Rick Perry Picks Up Endorsement of Sen. Jim Inhofe, Climate Change Skeptic

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29, 2011 -- Gov. Rick Perry's most recent endorsement came today from Sen. Jim Inhofe, a fellow climate-change skeptic, who said the Texas Governor is the strongest Republican to challenge President Obama in 2012.

"I've known Gov. Rick Perry for a long time, and I am endorsing him because I know he is the strongest leader to run against and defeat President Obama. After three years of Obama's liberal agenda, Rick Perry is the right person to get America working again and turn our country in the right direction," Sen. Inhofe said in Tulsa, Okla., today. "We can't afford four more years of the Obama malaise. Look at what Rick Perry has done in his state. He is going to be a great president!"

Inhofe shares in Perry's skepticism regarding climate change, having repeatedly called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and has argued the globe is moving into a "cooling period," a theory Perry supported in his book "Fed Up!"

"He won't cave in to the extreme environmental activists or the Hollywood crowd and their liberal agenda," Inhofe said of Perry.

When Washington, D.C., was buried under snow in the winter of 2010, Inhofe and his family built an igloo with signs jokingly calling it Al Gore's new home.

"If, in fact, global warming is taking place, it's kind of hard on a day like today and the last few days to be talking about global warming," Inhofe said on the Senate floor in February 2010. "I often say, where is it when you need it?"

In the opening week of his campaign, Perry labeled global warming as being "politicized," arguing that scientists "have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their, to their projects." Perry's criticism of climate change theorists drew fire from fellow Republicans.

"The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party - the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012," Huntsman said on This Week earlier this month.

Last week, Vice President Al Gore condemned climate-change skeptics' attempts to discredit the work of scientists by tying their projects to money.

"This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity and to slander them with the lie that they are making up the science in order to make money," Gore said in an online interview last week.

"These scientists don't make a lot of money," Gore said. "They are comfortable, as they should be, but they don't make a lot of money. That is not their motivation for doing what they do."

Gore also warned that doubters of climate change will ultimately be judged in the same way as those who previously espoused racist views.

"There came a time when racist comments would come up in the course of the conversation and in years past they were just natural. Then there came a time when people would say, 'Hey, man why do you talk that way, I mean that is wrong. I don't go for that so don't talk that way around me. I just don't believe that.' That happened in millions of conversations and slowly the conversation was won," Gore said. "And we have to win the conversation on climate."

In his book "Fed Up!" Perry called Gore a "false prophet of a secular carbon cult."

"Gore found something more satiating to his ego than the presidency. He found a global cause, and he became the prophet who could protect us from Armageddon. Soon he took his PowerPoint presentation around the globe, raising concerns about melting icebergs and undersized polar bears," Perry wrote. " The Left embraced him like never before. Hollywood toasted him as their hero. The Nobel Committee gave him a peace prize. He won an Oscar. And it's all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight."