Deroy Murdock
I might be slightly less hostile to the Green New Deal, had I not walked home Sunday in a hail storm. Even before the BB-sized bits of ice came shooting down that morning, this winter has been brutal, from Gotham to the Golden Gate.
Our Lady of Perpetual Limelight, Saint Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, insists that America battle so-called “deadly, manmade global warming” as if it were Nazi Germany. Ten-year cost: $93 trillion. But this supposed threat somehow seems less menacing than Adolf Hitler and the Wehrmacht.
Any given winter does not equal “climate.” Still, if mounting concentrations of carbon dioxide are the broth in which we homo sapiens are poaching ourselves like so many salmon cutlets, then we should not be enduring the entirely contrary scenarios that have unfolded so vividly from coast to coast:
• A “bomb cyclone” is slamming the Rockies and Midwest this week with hurricane-speed winds and mounting snowfall. As 97-MPH gusts struck Colorado Springs, marooned passengers huddled in horror inside now-shuttered Denver International Airport.
• Several polar vortexes pumped Arctic air into the Midwest and parked it there, sometimes for days. This brought low air temperatures to 22 degrees below zero in Chicago and minus-28 Fahrenheit in Minneapolis on January 30.
• Snow hit Las Vegas on February 17 and 19, with some 5.5 inches of the white stuff fluffing the peaks of Sin City’s western suburbs. Some 100 flights were cancelled at McCarran Airport on only the second day in two decades that it received measurable snow.
• “For the first time in at least 132 years, the temperature didn’t hit 70 degrees in downtown Los Angeles in February,” the Wall Street Journal editorialized on March 4. “Snow powdered the hills of West Hollywood and Malibu,” the Journal added. Last month, downtown Los Angeles saw snow for the first time since January 1962. Santa Barbara Airport logged its all-time record low of 33 degrees.
• Up north, the Sierra Nevadas repeatedly have seen avalanches close mountain roads. Last year’s early-March snowpack was just 19 percent of normal levels. As of Tuesday, the Central Sierra snowpack had jumped to 164 percent of normal.
Temperature gauges aboard space-based satellites have recorded average global temperatures on Earth that peaked in 1997 and then slid or flat-lined from there. A quick, El Niñowarming spike broke this “pause” in 2015-2016, only to be followed by declining average readings thereafter. This virtual absence of observed warming led Greenpeace’s Steven Guilbeault to explain: “Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that’s what we’re dealing with.”
Such authentic frontier gibberish provides the intellectual foundation upon which America might see President Ocasio-Cortez install high-speed trains from San Francisco to Honolulu, after she bans jumbo jets in 2025.
But wait. Before Americans surrender our Boeing 787s, New York Strip steaks, national prosperity, and sacred honor, wouldn’t it be nice if some serious scientists figured out whether we will boil over or freeze to death?
As luck would have it, President Donald J. Trump will decide soon whether or not to proceed with the Presidential Commission on Climate Science. The PCCS’s goal is to take a sober, scientific look at all of the claims made by advocates of so-called “global warming.” In January, Saint Alexandria prophesied that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” Catchy slogan, but does science confirm her hypothesis? Why not find out?
Instead, the Green New Dealers are pushing President Trump to ditch the PCCS and embrace “the climate consensus” — complete with swelling subsidies, sweeping regulations, slower growth, and slumping prosperity for (nearly) all, and a stunning bonanza for the fortunate few in the solar and wind sectors.If this sounds like a raw deal, please call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 and say so. Ask President Trump to order the PCCS to get to the bottom of this frigid warming.
