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Saturday’s National Post featured Rex Murphy doing his usual global warming shtick in the context of UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun. That is, he suggests, Britain having weather a Canadian would laugh at disproves at a blow the entire corpus of climate change science in all its gazillion-paged glory. He’s been down this road before. Last winter, it snowed in — wait for it — Vancouver, which again in his mind established beyond doubt climate change scientists are conspiring to make us all drive hybrids and eat turnips. Or something.
Murphy is touted to be the fire-breathing dragon of climate-change denialists. His portentous and pretentious diction in both speech and writing allegedly indicates intelligence beyond mortal ken. It’s sad and more than a little weird this oracle cannot tell the difference between weather and climate.
Let’s step back a minute and admire the sheer cheek of arguing against the science of climate change without having elemental understanding of the basic terms, something that any well informed layperson (i.e. me) has. ‘Tis astonishing, isn’t it?
The rest of Murphy’s column is devoted to an ad hominem attack on the various parties gathered in Cancun, in which he accuses the delegates of deliberately choosing the boozy pleasures of Mayan Riviera because they know “the jig is up” about climate change. (The truth is likely a little more prosaic, that Mexico asked — or was chosen by the U.N. — to be host, and selected the Yucatan as being well away from the narco-terrorism of the north and more amenable to security arrangements.) So in summary, the column contains a misunderstanding of basic science, and some irrelevant personal attacks on the motives of the scientists, diplomats, and politicos attending.
Time was, you listened to Murphy even if you violently disagreed with him, because he usually had some insight or other worth paying attention to. Now you get cant, stupidity and right-wing talking points. This is what Murphy thinks is informed punditry and argument these days. I won’t bother linking to the wankers who think the column is “incisive” or some such twaddle.
Seriously. It’s pathetic.
So hilarious. I counter his asinine observation of British weather with an asinine observation of my own: It was balmy yesterday in Halifax! In December! There. Global warming is proven.
I don’t know when exactly he went crazy, but I found that I stopped tuning into cross-country checkup about 6 years ago. I’ll anecdotally guess that that marked Rex’s descent into babbling incoherent madness.
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Just a reminder folks, climate change is dead. The failure of Cancun will prove it.
Cheers!
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ck Reply:
December 6th, 2010 at 2:47 PM
klem, don’t know why you’re celebrating. Laziness prevails at the cost of the well being of our planet. What’s even more disgraceful is that you all lie about it. Why don’t you just come out and admit you love your gas guzzling big assed SUVs and trucks; the more exhaust, the better, that you hate green products, that recycling is just too much of a chore for you; and breathing in that summer smog of 40 degrees above is tasty to you?? But, for Gawd’s sake, stop the lies!! Even the original deniers have recanted.
So yeah, celebrate how greed, laziness and materialism win out over cleaner air, preservation of wildlife and the future of our natural habitat.
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Christine Reply:
December 6th, 2010 at 6:53 PM
yes, klem, keep repeating that mantra, I’m sure your children and grandchildren will be pleased to see how you put their interests over your own short-term ones. And as the sea-levels rise, and the oceans acidify, keep saying it over and over.
If Cancun fails, it won’t be climate change that has “failed” it is our leaders and their short-sightedness, and our democracy.
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“Time was, you listened to Rex Murphy…” Sadly he’s forfeited his once considerable intellectual prowess.
As for Klem’s ridiculous jibe, he cannot grasp that global warming is but one aspect of a matrix of potentially existential threats including the rapidly spreading freshwater crisis; deforestation; desertification; species migration and extinction; ocean acidification; air/soil/water contamination; resource depletion;fisheries collapse; floods and droughts; increasing severe weather events; overpopulation and a variety of global security threats from nuclear proliferation to terrorism. Many of these are tangible. They can be measured and mapped by satellites and monitored by surface instruments.
The fact of global warming is beyond debate except to those who have shuttered their minds, including Rex Murphy. However even if global warming is taken out of the matrix, the remaining challenges demand many of the same solutions. Unfortunately if we cannot find the consensus to implement meaningful action for global warming mitigation and adaptation, we stand less of a chance of finding answers to these other difficulties.
But we in the West needn’t worry about dying from global warming. That’s a point well made by Gwynne Dyer in his recent book, “Climate Wars.”
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