Global Warming Is Al Gore's Fault

Updated below.

In the Washington Post today Emily Yoffe has a column about global warming that redefines the term "insipid". It's not that she writes a bad column, it's just that her thought processes seem to run toward the inane when she is writing about something, well, serious. She just does not seem to be serious, yet I don't read this as a column written for wit or irony. The thrust of the column is that the weather has been so nice, why are people being alarmist.

I, however, refuse to see the apocalypse in every balmy day. And I think it's wrong to let our children believe they'll be swept away before they get a chance to fret about college admissions. An article in The Post this spring described children anxious, sleepless and tearful about the end; one 9-year-old said she worried about global warming "because I don't want to die."

You can't hide bad news from children either, but it's up to the parents to provide some explanation and to mitigate the fears that the children may have. I think Ms. Yoffe's column pretty much comes down to this:

Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: "NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer." But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

As long as it doesn't affect her wardrobe or her plans for the weekend, then everything is cool.

I think Ms. Yoffe should just take the attitude that most people will take and just say that global warming is bad, but there is really nothing she can do about it. I'm sure not going to write a column to show just how ignorant I am but at least I know the difference between the weather and the climate.

You can see how she lines up politically as this is just another article written with the intent of criticizing Al Gore.

In his new book, "The Assault on Reason," Gore denounces what he sees as today's politics of fear. Yet his own campaign of mass persuasion -- any such campaign -- is not amenable to contradiction and uncertainty. It's about fright and absolutes. But just because something can be plotted on an X and Y axis does not make it the whole truth.

Al Gore seems to be an easy target for the intellectually lazy, but Al Gore is not one of the hundreds of scientists that have compiled and are continuing to compile the data on climate change. Gore is an easy target for many who oppose his politics the same as George Bush is any easy target for everything going wrong in this country.

Of course going back to the insipid, I'm not sure what a Cartesian coordinate system has to do with anything she is discussing here. I can't plot any of her thought processes using an x and y equation. If you could visualize her thoughts it seems that it would look like a maze that ran from one ear to the other with no clear way of getting through.

Jim Martin

Update:

Kevin Drum has issued a challenge about Ms. Yoffe's column, but I missed it. Besides, I am more mocked than mocking.