Bill Maher: Osama Bin Laden ‘Gets’ Global Warming ‘Better Than Every Republican’

Bill Maher has in one phrase probably done more damage to the global warming movement than climate change skeptics could have ever imagined to themselves. Trying to argue that believing in global warming was elementary for any educated person, he quoted Osama bin Laden saying in one of his underground (literally) videos that “the phenomenon is an actual fact.”

Bin Laden was speaking about the recent tragic floods in Pakistan, noting that “industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear responsibility for the global warming crisis.” Maher lauded this comment, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way, and used it to condemn Republicans that express skepticism about the existence of global warming: “a guy in a cave gets it better than every Republican voting for the Senate!”

The conservatives on his panel, of course, were not amused. P.J. O’Rourke, who argues that there’s no point in worrying about global warming because there is nothing human beings can do about it anyway, mocked him saying, “I was a skeptic before, but now I’m convinced!” S.E. Cupp took a more substantive approach to the discussion, noting that the only reason Bin Laden supports global warming research is that it promotes his “meme” that the West and, specifically, America, are destroying the earth. Global warming “is a rich man’s problem,” she noted, “the United States caused it.”

The comments from Friday’s Real Time via HBO below:

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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