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Published on Tuesday, May 31, 2011 by The Guardian/UK
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/30/climate-change-conspiracy-theory
To its eternal shame, the Republican party has taken climate change denial out of the crank fringe and made it mainstream
by Sahil Kapur
The United States is experiencing a golden era of conspiracy theories. From the "9/11 truthers" to the "Trig birthers" to the "Obama birthers" and, most recently, the "Bin Laden deathers", alternate theories of reality are alive and thriving on the American fringes, perhaps more so than ever in the age of digital media. As Hendrik Hertzberg recently wrote in a New Yorker comment article about Donald Trump's recent championing of birtherism: John Boehner, speaker of the GOP-controlled House of Representatives, has declared the settled scientific consensus that manmade climate change is happening 'comical'.
The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments of one of the two political parties that alternate in power in our governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, or that evolution is just another theory, on a par with the theory that the earth is six thousand years old.
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