Barack Obama: Climate Denier

Further to my item here yesterday about how the term “climate denier” is extended to everyone who dissents even the slightest bit from narrow climatista orthodoxy, Barack Obama clearly didn’t get the memo, for yesterday in Italy he let fly with this:

“Ninety-nine percent* of scientists who study climate change carefully . . . will tell you that it is indisputable that the planet is getting warmer and the only real controversy is how much warmer will it get.”

Whoa there, Lightworker! You’re not supposed to say that last bit! There is no controversy, understand? Only “deniers” say there is any controversy about forecasting future warming.

The weakness of the forecasting models has been at the heart of climate skeptics’ critique for a long while, and you don’t need to read any renegade science to have large doubts about the probity of the climate models. You only need to read the chapter on the problems of the models in each of the successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) periodic reports. But I suspect that the number of journalists (and most climate activists, for that matter) who ever read the actual IPCC chapter on climate models asymptotically approaches zero. It suffices just to quote the “consensus science” document to get you branded as a denier, which is a great marker of scientific close-mindedness.

Obama compounded his heresy with a remark that “we can manage” a modest warming of about 2 degrees, which is what many climate skeptics like MIT’s Richard Lindzen think is the upper bound of potential warming for the rest of this century. Obama doesn’t know you’re not supposed to say that either. Doesn’t he know that the modest warming we’ve had since 1850 is a catastrophe already? I’ll look forward to seeing Joe Romm, Bill McKibben, and the other Maoist climate enforcers sit Obama down for a good strong re-education session.

* I thought the official number was “97 percent,” but perhaps Obama is just rounding up.

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