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(This is the first of a series to appear in ScienceWeek)

Enemies of Science: Senator James Inhofe

James Mountain "Jim" Inhofe (born November 17, 1934) is a conservative, Christian Fundamentalist, American politician from Oklahoma. A member of the Republican Party, he currently serves as the senior United States Senator from Oklahoma. Inhofe's consistent citing to the Bible as the source for his stances on various political issues, such as gay rights, abortion and United States' support of Israel has made him very popular among Christian Fundamentalists. He is also the strongest skeptic of climate change in Congress.

Inhofe was born in Des Moines, Iowa and moved with his family to Tulsa when he was a child. He served as a private in the United States Army from 1955 to 1956 and ended as a specialist fourth class. In 1959, Inhofe married Kay Kirkpatrick, with whom he has four children. Inhofe received a B.A. degree from the University of Tulsa in 1973, at the age of 38.

In his business career, Inhofe was a real estate developer and became president of the Quaker Life Insurance Company. That company went into receivership while he managed it; it was liquidated in 1986, and despite a two year investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into accounting irregularities connected with the failure, Inhofe was never charged with any criminal offenses, and has since denied any wrongdoing.

Inhofe became active in Oklahoma Republican politics in the mid-1960s. He was a member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1967 to 1969, and a member of the Oklahoma Senate from 1969 until 1977, the last four of those years as minority leader. During his time in the state senate, he ran twice for election to other positions: for Governor of Oklahoma in 1974, losing to Democrat David Boren, and in 1976, losing a race to represent Oklahoma's First Congressional District (which was based in Tulsa) to incumbent Democrat James R. Jones.

Inhofe's political career was revived in 1978 when he was elected mayor of Tulsa, a position he held until 1984. In 1986, when Jones retired, Inhofe made another bid for Congress from the First District. This time, he won and he continued to serve in Congress from 1987 until 1994, being handily re-elected every two years in what rapidly became a strongly Republican district. He first came to national attention in 1993, when he led the effort to reform the House's "discharge provision" rule, which the House leadership had long used to bottle up bills in committee.

In 1994, Boren, who had been serving in the Senate since 1979, agreed to become president of the University of Oklahoma and announced he would resign as soon as a successor was elected. Inhofe won the Republican nomination for the special election that November, and swept to victory amid a strong Republican tide that saw the Republicans take both houses of Congress, as well as elect a Republican to the governorship for only the second time ever. He took office shortly after the election, on November 17 (giving him a little bit more Senatorial seniority than the incoming class of Senators) to serve the last two years of Boren's term and won the seat in his own right in 1996. He was re-elected in 2002.

Inhofe is one of the most politically conservative members of either house of Congress; among other political stances, he strongly opposes abortion and gay rights. As a member of the Armed Services Committee, he was among the panelists questioning witnesses about the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse. There he made news by claiming he was "outraged by the outrage" over the revelations of abuse, suggesting that shock at the crimes was more offensive than the crimes themselves. He has also criticized the Red Cross as a "bleeding heart." Against the wishes of the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and the American Petroleum Institute, Inhofe has persistently blocked American ratification of the international Convention on the Law of the Sea, claiming that the treaty would infringe on American sovereignty.

Inhofe, former chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is a strong critic of the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring as a result of human activities. In a July 28, 2003 Senate speech, he "offered compelling evidence that catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by the painstaking work of the nation's top climate scientists." He cited as support for this the 1992 Heidelberg Appeal and the Oregon Petition (1999), as well the opinions of numerous individual scientists that he named (although most climate scientists, as represented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), now believe that climate change is an existing phenomenon). In his speech, Inhofe also claimed that, "satellite data, confirmed by NOAA balloon measurements, confirms that no meaningful warming has occurred over the last century." However the satellite temperature record corroborates the well-documented warming trend noted in surface temperature measurements. Also, the satellite record begins in 1979 and the balloon record effectively in 1958, so it is unclear what Inhofe means by "last century".

In a 2006 interview with the Tulsa World newspaper, Inhofe compared environmentalists to Nazis. He said, "It kind of reminds... I could use the Third Reich, the Big Lie... You say something over and over and over and over again, and people will believe it, and that's their [the environmentalists'] strategy... A hot summer has nothing to do with global warming. Let's keep in mind it was just three weeks ago that people were saying, 'Wait a minute; it is unusually cool...." He then said, "Everything on which they [the environmentalists] based their story, in terms of the facts, has been refuted scientifically." Inhofe had previously compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo. He had also made allegations that the Weather Channel is behind the alleged global warming hoax, so as to attract viewers.

Inhofe, claiming uncertainties related to climate science and the adverse impact that mandatory emissions reductions would have on the U.S. economy, voted on June 22, 2005 to reject an amendment to an energy bill that would have forced reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases and created a mandatory emissions trading scheme. "Global warming is still considered to be a theory and has not come close to being sufficiently proven," he said.

Inhofe has similarly criticized predictions of ozone depletion, particularly in relation to the Arctic. On September 25, 2006, Inhofe gave a speech on the Senate floor in which he argued that the threat of global warming was exaggerated by "the media, Hollywood elites and our pop culture." Inhofe claimed that "From the late 1920s until the 1960s they [the media] warned of global warming. From the 1950s until the 1970s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate's fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years." He also accused the media of ignoring scientists such as Roger A. Pielke and William Gray who, Inhofe claims, disagree with global warming.

Inhofe was briefly shown in the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth. Only Texas senator John Cornyn received more campaign donations from the oil and gas industry in the 2004 election cycle. The contributions Inhofe has received from the energy and natural resource sector since taking office have exceeded one million dollars.

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