The once-in-a-century storm and cold snap that hit the South this past week has given the climate hysterics a “told ya so” moment, which is made even more annoying by Joe Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Accords on Friday.
“The extreme weather events that we’re experiencing this week across the central, southern, and now the eastern United States do yet again demonstrate to us that climate change is real and it’s happening now, and we’re not adequately prepared for it,” Homeland Security Advisor Liz Sherwood-Randall said.
She said it herself: this was a “weather event, proving nothing about climate change at all. But don’t stop the hysterics now. They’re on a roll.
“We have to ratchet up the commitments now if we are to stay on course to averting a catastrophic three degree Fahrenheit warming,” said [climate scientist Michael] Mann, the author of “The New Climate War,” during a Friday evening interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith.” “We have to increase our commitments and the other countries of the world have to do that.”
Climate change was not at the top of Joe Biden’s agenda that he ran for president on, and it certainly wasn’t one of the top issues of concern to Americans. But in our rush to save the planet from…something, we’re likely to destroy several industries and cost perhaps millions of Americans their jobs. That’s what increasing our commitments truly means.
But don’t worry. Coal miners, I’m sure, can learn to code—and how hard can it be to train an oil worker to install solar panels?
I’ve heard better used car salesmen than Michael Mann trying to sell global warming.
“There is some evidence that climate change might be leading to an increase in the incidents of these sorts of events, but there is no question that if we look collectively at all of the extreme weather events we’ve seen in recent years, unprecedented heat waves and droughts and wildfires and super storms, we can see the fingerprint of human influence on our climate in these devastating events,” Mann said.
Is there a possibility that these individual weather events might be connected to climate change? Yes, there is a chance. But that’s not the point, is it? The claim is that human industrial activity is responsible — and only human industrial activity.
At this point, even many skeptics acknowledge the planet’s climate is changing. But the question of “why” remains unanswered. Moreover, do we really need to suck between 8 and 12 trillion dollars out of the economy by 2050 to fight it?
We need a rational scientific debate to inform public policymakers on what should be done. But we’re not getting it. In fact, there’s no debate at all. The hysterics have determined that opposition to their point of view is akin to heresy and must be punished with public and professional shunning.
Needless to say, it’s not very scientific. But ever since climate change moved from the lab to the political arena, the debate has been infected by ignorance and partisanship.
The Paris Climate Accords are not the answer. And the restrictions they place on Western economies will mean genuine suffering by real people — not evil corporations or “climate deniers.” To say it’s for their own good somehow isn’t very comforting.