Your Logic is a Farce? Blame Sunspots!
When confronted with the (lack of) evidence for his sun-spotty suppositions, Ron Johnson neither apologized nor recanted.
It appears we can finally close the book on the mystery of why Senate candidate and gaffe-master Ron Johnson never got around to graduating from the Twin Cities’ prestigious Edina High School.
No, it wasn’t that Johnson had the foresight—after meeting shrink-wrap princess and future wife Jane Curler—to realize he’d be able to leech off the success of his in-laws’ meat-wrapping operation.
Some of Johnson’s recent comments point to a different reason: he fails to grasp even the most basic concepts of any high school science curriculum. In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Johnson garnered national attention by claiming climate change could be explained simply by “sunspot activity” during a period he referred to as geological time’s “sweet spot.”
Never mind that the sun has actually exhibited a cooling trend over the past 35 years, because pseudo-scientist Johnson tends to disregard data with big words like “solar ultraviolet irradiance” and “cosmic ray flux” as meaningless; as just another ploy to waste government money by those slick-talkin’ liberal operatives of the vast leftist conspiracy commonly referred to as “academia.”
Yet despite this assault on reason and logic—which has even spawned quite the satirical ado on the internets—this blatant disregard for the institutions that fuel the engine of progress is a quality he shares with far too many of the duds being heralded by the teabaggers this election cycle.
And if that wasn’t enough, when confronted with the (lack of) evidence for his sun-spotty suppositions, Johnson neither apologized nor recanted, but instead invoked the fallacious argument that Greenland’s name was evidence enough that sunspots have created cyclical temperature changes constituting “something just in the geologic eons of time.”
Actually, Ron, it turns out that Greenland has never been green, but was named so by Erik the Red to attract settlers. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t just his lack of scientific knowledge that kept Johnson from joining in the pomp and circumstance of diploma-gettin’, his history grades must’ve played a role too.