Florida Senator Marco Rubio took the unprecedented step over the weekend of directly confronting a popular fraud when he said that all the President’s executive orders and all the Congress’s laws cannot control our planet’s temperature. There is no planetary thermostat that politicians can adjust through laws and regulations.
“Well, yeah, I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate,” Rubio said on ABC’s This Week.
This unremarkable assertion is the very soul of reasonableness, and should demonstrate no more than a firm grasp of the obvious. Humans have never been able to control our planet’s weather or climate, and we can’t now, even if the world’s nations cooperated in the attempt, which they won’t. Just because our current president is delusional enough to think he can control the level of the seas is no reason anyone should join him in this psychosis.
But in certain high-toned circles, imaginary global warming, and the hard left policies being whooped up to solve the imaginary problem, trumps all. Lefty politicians, enviro-hysterics, and the left-stream media are in a tizzy — shocked, shocked, by Rubio’s common-sense remarks, which, by the way, are nothing more than what he said when he was running for the Senate in 2010. Rubio went on: “Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to man-made activities. I don’t know of any era in world history where the climate has been stable. Climate is always evolving, and natural disasters have always existed.”
Exactly so. Planet Earth’s climate has been changing ever since there has been a Planet Earth. There have been cold and warm periods, including periods warmer than the Earth is now with no burning of fossil fuels to account for the toasty state of affairs. And during these warm periods the sea did not swallow up the land. The planet was not racked by fires, floods, and storms. The planet did not become a desert. (Yes, Virginia, some of the same people who claim global warming will cause the seas to swallow the land also say global warming will expand deserts.)
“I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That’s what I —and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it, except it will destroy our economy,” Rubio concluded.
Right again. There is no evidence that harm will follow from current climate trends, or that human activity is now or ever has been primarily responsible for the changes we’ve seen. In fact, climate changed before Man ever set foot on the planet. But while evidence of man-made climate horrors has to be believed to be seen, it’s clear enough that severe restrictions on the use of fossil fuels would destroy our economy. And for nothing, as the rest of the world has no intention of following us over this particular cliff.
The reaction to Rubio’s sound sense has been so hysterical as to be comic. Let’s just sample a few of the knee-slappers:
The New Republic huffed that for his statement, “Rubio has been roundly ridiculed by reality-based commentators.” Hmmm, what reality would that be?
A Washington Post editorial under the headline “Marco Rubio Makes a Wrong Turn on Climate Change” takes Rubio to task for his remarks without ever engaging what he said. They don’t say that they believe politicians can control the planet’s climate.
“To totally reject what the scientific community is saying is really embarrassing for our nation,” Socialist Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said. Bernie is a guy who should know from embarrassing, though he knows as much about climate science as I know about nuclear physics.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Chairwomanperson of the Democratic National Committee, issued this Tweet: “Cannot believe that a senator from #Florida can be so backwards about climate science. #wakeup.”
In comments on the issue last year, Wasserman Schultz suggested that any politician from Miami should get in step with the global warming hustle because South Florida has experienced “nine inches of sea-level rise since the 1920s.” Anyone paying attention will see that this does not help her case, or the global warming case generally, as this sea rise has happened steadily before, during, and after the slight temperature spike of the late 20th century. (There has been no increase in global temperatures during this century.) And at last check, Biscayne Bay is right where it has always been and is not threatening to swallow the beach-front condos of Dade County Democrats.
But this parade of silliness will continue. Climate change, and attendant horrors, is one of those subjects immune to evidence. At least the left sees no reason to pay honest attention to the evidence. Just last week the highest officer of the land asserted that global warming has caused abnormal flooding, droughts, and storms, when historical records clearly show there is no more of this horrendous weather than in periods when the Earth’s temperature was more seemly. (You could look it up.)
This is a subject that needs more reasonable statements from elected officials, like those made this weekend by Rubio. But anyone taking a reasoned approach on this one must be prepared to be ridiculed from the left.
