The end is near!
The universal, voodoo all-purpose bogeyman: Climate Change.
World savers are anything but. They always have an unspoken motive. H.L. Mencken saw the self-appointed saviors for what they were almost a century ago, when he said the “whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
The most persistent hobgoblin of the last quarter-century has been global warming, now called climate change but eventually to be known as extreme weather, or some such other fright-inducing name. The climate activists are constantly bombarding us with warnings, hectoring, hysteria, pleading and threats. Apocalyptic books have been written and shrill movies made, all in an effort to slow man’s combustion of fossil fuels.
Included among these is a new documentary “inspired” by Naomi Klein’s book “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.” If the title isn’t enough to give away Klein’s motives for attacking the climate “crisis,” then a comment she makes in the trailer — please forgive: watching the entire documentary would be as agonizing as any medieval torture — should. “So here’s the big question,” says Klein. “What if global warming isn’t only a crisis? What if it’s the best chance we’re ever going to get to build a better world?”
Then comes the threat: “Change, or be changed.”
Yeah, well, as I’ve oftentimes observed, they’re all fascists at heart, these members of the National Socialist American Workers Party.
Klein’s statement is perfectly in line with Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, and in fact is almost an echo. Figueres acknowledged earlier this year that the environmental activists’ goal is not to spare the world an ecological disaster, but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” Figueres said in Brussels last winter.
The best part of being a True Believer is that no matter what happens, they can blame “climate change.” Take for example this puzzled story in the Washington Post from two years ago:
Antarctic sea ice has grown to a record large extent for a second straight year, baffling scientists seeking to understand why this ice is expanding rather than shrinking in a warming world. On Saturday, the ice extent reached 19.51 million square kilometers, according to data posted on the National Snow and Ice Data Center Web site. That number bested record high levels set earlier this month and in 2012 (of 19.48 million square kilometers). Records date back to October 1978.
So, more ice is good, no? Au courant and au contraire:
Whenever you point to melting ice in polar regions, climate change doubters or skeptics have an answer. Ice floating atop the seas around Antarctica, they point out, is growing — and that’s not what you would expect from global warming, right?
There’s no doubt that growing Antarctic sea ice is a mystery in the climate system — and an anomalous, seemingly contrary indicator. However, if a controversial and much-discussed new paper from famed former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 colleagues is correct, then actually it could be a troubling climate warning sign. (Indeed, other scientists have reached similar conclusions.)
According to Hansen’s thinking, expanding Antarctic sea ice is precisely what you would expect to see if the Antarctic continent itself is losing a lot of ice mass from its vast ice sheet, adding to sea level rise. The thinking goes like this: As ice shelves melt, and more inland ice slides towards the sea, a gigantic volume of cold, fresh water enters the ocean. This freshwater pulse, the researchers continue, promotes ocean “stratification,” in which a cold surface layer lies atop a subsurface warmer layer. The cold surface layer promotes more sea ice growth atop open water, while the warm lower layer sneaks beneath that ice and continues to melt submerged ice shelves, which plunge deep into the water at the fringes of the continent.
This “thinking” is what we used to call a “theory,” but to the crackpots of the “climate change” movement, it’s more like scripture. The cultists will go to their graves believing that, while they won’t live long enough to see the slightest effects of the coming Apocalypse, they must be right. They need help.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member