The status of “manmade global warming”—oops, “climate change”—oops, “sustainable development”

Don Surber in the Charleston Daily Mail has a well-written, funny column summarizing the state of the global warming issue. He starts off:

Even the people who thrust this man-caused global warming into the public’s face have given up beating that pony. That horse is deader than Secretariat. They even have retreated from climate change. The new threat to the world that requires more government is—sustainable development. That is an odd phrase that means no development.

The new slogan—“sustainable development”—will be the focus of the big climate conference this year, the Earth Summit in Rio, about which Surber quotes Reuters:

The “sustainable” branding for this year’s summit rather than climate, is by design, said Ambassador Andre Correa do Lago, who headed Brazil’s delegation to the U.N. climate talks in Durban and will be a chief negotiator for Brazil in Rio. Sustainable development is an easier sell globally than climate change, even though sustainable development is a way of tackling global warming and other environmental issues, he said.

So, catastrophic manmade global warming, which just four or five years ago was (like the Darwinian theory of evolution) a “settled scientific fact” which ALL scientists agreed on and which only intellectually defective, faith-based morons questioned, is now so, uh, non-settled that even the climate-warming community itself no longer uses the term. They decline even to use its watered-down successor, “climate change.” Which sure looks like a confirmation of the title of Surber’s column: “Global warmists thrown in the towel.”

Surber also quotes a hilarious passage from Britain’s left-wing Independent (it reads like deliberate self-parody, but evidently it is not) that tortuously blames the current killing winter in Europe—not itself a funny subject—on global warming:

The bitterly cold weather sweeping Britain and the rest of Europe has been linked by scientists with the ice-free seas of the Arctic, where global warming is exerting its greatest influence. A dramatic loss of sea ice covering the Barents and Kara Seas above northern Russia could explain why a chill Arctic wind has engulfed much of Europe and killed 221 people over the past week. The death toll from Arctic blast has been particularly severe in the Ukraine, where many of the dead have been people sleeping on the streets. Heating and food tents have been set up to ease their hardship. In Romania 24 people are known to have died and 17 in Poland. A growing number of experts believe complex wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above.

To which Surber replies:

A growing number? Name them. Otherwise, no one believes the explanations for cold weather any more.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 13, 2012 11:22 AM | Send