February 26, 2018

3 Years Ago, We All Laughed at James Inhofe’s Snowball. The Joke Was on Us.

After all, we elected a snowflake.

CSPAN

February 26, 2015 is a day that will live in Internet infamy for a few reasons. It gave us the great dress debate and the runaway llamas. But in the annals of science, let’s not forget it also gave us the snowball on the floor of the Senate.

On this day, three years ago, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, appeared with a snowball on the Senate floor to demonstrate, once and for all, that climate change is a hoax.

“You know what this is?'” asked Inhofe, the author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. “It’s a snowball, from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable.” Then he tossed it to a congressional page.

It happened to be very cold in the eastern United States that February, but 2015 overall ranked as the hottest year ever recorded globally (a record we broke again in 2016).

So now as we pause to commemorate the senator’s snowball, we should also look back on this innocent time—before most of us ever imagined that we would have a sitting president who agreed with the Senate’s most notorious climate change denier.

 

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

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And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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