PrintMarch 24, 2009
More Global Warming Scare Mongering From Obama
Barack Obama sat with a group of reporters yesterday and attempted to exploit the suffering of North Dakota’s Red River Valley flood victims to help sell his bogus energy plan. Apparently taking a cue from Al Gore while heeding Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s advice to "never let a good crisis go to waste," the president deflected a question challenging his proposed cap-and-trade system’s devastating impact on the economy by blaming the flooding on global warming – sort of.
Asked about North Dakotans’ concerns that his carbon trading scheme might harm the state’s vital coal and power-generating industries, Mr. Obama quickly changed the subject:
The president then proceeded to pitch the consequent necessity of his disastrous cap-and-trade program to the group. Of course, there were no challenges to the wildly conjectural assertion that such a plan would actually lower atmospheric CO2 or, for that matter, temperatures – that’s sadly become a given. But not one reporter questioned the complete lack of either conviction or logic in connecting not this yet perhaps future flooding to temperature increases and subsequently to why “we have to take this seriously.” OBAMA : I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating. The flooding in North Dakota which could result if you start seeing severely changing weather patterns …REPORTER: Which is going on right now …OBAMA: Which is going on right now. Now I can’t ascribe that in particular to climate change. If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ that indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.
Yes, potentially severe Spring flooding has hit the valley and it may or may not prove to be the worst since the devastating benchmark flood of 1997. But as local news channel KSFY pointed out yesterday: “Every Spring, the weather warms up, the snow melts and our rivers and streams fill up.” Now follow my logic here, if, that is, the president’s hasn’t managed to short-circuit that capacity: More snow in winter equals more melted snow in spring equals more water.
And ironically enough, just days before Obama’s climate non sequitur, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had denied North Dakota Governor John Hoeven’s request for a presidential disaster declaration to help deal with “the heavy and sometimes record snowfall in North Dakota this winter.” More snow. More water. Any questions?
And speaking of FEMA, here’s an agency Powerpoint training presentation (PPT) that lists 10 major floods in the valley between 1510 and 1762 and 18 since. One flood in 1826 was 10 feet higher than 1997 and another in 1950 peaked at 11 feet higher.
Given the absence of selfish SUV-driving carbon-spewing capitalists motoring about at the time, to what do you suppose John Quincy Adams and Harry Truman attributed the Red River Valley flooding of their days? Perhaps something as mundane as unstable melt output from normal seasonal snowfall variations?
But our current occupant of 1600 Penn is now leading the Liberal policy charge. So when the appropriate crisis to help make his case eludes him, it appears he’ll simply craft one – no matter how unconvincingly.
