There have been many conservative excuses for denying climate change and the opinion of the scientific community, not to be outdone however, Newt Gingrich took things a step further yesterday by asserting that he knows better than the scientific community because he is a scientist. Or something.
At a town hall in Atlantic, Iowa, Saturday afternoon, Gingrich gave an unusual reason for his present denial of man-made global warming. “I’m an amateur paleontologist,” Gingrich said. “I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.”
I'm fascinated by the weather and I watch it very closely. That doesn't make me a meteorologist any more than "looking at the Earth's temperature" makes Newt a paleontologist.
Of course the bigger problem with Newt's assertion is that paleontology is the study of prehistoric life, not the Earth's temperature.
Perhaps Newt meant to say amateur climatologist, amateur meteorologist, or maybe even geologist. Or maybe, just maybe, Newt is completely full of crap.