Climate Desperadoes

I wonder if New York Times house editorials are written by actual human beings, or whether they long ago recognized cost savings by farming out the job to the same folks who came up with the Thomas Friedman Op/Ed Generator?  If anything, the Times’ house editorials are more predictably lazy, yet more boring.  Apparently the sole writing test to be a Times editorial writer or monkey grinder is mastery of the subjunctive mood.

Yes, yes, I know, does anyone actually read them, and even if there are a few stray souls who do, why would I venture among them?  I do it so you don’t have to.

This week it was worth taking in a few items from the Times editorial page and op-ed page as signs of increasing panic among the Climatistas (or perhaps we should start calling them “climate desperadoes”).  A few days ago the Times took anxious note of the deliberations of the European Union about whether to substantially abandon their unreal climate policy goals (which we remarked on here and here), and unburdened themselves with this conclusion:

The European Commission must not allow economic arguments from utility companies or individual governments to deter it from giving Europe the clearest possible blueprint for a renewable-energy future. The world cannot afford to have Europe abdicate its leading role on climate change now.

Whoa, that is some deep and fresh thinking there.  (Actually the pushback on climate policy goals is not coming so much from utility companies as it is from other sectors of European industry.)

Maybe they were just trying to outdo Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, who took the the pages of the Times a few days before to argue that climate change should be regarded as the equivalent of terrorism, in an article entitled “If You See Something, Say Something.”

The urgency for action was underscored this past week by a draft United Nations report warning that another 15 years of failure to cut heat-trapping emissions would make the problem virtually impossible to solve with known technologies and thus impose enormous costs on future generations. It confirmed that the sooner we act, the less it will cost.

How will history judge us if we watch the threat unfold before our eyes, but fail to communicate the urgency of acting to avert potential disaster? How would I explain to the future children of my 8-year-old daughter that their grandfather saw the threat, but didn’t speak up in time?

Aside from the usual “do it for the children” trope, Mr. Mann forgets that James Hansen and Al Gore were telling us back around 2004 that we only had “a decade left” to stop catastrophic climate change.  They seem to think that we’ll never notice that they’re always moving the goal posts.

But wait, there’s more!  Thomas Friedman can’t be left out of this circus!  Not the week before Davos, which always features one whole day devoted to climate change.  Friedman’s mid-week column warned that if we don’t solve climate change, we’re going to have more civil wars in the Middle East just like Syria.  Because climate change really is the heart of the problem over there.

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