PrintMay 26, 2010
Joe Romm exploits Gulf Coast misery and Obama's legacy to push his Warmist nonsense
Joe Romm warned Barack Obama in today’s Salon that “[t]here's a clear link between the BP spill and global warming.” No, the Climate Progress alarmist isn’t suggesting that either the grossly exaggerated sea level rise or ocean acidification he attributes to climate change played any direct role in April’s Deepwater Horizon accident. But they share a common cause, he insists, and its name is Fossil Fuels. And to ignore its evil is to imperil not only the planet, but something Romm implies may be of greater concern to the Democrat president – his legacy.
Romm writes that although the impact of a “ravaged Gulf Coast” will be “felt for at least a generation,” the spill is actually a mild calamity compared to the “biggest catastrophe that is now unfolding: human-caused global warming.”
After all, even the “inevitable damage to sensitive coastal wetlands, fish, fowl and wildlife” Romm foresees resulting from the relentless black ooze, pales in comparison to how “all of American life -- politics, international relations, our homes, our jobs, our industries, the kind of cars we drive -- will be forever transformed by the climate and energy challenge” in just the next 20-years. And by century’s end “the inland United States [will warm] by nine degrees,” which “could lead to sea levels 3 to 6 feet higher (rising perhaps an inch or two a year), cause the Southwest -- from Kansas to California -- to become a permanent dust bowl, and transform much of the ocean into a hot, acidic dead zone.”
Regarding Obama, Romm argues that the eco-disaster most threatening his legacy due to lack of action is not the one currently hitting the Gulf of Mexico, which there’s “not much more that [he] can do to stop,” but rather that of “catastrophic climate change,” which, according to Romm, there’s plenty the president can do to prevent.
Romm apparently adheres to the motto Pat Michaels attributed to the IPCC last Monday at the Heartland Climate Conference (ICCC) in Chicago: “Damn the data – full steam ahead,” in blaming “climate change,” and therefore its alleged consequences, on “unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases.”
You see, last week, ICCC scientists once again demonstrated that, by century’s end, the US will not warm by even 10% of Romm’s daffy nine degrees even if CO2 levels have doubled since then (Spencer, Lindzen, Singer, et al), sea level rise will not exceed the 7 inches per century we’ve experienced for 3000 years (Singer, Carter, Mörner, et al) and the oceans will be just fine (Idso, Douglass, Plimer et al).
But opportunistic alarmists the likes of Romm also adhere to the motto attributed to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel -- “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste."
Which is why he writes that while Obama does need to take charge of the spill response (that Romm oddly stated just paragraphs prior the president could do nothing about), it’s more important that he “communicate to Americans that the disaster was ultimately caused by our addiction to fossil fuel -- and to make it clear that we face a far greater disaster if we don't start working toward ending that addiction.”
As Hon. George Allen of the American Energy Freedom Center told the same Chicago gathering last Monday, “Americans are not addicted to oil, they’re addicted to freedom.”
And with fossil fuels currently meeting 84% of their energy demands, Americans aren’t about to give up the comfort, freedom, and wellbeing such energy provides based on Romm’s brand of antiquated and consistently debunked alarmism.
