House of Eratosthenes

All reasonable Americans—this statement is true by definition—scoffed in 2008, when then-Sen. Barack Obama, having just clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, proclaimed: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that…this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

It’s been only a fraction of a generation, but the president asserted yesterday that he had mischaracterized that moment. “The planet is getting warmer,” he claimed in a commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy:

Fourteen of the 15 hottest years on record have been in the past 15 years. Last year was the planet’s warmest year ever recorded.

Our scientists at NASA just reported that some of the sea ice around Antarctica is breaking up even faster than expected. The world’s glaciers are melting, pouring new water into the ocean. Over the past century, the world sea level rose by about 8 inches. That was in the last century; by the end of this century, it’s projected to rise another 1 to 4 feet.

Yes, the lucky cadets were treated to a presidential lecture on, in Obama’s words, “the urgent need to combat and adapt to climate change.”

This is a chorus ever-repeating in the musical that is Marxist insanity: “This thing is absolutely inevitable and unstoppable, so we must sacrifice everything to make it happen.” It is the sort of mental slippage consequential to reading the future, with all the certainty attendant to recollection of the past. Then again, if lefties had some useful comprehension of time, they wouldn’t be asserting in 2008 that this is “the moment our planet began to heal,” and then seven years later that the planet’s sickness was worse than ever before, with not a hint of backpedaling, or “sorry I was wrong,” or “seemed like a good idea at the time” — or even, “key change!”

Such reflections on the elementary human experience of time, reveal brutally that if this ideological movement retains so much as a semblance of sanity, it’s not any brand of sanity that’s useful to anyone else. Continuing,

The most telling assertion in the president’s speech was meant as a throwaway line. Immediately after setting up his some-folks-back-in-Washington straw man, Obama allowed as how “on a day like today, it’s hard to get too worried about it,” the antecedent being “climate change.” It was a cool spring day in New London, Conn.

Now of course weather isn’t the same thing as climate, as global warmists are quick to point out in fair weather. But that’s true of all weather. It is fallacious to attribute bad weather but not good weather to “climate change,” as if every day was idyllic everywhere on preindustrial Earth.

And that, right there, is really the whole problem. “Climate change” is, as the name correctly implies, an assertion that something in nature is undergoing a transformation. We “know” this to be true, because we are applying measurements to this thing in nature, using things that have been created by humans to do the measuring. Left out of the bumptious bullying narrative is any confession that these instruments, and the technologies & methodologies that apply them to the task and interpret their readings, have also been subject to change.

More insanity. The assertion is that we know a thing is changing, because we’re getting changing readings when we measure it — using a “yardstick” that we know is changing. And the insanity feeds upon itself, growing exponentially: There’s no use discussing it with you if you do not acknowledge, without reservation or hesitation, that the changing measurements on this changing yardstick prove that the thing being measured, is changing; and, exactly the way we say it is. Furthermore, that this change represents a problem, which can be solved only by moving money around in the way we say. But it may be too late already! But move the money around anyway.

After all, the thing is inevitable, an absolute certainty, and that can only mean one thing, that we must sacrifice everything to make it happen.

with not a hint of backpedaling, or “sorry I was wrong,” or “seemed like a good idea at the time” — or even, “key change!”

I’ve often said that the only thing that would ever make me take “climate change” seriously is climate alarmists acting as if they took it seriously — Al Gore shuttering some of his mansions, Leonardo DiCaprio giving up private jets, etc. But now I have a second criterion to add:

Remember Global Cooling? It was all the rage among the greenies back in the 1970s. Find me an activist who admits he was wrong on that — that he seriously believed the exact same mechanisms which “cause” “global warming” now “caused” “global cooling” back then, but was in error.
- Severian | 05/22/2015 @ 12:55
“The assertion is that we know a thing is changing, because we’re getting changing readings when we measure it…”
Oooo….let’s chat about labor, debt, education, health, “lifestyle”, “Recent university/gub’mint science suggests…”, and public opinion polls, shall we?
What is “truthiness” again?
- CaptDMO | 05/22/2015 @ 13:40
This is going to sound really crass but if the promoters of human caused climate change really believed it was as serious as they claim then they’d be offering ways to survive it rather than “slow” it, because if it is as dire as they say it is already to late.

If they really believed this stuff they’d be advocating hiring every available Mexican to build a sea wall from Port Isabel Texas to the St. Lawrence Seaway and then down the West coast. This would insure survivability and solve the immigration issues at the same time

Since they are offering no measurable solutions to the problem they do not really believe in the problem.
- Fai Mao | 05/22/2015 @ 23:14
Hope and change have been a greater danger to the world than climate change.
- Rich Fader | 05/23/2015 @ 00:44
Did anyone notice that just a few days after NASA published data showing the polar ice mass was greater than it was in 1979 our President declared the information was ‘top secret’ ? Civilian analysts no longer have free access to the data.
- Theo | 05/23/2015 @ 01:54

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

“Real Denialism”Friday, May 22nd, 2015

“Real Denialism”
Friday, May 22nd, 2015