'The Quote of the Millenium'

To paraphrase Barack Obama’s bête noire, if the Global Warming / Cooling / Climate Change / Climate Chaos Empire should last for a Thousand Years, let them know that this, their finest hour of banning everything, rearranging the average consumer’s lifestyle and breathing deep wacky geothermic engineering fantasies might or might not have paid off.

Here’s Anthony Watts of the Watts Up With That science blog on Australian journalist Andrew Bolt scoring “the Quote of the Millennium” — almost literally so, on MTR-1377, Melbourne’s talk radio station:

Our regular feature, “Quote of the Week” just doesn’t work here. Neither does decade or century. No, a whole new category all by itself is reserved for this quote from the newly appointed Climate Commissioner of Australia, Tim Flannery, noted zoologist and author of the book The Weather Makers.Here it is, brace yourself:

If we cut emissions today, global temperatures are not likely to drop for about a thousand years.

Lest you think that is an errant remark out of context, here’s the follow up from Flannery:

Just let me finish and say this. If the world as a whole cut all emissions tomorrow the average temperature of the planet is not going to drop in several hundred years, perhaps as much as a thousand years because the system is overburdened with CO2 that has to be absorbed and that only happens slowly.

Crikey! So much for the “think of the grandchildren” argument used by Dr. James Hansen.