Watts Up With That?

WASHINGTON — About a day into the debate over legislation to combat global warming but before Republicans brought the discourse to a stop on Wednesday by insisting that the clerk read every word of the 492-page bill, Senator James M. Inhofe decided to get a few things off his chest.

Mr. Inhofe, who believes that fears of catastrophic climate change are hugely overblown, has insisted that there is no need to get into a scientific argument because there are enough other reasons to oppose the Senate bill, which would cap the production of heat-trapping gases and force polluters to buy permits to emit carbon dioxide.

Still, for a guy who said he did not want to talk about science, Mr. Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, was the only senator to utter the phrase “anthropogenic gases.” He also wanted to talk about the recent cold winter in his home state and mention a few small points of disagreement with Al Gore and Mr. Gore’s co-recipients of the Nobel Prize, the roughly 2,000 scientists who are part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sponsored by the United Nations.

“We in the state of Oklahoma have had the worst cold spell during this last winter than we have in 30 years,” Mr. Inhofe said. “I find this to be true all over the country. You just can’t have it both ways.” (Most scientists say year-to-year weather changes are irrelevant to the clear, long-term warming trend.)

“One of the good things about this discussion and this debate is we are not going to be discussing the science,” Mr. Inhofe continued. Then, he unleashed an attack on the United Nations climate panel.

“We talked about 2,000 scientists,” he said. “We have a list of 30,000 scientists who said, ‘Yes, there can be a relationship between CO2 and a warming condition but it’s not major.’ ”

Next, he turned to Mr. Gore, the former vice president. “Al Gore has done his movie. Almost everything in his movie, in fact, everything has been refuted. Interestingly enough, the I.P.C.C. — on sea levels and other scare tactics used in that science fiction movie — it really has been totally refuted and refuted many times.”

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, wanted to challenge Mr. Inhofe. “Will the senator yield?” Mr. Kerry asked. Read the rest of this entry »