Thomas Friedman, the left’s Most Useful Idiot, is bloviating again, this time attacking GOP presidential candidates who choose to differ with global warming zealots. Writing in The New York Times, Friedman opines that now that China and India have pronounced themselves willing to do the bidding of global warming fanatics and curb their carbon emissions, only the GOP “knuckleheads running to be our next president” ignore the catastrophic effects soon to envelop the planet.
Why, smirks Friedman, even Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state George Shultz, who owns an an electric car powered by solar panels on his home’s roof, of course, admitted Reagan “urged industry to proactively address ozone depletion.” Friedman sneers at Senator Marco Rubio’s statement, “We’re not going to destroy our economy the way the left-wing government that we are under now wants to do,” and Gov. Chris Christie’s rejoined to Shultz, “Listen, everybody makes a mistake every once in a while.”
Then Friedman tries to sell his fertilizer with facts culled from the global-warming handbook:
1. “Hurricane Sandy — likely amplified by warmer ocean waters — caused over $36 billion in damage to Christie’s own state, New Jersey, in 2012.”
Suuuure, According to the other bastion of American leftism, The Washington Post,
While the human imprint on hurricanes is almost certainly more than zero, it would also be a stretch to say it’s anything more than small. According to a consensus statement from leading hurricane and climate change researchers published in 2010, scientists have been unable to definitively detect a human contribution in hurricane activity. NOAA hurricane and climate change researcher Tom Knutson – who contributed to the statement – put it this way:
“Later will be too late. We elect a president who ignores this science at our peril.”
Thomas Friedman
Try again, Tom.
If you have time to read one book on this subject, I highly recommend the new “Big World, Small Planet,” by Johan Rockstrom, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center, and Mattias Klum, whose stunning photographs of ecosystem disruptions reinforce the urgency of the moment.
Friedman quotes Rockstrom referring to the last 10,000 years of stable climate conditions as “our Eden,” adding, “we are threatening to push earth out of this sweet spot,” warning “climate change, chemical pollution, air pollution, land and water degradation … and the massive loss of species and habitats.”
An emotional argument, not one buttressed by any salient facts. More charges follow:
We’re sitting on these planetary boundaries right now, argues Rockstrom, and if these systems flip from one stable state to another — if the Amazon tips into a savannah, if the Arctic loses its ice cover and instead of reflecting the sun’s rays starts absorbing them in water, if the glaciers all melt and cannot feed the rivers — nature will be fine, but we will not be.
If, if, if.
And yet more unsupported statements:
Forests show the first signs of absorbing less carbon. The oceans are rapidly acidifying as they absorb more CO2, harming fish and coral. Global average temperatures keep rising.
But data compiled by NASA’s Langley Research Center in 2013 showed that atmospheric greenhouse gases actually cool the planet, as reported by Principia Scientific International (PSI). And there has been no global warming for at least the last 18 years, as Dr. John Christy, director of the University of Alabama/Huntsville’s Earth System Science Center, pointed out in 2014. The Washington Post allowed that more snow covered the Northern Hemisphere in the fall of 2014 than any time in the previous 46 years. And even NASA admitted that sea ice surrounding Antarctica in 2014 reached a new record high.
Friedman quotes Rockstrom: “For the first time, we need to be clever and rise to a crisis before it happens,” then concludes loftily, “Later will be too late. We elect a president who ignores this science at our peril.”
As usual, with facts staring him in the face, Thomas Friedman prefers to pad his income by parroting the leftist party line.