Republicans and Climate Change

While half watching MSNBC's Hardball a few minutes ago, the incredibly annoying Chris Matthews was talking about why Republicans don't seem to believe in science.

Specifically he was comparing disbelief in Evolution with disbelief in Climate Change, basically stating that if you can't believe in the science of Evolution that you can't believe in the science of Climate Change. During his tirade, Matthews was interviewing former House Representative Tom Tancredo (R). Tancredo believes in ID, he said so. He believes there is evolution within species (so-called micro-evolution) but not changing of one species to another (so-called macro-evolution). He stated that there's no evidence at all of the latter in the fossil record, that we don't see transitional fossils. Apart from the obvious nonsense of this position (every species that has ever existed, every fossil, is transitional, always changing), the comparison between not believing in Evolution and not believing in Climate Change is invalid.

The reason it's invalid is that Climate Change (read: Global Warming) doesn't threaten anyone's religion, like Evolution seems to.

Let me be clear about my position. I'm an atheist, sometimes a militant atheist, but I don't believe the case for Anthropogenic Global Warming has been made. I think there are a lot of ifs and maybes, but observational evidence doesn't seem to support those ifs and maybes. I'm also not a Republican, or a Democrat, or any other political label.

Matthews went on to say he believes in a god who created everything, but didn't really say if he agrees with the theories involved with Evolution, I guess that would make him a fence-sitter. So I'm not sure what his point was. He seems to disagree with Evolution as a natural process, instead believing "god" had a hand in it. Yet he seems to agree with the Climate Change proponents. So again, I'm not sure what his point was, besides comparing apples and oranges and monkeys.