Michael Steele recently irritated his party by taking a tolerant view of abortion, but the RNC chairman is here to let everyone know that there’s plenty of crazy where that came from. While guest-hosting a talk show, Steele compared President Obama to Richard Nixon and argued that, science be damned, the Earth isn’t getting warmer — it’s getting colder.
In trying to prove it, he called upon a grossly inaccurate sense of socio-geography.
Huffington Post via Political Wire:
And when a listener scoffed at the notion of global warming, Steele eagerly ran with the baton.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said. “We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.”
Greenland, for the record, likely had forestation some 450,000 to 800,000 years ago. But its name was derived, as is most commonly believed, from Erik the Red, who wanted to trick people into going to that island as opposed to the more hospitable Iceland.