Senator Whitehouse Tells the GOP They Need To Reject The ‘Iron Curtain’ Of Climate-Change Denial

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) rose to the floor of the Senate last week to give his weekly speech begging his colleagues to reject climate-change denial, and ended up giving an eerie warning to Republicans who refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that suggests we’re reaching a tipping point when it comes to carbon pollution.

Making the “political” argument, Whitehouse asked Republicans to consider the prospects of embracing the five percent of scientists who believe mankind isn’t fueling climate change.

“An iron curtain of denial has fallen around the Republican Party,” he said. “So let me respectfully ask my Republican colleagues: What are you thinking? How do you imagine this ends? ”

Presciently, just days before a mile-wide tornado devastated Oklahoma, the senator asked Republicans to consider the extreme weather events being fueled by climate change:

Have you noticed the floods and wildfires and droughts and superstorms and tornadoes and blizzards and temperature records? Have you noticed those warming, rising seas? Have you noticed species invading new territory, and miles of dead pine forests in the Rockies, and Arctic sea ice disappearing?

Do you understand that carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the sea, and that that is a law of science and is not debatable? Do you understand that because they are absorbing the carbon the oceans are getting more acidic? Thirty percent more acidic already and climbing? Do you understand that’s a measurement, not a theory?

It’s one thing to be the party that stands against science. Are you really also going to be the party that stands against measurement?