On Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about CNN’s fact-free reporting about climate change. Video and partial transcript below:
Remember that “Simpsons” headline? I always loved this headline, “Old Man Yells At Cloud,” and it just has a picture of the old man from “The Simpsons” yelling at the cloud. That to me is the Democrats. They’re yelling at the clouds.
There’s this terrible storm, Dorian, and Dorian is now, I think, moving over the Carolinas. It’s been degraded to a Category 2 as I’m speaking [Thursday morning], went up to a Category 3, but when it hit the Bahamas — it eliminated whole parts of the Bahamas. That was a genuine catastrophe. Last I heard, the death toll was around seven I think, but it’s obviously, unfortunately, going to go up.
So we talk about this fact that it’s a fact-free world, and it’s always Donald Trump’s fault. So Donald Trump, at some point, said that he thought the storm was going to hit Alabama, and all the weather people said no, no, no. The National Weather Service said Alabama is not going to see any impact from Dorian. This is important, because when the president says something, people pack up and leave — they evacuate and all this stuff, so it matters.
If [Trump] was wrong, he shouldn’t have said it. If he was wrong, he should have admitted it. Then, [Trump] was talking in front of a weather map, and somebody had drawn on the weather map movement that made it look like the storm was going to hit Alabama. And Trump is still saying he was right about this, that there was a point when they said it was gonna hit Alabama. Who knows?
Who cares? This is what I mean. When they talk about a fact-free world, they’re always going after Trump’s gaffes. He talks carelessly, and you know, the way I hear him lie — he lies in this kind of harmless exaggerating way, and in this negotiating way. But we’ve kind of factored in the way Trump talks, most of us, those of us who are paying attention, those of us who are not trying to destroy him in order to give power back to the Democrats, which is a small number of people in the media.
But let’s compare that to the news media and to the Democrats. When we’re talking about the storm, does it hit Alabama? Does it not hit Alabama? Was it ever going to? I don’t know, a lot of times Trump turns out to have been right about this. I don’t know what he saw. But let’s talk about this. Temperatures, I think, have been rising somewhat. The question of whether that increases hurricanes is completely unknown. Nobody knows. There have not been any more hurricanes recently. The question is, does it make them more powerful? We don’t know.
Even the U.N., which has been pushing climate change like crazy, doesn’t know whether hurricanes get more powerful just in the same way that they don’t know whether [climate change] makes fires worse. It seems like there are fewer forest fires, but they burn worse because of poor forest management. That’s what it seems like. But there’s a lot of science that’s unsettled, this whole thing. However, is that unsettled on CNN? No, no, no my friends. On CNN, the science is done completely in the laboratories of their imagination and they’ve got it all figured out. This is what CNN is selling about Dorian.
BLITZER: We’re seeing firsthand the effects of climate change, as a powerful Atlantic hurricane is sitting right now off the coast of Florida. It could make landfall tomorrow in South Carolina ….
BLITZER: More extreme weather events, like Hurricane Dorian that’s churning toward the Carolinas right now.
BURNETT: Think bigger fires in the West, or deadlier heatwaves, supercharged storms like the one we’ve seen now, Hurricane Dorian, which is hovering off the coast of the Carolinas as I speak…
BURNETT TO HARRIS: When you look at the severe weather, certainly what we’re seeing with the hurricane now …
BURNETT: The top Democratic presidential candidates are all with us tonight on the heels of the deadly hurricane Dorian, which is leaving neighborhoods underwater in the Bahamas — utter devastation. It now heads north along the United States coast.
BURNETT: The storm comes as we are facing a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. You know, Hurricane Dorian is just one, right. One thing, right, one side of that dangerous world that scientists say we are entering if humans do not cut carbon pollution.
COOPER: Flooded coastal cities, island nations under water …
COOPER: We’re coming to you, of course, tonight just as Hurricane Dorian, the strongest storm anywhere on the planet this year, has decimated parts of the Bahamas and is threatening the East Coast.
COOPER: … [T]alking about super storms and mass extinction, worsening drought.
They have it all figured out on CNN. They actually don’t even need scientists, they just have little scientists in their brains who run around doing experiments in their imagination, getting the results that they want to get. You could even hear the way Anderson Cooper was talking when he said [Dorian is] the “strongest storm anywhere on the planet this year.”
So it’s a bad storm, [but] we’ve had bad storms before. If my anecdotal memory is any use at all, when I was a kid, storms were much worse. We had these hurricanes, I remember my backyard — I lived out on Long Island. I remember these storms that absolutely flooded our neighborhoods, flooded, and we were fairly far inland, but we would just get absolutely flooded. Guys in hip[-high] waters coming down the street to make sure everybody was alright, boats being overturned.
Then they stopped for a while. They seemed to get better, and now [we’re starting] to see some of these storms again. But of course, it’s the reporting. I mean you heard that. That is completely fact-free reporting. They do not have proof that Dorian has anything to do with climate change, and they haven’t prove[n] that climate change is a result of human activity.
The climate is changing; the climate always changes. Human activity does create heat, I’m sure it does have an effect on the climate. We just don’t know if it’s catastrophic. When they call you a denier … that is a way of comparing people who disagree with the Democratic panic on this, the CNN panic. This completely dishonest reporting on CNN, they’re comparing you to Holocaust deniers.
The Holocaust, the most completely documented atrocity in human history. OK, I mean the Nazis, say what you will about them: They kept good records. They kept good records, and we have their testimony, and we have the testimony of people who were there, and we have movies, we have all this [stuff]. If you’re denying the Holocaust, it’s because you are an anti-Semite. That’s why people deny the Holocaust, or you’re a nutty conspiracy theorist.
If you are denying that a computer model can predict the climate long into the future, you’re simply being sensible and sane. The climate is a vastly complex system that computers have not predicted very soundly in the past. So we simply don’t know what’s going on. The other thing is, even in the worst climate predictions, the cost is not that bad. You know the cost of climate change is not that bad, but it is if you’re listening to CNN.
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