Obama Talks Global Warming to Shivering Crowd

By Marc Sheppard

In the first speech of his "whistle-stop" tour to Washington, Barack Obama talked global warming to a crowd of shivering Philadelphians who braved 18 degree (sub 10 degree wind-chill) temperatures on their journey to the 30th Street Train Station.

It's hard to believe that, given the arctic-like temperatures the northeast has suffered through this winter, the president-elect didn't instruct his writers to reword this passage from his "historic" speech: [my emphasis]

"Only a handful of times in our history has a generation been confronted with challenges so vast. An economy that is faltering. Two wars, one that needs to be ended responsibly, one that needs to be waged wisely. A planet that is warming from our unsustainable dependence on oil."

I know -- severe weather patterns in either direction are not necessarily symptomatic of overall climate trends, and I generally resist the temptation to report so-called "Gore Effect" events. But following a year predicted to be the "hottest in a century" that turned out instead to be the coolest in a decade, you'd think that -- given the extraordinarily glacial locale -- the supposedly brilliant future leader of the free world would have appreciated the hysterical disconnect in his words.

Not to mention the tough road ahead in selling his plan to legislate commerce-and-lifestyle-altering sacrifice to confront an unproven crisis with wholly hypothetical remedies to a cash-strapped and freezing populace.