US Senator Marco Rubio Shifts Position And Thinks He's A Climate Expert

A while back, I started a series of blog entry titled "You Can Teach Yourself To Think Like A Scientist". In Part 3 of this series, I mentioned about the general principal that one might be able to draw when reading the statements made by a US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. To refresh your memory, in a GQ Magazine interview, the senator was asked on how old he thinks the Earth is. He evaded answering the question by claiming that he's not a scientist, and that the issue has nothing to do with the economy of the US, which one would gather is the more important issue on his plate at that time.

Based on that interview, I tried to illustrate trying to extract the principals that Senator Rubio was using, which presumably are the principals that guide him in his decisions. His refusal to answer this question and based on his responses, one can conclude that he would rather defer such questions to experts. There's nothing wrong with that, and certainly, being put in a position like that, deferring to the experts is a rather smart way to respond to such a question.

However, such a principal no longer applies anymore, it seems. In the latest news report, it seems that Senator Rubio thinks that he's a climate expert.

"I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it," Rubio said.

"I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy," he added.

In the week since the Obama administration released a national climate change report that named Miami as the city most vulnerable to rising sea levels, Rubio has been critical of the White House push on global warming.

"I think it's an enormous stretch to say that every weather incident that we read about or the majority of them are attributable to human activity," he told CNN.

Not only did he not defer to the experts on this subject, it seems that he has the expertise, he thinks, to even dispute them! Based on what, you may ask? Why, based on his "belief", of course. He believes in these things, thus, it must be true, regardless of what the evidence and the experts say.

So what happened here? There are certainly two contradictory events. If one lives by the principal that one defers to experts and won't offer an answer on something one isn't well-informed in (as in the age of the Earth), isn't it rather contradictory to then turn around and behave the opposite way by contradicting those experts in another subject area?

And let's not ignore the very annoying, and often dangerous, traits of some people of relying on their "beliefs" that seem to trump expert opinions and evidence. It is one thing to question the validity of something when one has evidence to back it up. It is another when all one can offer is simply one's beliefs. This is a sign of someone who can't think properly when faced with a problem, and simply decides not on what the evidence say, but rather on some preconceived ideas on how things should be. I think this is another example where the public, and a politician in this case, put more emphasis on their "values" rather than facts.

Think of these things when you vote for your candidate next time.

Zz.