Rick Santorum's "Google Problem"
It been eight years since columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage "redefined" his name to be a neologism for anal sex, but Santorum's "Google problem" continues to plague his campaign... in part because both Santorum and supporters like Americans For Truth About Homosexuality keep calling voters' attention to it. REUTERS

Rick Santorum said global warming is a “patently absurd” idea.

Santorum is a former Republican Senator from Pennsylvania and a 2012 presidential hopeful.

In an interview with conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Santorum lashed out at the concept of global warming and called it a liberal scheme.

He said the earth’s temperature goes through periods of cooler and warmer trends throughout history. Right now, we just happen to be in an uptrend.

Santorum said the liberals are abusing this natural swing and have concocted the concept of global warming in order to pass more government regulations.

It's just an excuse for more government control of your life, said the former Senator.

The concept of global warming is widely accepted in the scientific community. For example, it’s recognized by Nature, the US Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, Harvard University, and countless other institutions.

However, there are doubters, even though they remain in the minority.

Below is one academic who disagrees with global warming (aggregated by LiveScience):

William Gray, hurricane expert and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project at Colorado State University, in a 2005 interview with Discover magazine:

I'm not disputing that there has been global warming. There was a lot of global warming in the 1930s and '40s, and then there was a slight global cooling from the middle '40s to the early '70s. And there has been warming since the middle '70s, especially in the last 10 years. But this is natural, due to ocean circulation changes and other factors. It is not human induced.

Nearly all of my colleagues who have been around 40 or 50 years are skeptical as hell about this whole global-warming thing. But no one asks us. If you don't know anything about how the atmosphere functions, you will of course say, 'Look, greenhouse gases are going up, the globe is warming, they must be related.' Well, just because there are two associations, changing with the same sign, doesn't mean that one is causing the other.

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