Well this one caused a quick double-take this morning. NYT writer and Dot Earth blogger Andy Revkin complains in the paper today, just like Sens. Olympia Snowe (R., ME) and Jay Rockefeller (D., WV) before him, that people speaking out are getting in the way of efforts to impose a particular agenda on you:
Mr. Obama’s political foes have already seized on the cooling of public concern. Marc Morano, the communications director for the Republican minority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has been sending out e-mail alerts, sometimes several a day, highlighting stories on winter weather and other surveys suggesting a shift in public attitudes.
Yeah. How dare he. English-to-English translation: hey, we’re working that corner! Such distaste is awfully rich for anyone from Team Alarmist given how that’s “what they do.”
I suppose it’s easy to forget how the alarmists speculatively attribute every, single, solitary thing that occurs to man-made global warming–from the USAirways forced splashdown to the Minneapolis bridge collapse to every solitary event in nature, including flora and fauna specie migration (or expansion or decline), to too much snow to not enough snow to hot to cold to rain to drought to storms and so on. And as we just saw, both a cooling Antarctic as well as (when they manufacture the data) a warming Antarctic–wherever the truth may lie–both, like everything else, are your fault.
Recall their mantra:
“Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with.” Steven Guilbeault, Greenpeace, 2005
I missed Andy singling this daily ritual out for attempted ridicule, lost I suppose in the din of reporting such silliness as news.
But there’s one stark difference. What Morano has pointed out plainly confounds the global warming alarmist case–notwithstanding all of the new weasel-words about “consistent with” to explain such inconveniences away–and much this cavalcade of “the human did it!” that the greens spout and Andy writes about is, for the most part, simply the tired formula of speculating that phenomenon A is occurring, climate’s changing, ergo (man-made) climate change caused it.
Which is less defensible?