GOP World's Only Big Party Denying Climate Evidence

The GOP looks to be the only major party in any democracy in the world that flat-out rejects the science of climate change, writes Ronald Brownstein in the National Journal. Even politicians considered conservative in their home countries—Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel—accept the scientific consensus that "climate change is occurring, and is caused largely by human activities," to quote the National Academy of Sciences.

But the GOP in 2010 will have none of it. The president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change says that while parties elsewhere show some skepticism, there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of." It's a problem because the world can't address the problem without the US, and the US can't do so "if one party not only rejects the most common solution proposed for the problem (cap-and-trade) but repudiates even the idea that there is a problem to be solved."