Rich Lowry writes in Politico about Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent foray into the climate debate.
Secretary of State John Kerry is reporting for duty in the war against climate change. In a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, he declared climate change “another weapon of mass destruction.” Indeed, in what might be news to the 50-megaton hydrogen bomb, he declared it “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”
If climate change does not consider itself duly warned, it has only itself to blame. John Kerry has proven himself fully capable of supporting hostilities against dangerous enemies of the United States (that he then regrets, and campaigns against—but that’s another story).
The Obama administration’s latest foray on climate change—clearly setting the predicate for a regulatory offensive on the issue—is notable for its cheap argumentation heedless of logic or the actual state of the evidence. The same people who congratulate themselves for taking climate science so seriously trample all over the science as a matter of routine.
On climate change, they can’t handle the truth, because it is too nuanced and complicated to support a scare-mongering push for expensive, economically harmful action right away.
Nothing so annoys the alarmists about climate change née global warming as when conservatives talk as if a cold snap or snowstorm falsifies the phenomenon. Weather, they explain, rolling their eyes, isn’t climate. You dummies.
Or that used to be the mantra. Now, every bit of spectacular weather is presumed to be part of the grand, threatening mosaic of climate change.
