Let’s call it “blathering-idiotgate.” The name is borrowed from an insult that Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) hurled at “climate-change deniers” before going on to hail global warming climate change as one of the “biggest challenges of our time.” In his remarks on the House floor, DeFazio also urged the Obama administration to play hardball with China and other offenders to get them to cut down on carbon emissions. May Obama could draw a red line.
DeFazio’s statements were made in reaction to jokes he heard on talk shows regarding the “Arctic vortex” that is currently gripping the nation. If anything, his comments reveal he needs to get a sense of humor. A shipload of climatologists on the way to study the shrinking polar sea ice getting stuck in said ice is hilarious. So are efforts by people like Bryan Walsh, science editor at TIME, to explain how climate change might be responsible for the historic cold snap.
What makes Walsh’s proclamations equally funny is that the magazine he works for made a very different (would it be cruel to say “polar opposite?) prediction in 1974. Here is a key paragraph from the article, which bore the ominous title “Another Ice Age?”
Scientists have found other indications of global cooling. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds — the so-called circumpolar vortex — that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world.
It’s easy to understand why liberals are in a bad mood. Back when Al Gore was making doom-and-gloom movies about the rising temperatures, liberals kept spewing words like consensus is though they had relevance to real science. The newly elected President of the United States in 2008 promised in his inaugural address to “restore science to its rightful place.”
Now they all look like saps. No wonder DeFazio is tossing out terms like blathering idiot. Name calling is the last refuge of the guy walking around with a length of toilet paper streaming from the heel of his shoe.
