As Kamala and her woke-prog cronies start to tank in the polls, you can expect them to try to scare the [expletive] out of us, by the usual exploitation of the pervasive public ignorance of the various forms of earth science. Meanwhile, they are still pandering to economic ignorance — mostly blaming inflation on price-gouging by those awful greedy corporations instead of the obvious and irresponsible vast increase in the supply of paper money.
The “greedy corporation” rant was worked to death long ago by generations of foaming-at-the-mouth Marxists. For a major party candidate to burp up such a lame screed was even too much for the lapdog Washington Post.
The first lecture in the climatology class that I attended — which was taught by a visiting professor from the Valhalla of American climate studies: the University of Colorado, Boulder — defined weather as day-to-day and climate as a twenty-year average of recorded weather statistics. Weather is also particularly local, whereas climate is more or less regional while still not really all that global.
A rather woke-prog friend once asked me what it would take for me to realize that global warming is real. I told him that I would need to live to be at least 500 years old so I could objectively notice the trend. The problem with the left’s adoption of “climate change” in lieu of “global warming” is that climate is supposed to change. Ice ages and fluctuating sea levels have long been leaving their marks for all to notice. Another deception has to do with the idea of “normal” weather conditions, such as “tomorrow’s forecast calls for temperatures about five degrees above normal.” Rainfall is also notorious for year-to-year fluctuations.
Playing the climate/weather hysteria card is becoming more and more likely as the Harris-Walz economic agenda is falling flat on its face. There are, however, limits to the effectiveness of this tactic. First, the little boy has been crying “wolf!” for way too long to still have much impact. Second, the measures suggested to deal with such an imaginary problem are really, really expensive, not to mention grossly inconvenient. Only nut-bag zealots would ever be eager to lower their standard of living because of a popular fantasy.
Deception is rampant in this field of endeavor. Electric vehicles, from cars to trucks and buses, falsely claim in statements on their body panels that they are “Emission Free.” Since when is generating electricity emission-free? Greater minds than mine figured out that, due to their much greater weight, bridges and similar structures would have to be seriously upgraded should E.V.s become the majority of vehicles on the roads. This also implies that much more energy, of any form, is needed for an E.V. to travel the same distance as a gas-powered vehicle. This is basic Newtonian physics: force needed to overcome inertia.
Nonetheless, the lure of playing the climate hysteria card is particularly tempting to desperate office-seekers. Unlike the overwhelming historical evidence of the folly of price controls and other government interventions, climate trends are much harder to pin down, making it a lot easier to lie about them and whip up voter support.
This is not without precedent. Early in the twentieth century, William Mulholland and others got a bond issue passed by the voters of Los Angeles to finance the building of the Owens Valley aqueduct. To encourage public support for the measure, they warned of the likely repetition of a severe drought that happened in the 1890s. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a grad student in geography at U.C. Berkeley, Scott Stein, used tree ring analysis to prove that the drought never happened. Since droughts in California are fairly common, and most folks living in Los Angeles at that time had arrived there long after the drought was supposed to have occurred, the trick worked.
Desperation often induces (ahem) weird behavior. Since Kamala has just dropped the price control bomb, much of the negative stuff the Trump folks have been putting out about her now has an even greater ring of credibility. Scaring us about boiling oceans and tornados in the backyard is just about all they have left.
Image via Public Domain Pictures.