the coral is dying

Take look at this map.  Those are places where the temperature is high enough that the coral is expelling the algae that lives in it and is, therefore, dying.  Oh, and that's just a one-day snapshot.  Some of those Pacific places are starting to cool off from what they were a few days ago.

Hasn't it reached the point yet where it doesn't matter if it is man-caused or not?

And then these lunatics demonstrate that they are as loud as they are ignorant (Thank you, Prof. Farnsworth!)(The quotes that follow are cribbed from http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41192.html):

Ron Johnson, Republican, is running for the US Senate in Wisconsin and he said that the warming the earth is experiencing is casued by "sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time."  Mr. Johnson's website (http://ronjohnsonforsenate.com/home/meet-ron/) says he's ABD for an MBA.  There's nothing I want more than a business major telling me about something as complicated as climatology.

Sharron Angle, Republican, is running for the US Senate in New Mexico.  She said an effort to limit greenhouse gasses “is based on an unscientific hysteria over the man-caused global warming hoax.”  Ms. Angle has a BA in fine arts (http://sharronangle.com/about).  There's nothing I want more than an artist telling me about something as complicated as climatology.


When Sen. Barbara Boxer warned that climate change was a national security issue, her Republican opponent, Carly Fiorina, said “Terrorism kills — and Barbara Boxer's worried about the weather.”  Though her website doesn't say where she went to school or what she majored in (http://carlyforca.com/about/), it does tell us that she went to graduate school.  And, as Ms. Fiorina was, of course, the CEO of Hewlett Packard, I think we can assume that she majored in business.  Another accountant who thinks she understands geophysics.

Ken Buck, Republican, is running for Senate from Colorado.  He said "I don’t think that causes are the primary factor for global warming."  No, I didn't leave out a word.  He doesn't think that causes are the primary factor for global warming.  I have no idea what that means.  It isn't English.  Mr. Buck Ken attended Princeton University and earned his undergraduate degree in politics in 1981. He received his Juris Doctorate in 1985 from the University of Wyoming School of Law in 1985 (http://buckforcolorado.com/meet-ken).  He's the best educated one so far and he's a lawyer.  I hope he doesn't try to tell a judge that causes don't have anything to do with what happened in any particular case.

It's exhausting fighting this kind of ignorance.  These people are running for the United States Senate -- an entity that ought to contain statesmen.  These people are ignorant yahoos making pronouncements about something that is so far over their heads as to be invisible.  Not one of them can do any real mathematics.  Not one of them knows anything beyond freshman level physics (if they know that much).  They are not well-educated people.  We should not let people who do have education be put in a position where they will flaunt their ignorance and destroy the only planet we've got.