What word best describes NYT columnist Thomas Friedman: Fatuous? Yea, that works.
In the face of the collapse of credibility for the global warming crisis hysteria—not the same thing as whether we are in a warming trend or whether humans have some impact on climate—Friedman assumes that the answer to convincing a public he clearly thinks are stupid—is for his Davos crowd is to treat us like school children and change the soundbite. From his column:
In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes...
Avoid the term “global warming.” I prefer the term “global weirding,” because that is what actually happens as global temperatures rise and the climate changes. The weather gets weird. The hots are expected to get hotter, the wets wetter, the dries drier and the most violent storms more numerous. The fact that it has snowed like crazy in Washington — while it has rained at the Winter Olympics in Canada, while Australia is having a record 13-year drought — is right in line with what every major study on climate change predicts: The weather will get weird; some areas will get more precipitation than ever; others will become drier than ever.
Good grief. I thought record cold was just “weather.” Oh, and he also extols China again, for example, for building a high speed train, without mentioning that that tyranny can do what it wants without having to worry about lawsuits and regulatory interference.
The cluelessness of the crowd for which Friedman speaks is beyond belief. The idea that a good sound bite—and, by the way, “global weirding” isn’t one—can turn the tide is insulting. If they want to get us sixth grade thinkers to take their alarmism seriously, they are going to have to go back to square one, open the process, allow all the data to be viewed by all, and let every properly credentialed voice at the table—not just their favored ideological fellow travelers.
But that is precisely what they will not do for it would challenge their policy hegemony, misplaced sense of self superiority, and vaunted social status, which in the end, is what I think a lot of this is actually all about.
