“It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.”
– Charles Krauthammer, “Obama’s Global-Warming Folly.” Washington Post, July 4, 2013.
The late Charles Krauthammer was a wise voice in a public policy hothouse. His views on Obama-era climate-change policy ring true today–and demonstrate prescience.
Quotations follow from his five-year-old Washington Post editorial.
“The economy stagnates. Syria burns. Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him , even as a ’29-year-old hacker’ revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change.”
“Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic.”
“Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.,… [This] is something that the very complex global warming models that Obama naively claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president’s presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings.”
“It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.”
“What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about [global warming]?”
“The United States has already radically cut carbon dioxide emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels. And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.”
“At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. ‘Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,’ explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. ‘On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.’”
Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished…. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.”
“… China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing Third World will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.”
“To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?”
“Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.”
“… there is no point in America committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise…. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.”
(James) Taylor on Krauthammer
Krauthammer’s piece sparked derision from the alarmist camp. James Taylor (the happy cancellation of brother Jerry) set the record straight at Forbes.com.
“For all the alarmists’ collective outrage, [critics] have yet to identify a single error in what Krauthammer wrote and said,” Taylor noted. “In the process, they have perfectly illustrated the difference between global warming skepticism, which relies on scientific evidence, and global warming alarmism, which relies on name-calling and temper tantrums.”
Taylor adds his frustration to those who refuse to discuss/debate but just smear.
As if intentionally attempting to prove Krauthammer correct, global warming alarmists have responded to Krauthammer’s column and O’Reilly appearance with shrill outrage, bullying tactics, and not a single shred of scientific data…. Time magazine senior editor Jeffrey Kluger repeatedly called Krauthammer an ‘unfrozen caveman’…
Taylor continues:
When Charles Krauthammer and others ask such questions, one would expect global warming advocates who feel secure in their supporting scientific evidence to present the evidence and let the science do the talking. When prominent global warming advocates such as Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Jeffrey Kluger respond instead by engaging in juvenile name-calling – “flat earthers,” “unfrozen caveman” ….
Year after year, I have invited many of the most prominent advocates of a global warming crisis to make their scientific case at the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change. Year after year, the alarmists shy away from the science and resort instead to the sort of long-distance name-calling…. Their name-calling temper tantrums may help them vent their anger and rage at being proven wrong by the science, but it doesn’t change the fact that they are continually proven wrong by the science.
James Taylor concluded: “While global warming alarmists ramp up their unscientific temper tantrums, Charles Krauthammer’s sound science looks better with each passing day.”
Long live Charles Krauthammer.
Iowa Climate Science Education 