I know what you’re thinking: what took so long for Jerry Brown to be awarded our coveted Green Weenie? He certainly deserves a Lifetime Weenie for his record as governor back in the 1970s, and again for pushing the recent mandate that California get one-third of its electricity from “renewable” sources by the year 2020.
But what pushes him over the finish line this week is the news that Brown has launched a state-sponsored and funded website to refute climate change skeptics:
Gov. Jerry Brown said today that “humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return” on climate change, and he launched a website criticizing conservatives who dispute its significance.
The website “Climate Change: Just the Facts,” is hosted by Brown’s Office of Planning and Research. It devotes one page to “the denialists” and another to rebutting “common denialist arguments.”
The Democratic governor, in Stateline, Nev., for the annual Tahoe Summit, has long been frustrated by conservative politicians who say the effect of global warming is overstated, or who argue government intervention to address climate change is a drag on the economy.
Isn’t Gov. Moonbeam a little late to this party? Does he really think yet another website is just sure to do the trick?
Official State Portrait for Gov. Brown (no, really, it is)
Meanwhile, when is a reporter ever going to get around to asking Brown whether he’ll do another official state portrait like his last one, and whether he’ll use the same artist as last time (Don Bachardy)?
But while we’re on this dreary and monotonous subject, don’t miss the letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal today from MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Princeton’s Will Happer, and Roger Cohen of the American Physical Society beating down on last week’s Green Weenie winner, Fred Krupp, for his pathetic op-ed in the Journal calling on conservatives and Republicans to join the climate campaign. Here are two highlights:
In an effort to move the science debate completely into the political arena, Mr. Krupp implies that with the exception of a few enlightened Republican governors and captains of industry, most “conservatives” are climate skeptics—and vice versa. But some of the most formidable opponents of climate hysteria include the politically liberal physics Nobel laureate, Ivar Giaever; famously independent physicist and author, Freeman Dyson; environmentalist futurist, and father of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock; left-center chemist, Fritz Vahrenholt, one of the fathers of the German environmental movement, and many others who would bristle at being lumped into the conservative camp. . .
It is increasingly clear that doubling CO2 is unlikely to increase global temperature more than about one degree Celsius, not the much larger values touted by the global warming establishment. In fact, CO2 levels are below the optimum levels for most plants, and there are persuasive arguments that the mild warming and increased agricultural yields from doubling CO2 will be an overall benefit for humanity. Let us debate and deal with serious, real problems facing our society, not elaborately orchestrated, phony ones, like the trumped-up need to drastically curtail CO2 emissions.
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