The global warming debate is over!”
That has been a common battle cry from the political left and the news media for years now. As a conservative who is inherently skeptical of any media-driven “conventional wisdom” (mostly because they almost always turn out wrong), this declaration has always made me chuckle for several reasons.
First, as I recently asked Democratic congressman John Yarmuth on my syndicated radio show: If the left is so confident that they’ve “won” this debate (personally, I don’t recall that we ever really even had one), why in the world would they want so badly for it to be over? If I was really humiliating my opponents on an issue both in reality and in perception, I would want to keep that discussion going as long and as often as I possibly could.
The fact that the left refuses to engage in any debate on global warming — and wants the matter closed yesterday — makes me extremely suspicious that they aren’t actually so confident that they are right, or that they are winning. When they go a step further and call those who disagree with them “deniers” and equate them with “blasphemers” or those who claim the Holocaust didn’t really happen, like a bully who has nothing to back up his bravado, it makes me think they have some extreme insecurities.
But last week broke new grounds in the lengths people will go to cut off any dissent on this issue, which many have used to hinder business production in extremely significant ways. And the news media’s curious lack of a negative reaction is also telling.
President Obama, while speaking to the graduating class of the Coast Guard Academy, declared “climate change” to be one of the primary threats to our national security. Given the precarious state of the world, that would have certainly elevated the topic way beyond what it deserved even if it was based reality, but the president hardly stopped there. He went on to utter what I consider the single-most absurd statement a president has made in prepared remarks in my memory:
If you see storm clouds gathering or dangerous shoals ahead you don’t just sit back and do nothing. You take action to protect your ship, to keep your crew safe. Anything less is negligence. It is a dereliction of duty. So to with climate change. Denying it or refusing to deal with it endangers our national security. It undermines the readiness of our forces.
There is simply no other rational way to interpret those words than that the commander-in-chief of our armed forces told those entering into a branch of our military that it is a “dereliction of duty” just to even “deny” the existence of man-made climate change. So there is no confusion, he had to be referring to the man-made variety of climate change because presumably there is nothing any of us can do to “take action” against “normal” climate change, which has happened since the beginning of time.
What the president did there was outrageous even if he was somehow completely correct on the underlying issue. He was telling future members of our military that it is effectively a “thought crime” to disagree with him on a topic that is both inherently extremely political as well currently impossible to prove either way.
I would like you to consider what the media reaction to similar statement made by George W. Bush would have been like. Can you imagine if Bush had told the graduating class at West Point that it was a “dereliction of their duty” to “deny” the existence of Jesus Christ? Twitter would have broken and the cable networks would still be in a 24/7 frenzy.
While most on the left will scoff at such an analogy, I would maintain that belief in catastrophic anthropogenic climate change has all the hallmarks of a religion. Regardless, what even the left cannot dispute is that the mainstream news media almost completely overlooked the ludicrousness of Obama’s statements. A simple Google search of “Obama Deny Climate Change Dereliction of Duty” shows that only news sources considered “conservative” made a big issue out of his words.
This type of omission is usually the tactic the news media uses most effectively to maintain the status quo in the climate debate. After all, how can a debate that is “over” ever be reversed when any and all data points which would lead one in the other direction are aggressively ignored?
This past week provided two other classic examples of the omission phenomenon. The most dramatic occurred in the Texas/Oklahoma area where massive flooding drenched an area which had been in a severe drought since 2011.
I am quite sure that some of the global warming believers, much like religious zealots, will see the two water-logged states as further proof that their faith in man-made climate chaos is justified. However, I believe the opposite is true.
In 2013, USA Today, among many major news outlets to focus on the issue, published a special report on how global warming was exacerbating the supposedly historic drought in Texas and that “likely do more damage in the future.” Well, that drought is amazingly now officially over less than two years later.
This, in a remotely logical world, would leave only two options: 1) Global Warming has been fixed; or 2) The report was a piece of garbage using a natural cycle to promote a political agenda. I asked the reporter via Twitter if she intended on retracting the piece now that the supposedly global warming-caused drought is over so incredibly quickly, but shockingly I got no response.
Nowhere in the news media was there any indication that this drought data point, which has recently been used to score points in the global warming debate, had been effectively been proven to have been illegitimate. The news media ignored the same development with regard to Florida’s horrific drought of 2006-07 which has since been doused, except for the very southern tip of the state (which is ironically still drier than normal because of the pronounced lack of hurricanes produced by Global Warming lately).
Also this past week, most of the news media managed to somehow overlook a report by Forbes which indicated that one of the basic foundations of the global warming religion is based in a falsehood. It turns out that NASA satellite data now indicates that the polar ice caps have not actually receded at all since that information started to become available in 1979 (all data pools in this realm are so incredibly shallow as to be roughly the equivalent to trying to determine the final baseball standings based on only the first game of the season). Making this even more remarkable is the fact that 1979 was at the end of a cooling period and therefore should have been a year from which icecap reseeding would be more obvious.
But see, the global warming fanatics will tell you that it is all much more complicated than it appears. That one must be an “expert” (preferably one who owes their career progression to being part of the global warming “pack’) to properly interpret the data. That common sense has no place in this discussion. That extreme weather examples are only allowed to used if they support one side of the argument (and ALL unusual weather somehow fits perfectly into global warming theory). That you are humiliating yourself if you dare to “deny” or even question the obvious reality and imminent danger of man-made climate change.
Sorry. I am not buying it. And the more the news media pretends the other side doesn’t exist, and the political left continues to intimidate and scare instead of engaging in legitimate debate, the more confident I will be that this whole issue is mostly just hot air.
