It’s 5 degrees Fahrenheit in Littleton, CO, sunless and snowing. Colorado isn’t the only state in the grip of a deep freeze. NBC reports that residents of Duluth, MN got two feet of snow yesterday and are bracing for another foot today. The real treat will be the expected minus 22 degree temperature Friday. Parts of Nevada and Arizona are experiencing snow and freezing temperatures. Ice has covered Dallas, TX, and cold temperatures in California’s Central Valley have citrus growers looking nervously at the tender fruit still ripening on the branch.
The Farmer’s Almanac has predicted a “bitterly cold” winter so there may be no use in hoping for a little global warming. Unless you’re a global warming activist, that is; then there’s always hope even when the facts don’t go your way. For them, all weather phenomena can be blamed on man-made global warming from the super typhoon that devastated the Philippines to the cold snap that froze Europe a few years back. It doesn’t matter whether the polar ice cap grows or shrinks or there are fewer hurricanes and tornadoes in a season or more than usual; it’s global warming all the way.
When conflicting information leads one to arrive at the same conclusion over and over, it’s not deduction at work, but delusion. It’s like the mental patient who believed he was dead no matter what doctors did to prove otherwise. When a hopeful psychologist pricked the man’s finger to show how it bled, the man responded in wonder, “I’ll be darned, dead men do bleed!”
Global temperatures haven’t risen in 15 years but that didn’t stop Al Gore from likening climate change “deniers” to racists and drunks in a speech this summer. The new word for skeptics coined by Al Gore and other climate activists—global warming denier—has a nice inquisitional ring to it. What’s next, a reeducation camp?
About half of the nation’s meteorologists would have to enroll. A recent survey of American Meteorological Society (AMS) members found that only 52 percent of their members believe that global warming is happening and humans are mostly to blame. The survey also found that those with liberal political views were more likely to embrace global warming theories. Study author Neil Stenhouse recommends the AMS “acknowledge and explore the uncomfortable fact that political ideology influences the climate change views of meteorology professionals [and] refute the idea that those who do hold non-majority views just need to be ‘educated’ about climate change.”
The global warming movement may be less a scientific endeavor and more a political game plan for the redistribution of wealth, higher taxation and government regulation, severe limits on oil and gas production, and restrictions on personal freedoms. Perhaps the alarmism isn’t a delusion but a tactic. How else does one explain why the prophets of global warming among the Hollywood and DC elite decline to live the lifestyle they advocate for others? As Al Gore heats his 10,000 square foot house for one on this chilly afternoon, does he give a thought to the contradiction between his beliefs, his actions, and the weather outside?
Krista Kafer is director of Colorado’s Future Project and co-host of “Backbone Radio,” airing Sundays from 5 to 8 p.m. on 710 KNUS.
