Lefty, It’s Cold Outside - Uniting liberals and conservatives in laughter.

National Review Online ^ | January 30, 2009 | Deroy Murdock

[neverdem]

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January 30, 2009, 0:00 a.m.

Lefty, It’s Cold Outside
Uniting liberals and conservatives in laughter.

By Deroy Murdock

So-called global warming has shrunk from problem to punch line. And now, leftists are laughing, too. It’s hard not to chuckle at the idea of Earth’s boiling in a carbon cauldron when the news won’t cooperate.

Nearly four inches of snow blanketed the United Arab Emirates’ Jebel Jais region for just the second time in recorded history on January 24. Citizens were speechless. The local dialect has no word for snowfall.

Dutchmen on ice skates sped past windmills as canals in Holland froze in mid-January for the first time since 1997. Defense minister Eimert van Middelkoop, who inhabits a renovated 17th-century windmill, stumbled on the ice and fractured his wrist.

January saw northern Minnesota’s temperatures plunge to 38 below zero, forcing ski-resort closures. A Frazee, Minnesota dog-sled race was cancelled due to excessive snow. Snow whitened the beaches of Surf City, North Carolina. Days ago, ice glazed Florida’s citrus groves.
 
As Earth faces global cooling, both troglodyte right-wingers and lachrymose left-wingers find Albert Gore’s simmering-planet hypothesis increasingly hilarious.

“In terms of [global warming’s] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don’t think it makes it into the top ten,” Robert Giegengack, former chairman of University of Pennsylvania’s Earth and Environmental Sciences Department, told the Pennsylvania Gazette. Dr. Giegengack voted for Gore in 2000, and says he likely would again.  

Commentator Harold Ambler declared January 3 on HuffingtonPost.com that he had voted for Barack Obama “for a thousand times a thousand reasons.” He also said that Gore “owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming.” He called Gore’s assertion that “the science is in” on this issue “the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of mankind.”


“Not only is it false that human activity has any significant effect on global warming or the weather in general, but for the record, global warming is over,” retired U.S. Navy meteorologist Martin Hertzberg wrote on carbon-sense.com. The physical chemist and self-described “scientist and life-long liberal Democrat” added: “The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has declined over the last ten years. From the El Niño Year of 1998 until January 2007, it dropped 0.25 degrees Celsius [0.45 degrees Fahrenheit]. From January 2007 to the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C [1.35 degrees Fahrenheit].” 

“It is a tribute to the scientific ignorance of politicians and journalists that they keep regurgitating the nonsense about human-caused global warming,” veteran left-wing commentator and Nation magazine columnist Alexander Cockburn wrote. “The greenhouse fear mongers rely on unverified, crudely oversimplified models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution—and carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism, and greed.”

Some leftists believe the collective hallucination of warmism distracts from what they consider urgent progressive priorities.

“The most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might,” University of Ottawa physics professor and environmental-science researcher Denis Rancourt has written. “The global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth.”

Social historian David Noble of Canada’s York University concurs. He has lamented that warmism is “diverting attention from the radical challenges of the global justice movements.”

Geophysicist Claude Allegre, previously education minister in France’s late-1990s Socialist government, denounced the “prophets of doom of global warming.” He sounded amused in a September 2006 L’Express article: “The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people.”

“The so-called consensus on man-made global warming is not holding up,” Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.) told his colleagues January 8. “It is becoming increasingly clear that skepticism about man-made global-warming fear is not a partisan left vs. right issue.”

“Global warming” has accomplished the impossible: It has united liberals and conservatives in laughter.
— Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. 

© 2009 Scripps Howard News Service

[Danae]

I can only hope that Al invested his “Earnings” off his movie and lecture circuit in the stock and housing markets.

[cartan]

Unfortunately, I don’t see Obama laughing…

[kittymyrib]

If life were just, Fat Al would be dipping his drinking water out of frozen creeks, as suffering Kentuckians are having to do.

[atomic conspiracy]

See Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Mike Flynn. This is a spoof of Greens and global warming hysterics written way back in 1991. The setting is a near-future in which CO2-hating Greenies are running things and have inadvertently caused a new ice age, which they blame on renegade astronauts who refuse to come down from a self-sufficient space colony.

"The novel takes aim at several targets of ridicule: Senator William Proxmire, environmentalists, and mystics, such as one character who believes that one cannot freeze to death in the snow because ice is a crystal and 'crystals are healing.' It also mocks the usage of environmentalist ideas in science education, which greatly helps the main characters (for example, one government "expert" cited in a news article believes that the astronauts must be superhumanly strong, based on a photograph of a weightless astronaut easily handling heavy construction equipment)."

[Flycatcher]

It's becoming a punchline now:

HE: Man, it's cold outside today!

SHE: (Rolling eyes) Global warming...

I love it!

[webheart]

Global warming is over because it has served its purpose: It got the libs elected. Now that they have been elected, global warming is inconvenient, and so will now go away. They may also claim to have solved it.

[webheart]

And the libs are laughing at us, not with us.

[ZirconEncrustedTweezers]

I think I should find this book! Niven is one of my favorite authors.

[reefdiver]

Fat Al is a liar. But liberals stand in line to listen to his lies. Just some of them . I won the election. Global warming, invented the Internet, was in inspiration for a love story, and on and on. but the mess he started with the supreme court and the problems that resulted from that are almost un forgivable

[hermgem]

And here's poor Al, again holding the hat similar to his election chaos.
He bought himself this 100 foot long house boat and here come seasons that get increasingly colder depriving him of all his hard earned fun.
When it comes to facts, rosy warming forecasts will not do.

[PzLdr]

Global warming served its pupose. It stampeded the lemmings of the left over the cliff and into a a voting booth for the Madhi. The 100 mill Fat Albert’s made off the scam is merely gravy.

[neverdem]

The column is getting some circulation. Here's Gannett's version:

Even leftists laugh at warming

Here's Seattle Post-Intelligencer's version:

Murdock: Even left now laughing at global warming

[javachip]

From January 2007 to the spring of 2008, it dropped a whopping 0.75 C

This means Bush solved global warming!

Unfortunately, Obama appears to have started the next ice age.

[T. P. Pole]

Re: Niven's Fallen Angels - Here is a link to a legal online version of the book.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[SuziQ]

Bump for later Monday reading.