PrintOctober 30, 2007
The Dumbest Thing Said about Global Warming Last Week
In a week which witnessed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and CNN's Anderson Cooper blaming the California wildfires on global warming to promote their political agendas and doomsday documentary, respectively, one might not expect to uncover any dumber proclamations on the subject.
Ah, but this is global warming we're talking about, where those who know the most tend to say the least and those who know the least tend to win Nobel Prizes.
That's why talk show guests the likes of syndicated columnist Clarence Page, who made the same lame assertions on The McLaughlin Group days after the connection was dismissed as rubbish, remained strong contenders.
As did the Goreacle himself, who, speaking at a climate change conference in Berlin on Tuesday predicted that should we fail to heed the warnings of the big green scare machine, 2007 would be a year our doomed children will one day look back on and ask: [emphasis mine]
"What were they doing? What were they thinking about and how could they let that catastrophe happen? Didn't they listen to the scientists? Didn't they see the glaciers and polar caps melting? Didn't they see the fires?"
This was a strongly obtuse entry, to be sure, and, spoken on a different week, perhaps even a winning one.
But no, last week's champion of torpidity was Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program. On Thursday, his group released a flame-fanning report purporting to be the "final wake-up call to the international community." Their Global Environmental Outlook 4 presages the usual species extinctions, potable water unavailability and unsustainable human consumption leading to mass starvation, and of course, hitherto inconceivable environmental devastation.
And, while this familiar repent Ye eco-sinners "wake-up call" - which in truth deserved little more that a tap on the snooze alarm - was, itself a veritable bounty of potential champs, it was Steiner's related observations which allowed him to snatch last week's dubious glory.
During a telephone interview with the International Herald Tribune, the UN Under-Secretary General epitomized why scientific research is better suited to scientists than enviro-activist economists when he shamefully mischaracterized another achievement:
"The recent award of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to former Vice President Al Gore was a sign of widespread scientific consensus that climate change is under way."
While we've come to expect such blathering illogic from our pols and pundits, it's difficult to escape the sheer absurdity of such a specious conclusion being drawn by a man who sits at the helm of a program which has been commissioned for the express purpose of - drawing conclusions.
