Gore, so quick to attack any liberal politician who makes an issue of global warming, will leap to the defense of Stevens' claim, which as far as scientists can tell, appears to be a personal fantasy.
Intriguingly, five years ago, Stevens sang a different tune, as as Timothy Egan of the New York Times reported. For more, please see my post in Grist:
