The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Mormon Missionaries Dress Like Armed Robbers–Now That Would Be News
“Armed Robbers Dress Like Mormon Missionaries”–headline, ABCNews.com, Aug. 22
Breaking News From Luke 15:11-24
“Cash-Strapped Entrepreneurs Seek Early Inheritances”–headline, The Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19
Is Green the New Black?
It’s not surprising that Al Gore put on weight after he lost that election. The guy has more whoppers than a Burger King. Yesterday we noted that in an interview with the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, Gore had misrepresented the content of his own movie by characterizing his outlandish “climate change” doomsaying as having been merely an accurate prediction of last year’s weather.
It was left to one of Klein’s colleagues, the delightfully named Jason Samenow, to clean up another bit of the mess Klein allowed Gore to make. Gore claimed that “extreme events” like hurricanes are “more extreme” than they used to be: “The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6.” Samenow called the National Weather Service, which told him, in Samenow’s words, that “Gore’s statement about this new breed of hurricanes is patently false.”
The idea of a “Category 6 hurricane” is not completely original to Gore; it has been the subject of idle chatter such as this August 2012 Discovery.com piece: “Will we ever need to push the hurricane scale up to a 6? Probably not, experts say.”
Reader Jeff Brazell notes that Gore’s statement that “extreme events are more extreme” is also false, at least as applied to hurricanes and other tropical cyclones:
Note that the newspaper columnists and scientists who have talked about introducing Category 6 storms (i.e., winds greater than 174 or 180 mph) reference storms that are mostly pre-global-warming-alarmism, most notably Typhoon Ida in 1958 and Typhoon Nancy in 1961, both with sustained winds of 215 mph, and Typhoon Tip in 1979 with sustained winds of 190 mph. The 2005 hurricane season is considered to be the worst ever, but, it didn’t have any storms of the ferocity seen in the Pacific in 1958, 1961, 1979.
Also, if you graph and calculate a linear trendline from the government’s “U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade” report, you see that the trend for major storms (Category 3, 4, and 5) since 1851 is very slightly negative, with the clear peaks, again, in pre-global-warming eras.
As frequent contributor Jeryl Bier notes on Twitter, there are a couple of other statements in the interview that sound implausible, to wit:
There has been a 100-fold increase in the number of extreme, high-temperature events around the world in the distribution curve. . . . The cumulative amount of energy trapped by manmade global warming pollution each day in the earth’s atmosphere is now equal to the energy that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima bombs going off every 24 hours.
The first one sounds like it may be the product of statistical cherry-picking and the second like an apples-and-oranges comparison, but we’ll leave it to others to check them out.
Meanwhile, another portion of the Gore interview is worth picking apart. Klein asks Gore to lay out an “optimistic scenario,” and Gore responds by outlining a political and rhetorical strategy:
Well, I think the most important part of it is winning the conversation. I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, hey man, we don’t go for that anymore. The same thing happened on apartheid. The same thing happened on the nuclear arms race with the freeze movement. The same thing happened in an earlier era with abolition. A few months ago, I saw an article about two gay men standing in line for pizza and some homophobe made an ugly comment about them holding hands and everyone else in line told them [sic] to shut up. We’re winning that conversation.
The conversation on global warming has been stalled because a shrinking group of denialists fly into a rage when it’s mentioned. It’s like a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage every time a subject is mentioned and so everybody avoids the elephant in the room to keep the peace. But the political climate is changing. . . . The deniers are being hit politically. They’re being subjected to ridicule, which stings. The polling is going back up in favor of doing something on this issue. The ability of the raging deniers to stop progress is waning every single day.
Let’s go through Gore’s list of topics about which he claims his side has “won” or “is winning” the “conversations”: racism, the nuclear arms race, slavery, apartheid and homosexuality.
The bit about nuclear arms seems out of place. It’s true that the arms race has essentially ended. But that isn’t because the “freeze movement” won, it’s because the Soviet Union collapsed before reaching the finish line. The “freeze movement” was a mid-1980s flash in the pan. Does anyone even remember the “Great Peace March”? Suffice it to say it wasn’t exactly the march on Washington.
When we toss that example, we’re left with the “conversations” about racism (of which slavery and apartheid are subcategories) and homosexuality. Suddenly Gore’s strategy is clear: He wants the global warming debate to follow the civil-rights model–or, perhaps more precisely, the identity-politics model of the post-civil-rights era.
You can understand the appeal of this approach. Identity politics has enormous cultural influence. If you belong to a group that acquires accredited victim status, influential people will tie themselves into knots to satisfy whatever demands you make. The reductio ad absurdum is the kerfuffle over what pronouns to use in reference to Bradley Manning, who following his sentencing on espionage charges declared that he is now a “woman” named “Chelsea.”
Smaller lefty organs like Slate and The New Republic are demanding that everybody immediately commence using feminine pronouns to refer to the former private. As we noted yesterday, the New York Times is struggling to come to terms with the news, although its public editor is on board with “Ms. Manning.” Most hilarious of all is a blog post by Andrew Rosenthal, the Times’s editorial page editor, about a letter Manning wrote to President Obama:
Private Manning told Mr. Obama that he (I’m using the male pronoun to follow our newsroom’s style even though he also announced today that he is a woman, and would like to be called Chelsea) entered the Army and went to Iraq believing that since the 9/11 attacks, “we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.”
To be sure, that wonderfully entertaining parenthetical is by far the best part of Rosenthal’s post. But can anyone imagine Abe Rosenthal twisting himself into knots to be solicitous, especially of a man convicted of espionage against America? A lot changed in one generation, thanks to identity politics.
It must be acknowledged that Manning is a troubled young man (we are, of course, using the word in the gender-neutral sense of “mankind”). The compassionate impulse that underlies all this bizarre solicitude is not wholly misplaced. Nor, we hasten to add, does it excuse his crimes–but our point here is simply that there is a well-meaning aspect to identity politics.
There is also, however, a vicious aspect, of which Salon’s Joan Walsh provides as pure an example as one could hope for.
Walsh tells the story of Antoinette Tuff, an accountant at the Ronald McNair Discovery Learning Center in Decatur, Ga. On Tuesday a man named Michael Hill showed up at the school with a rifle. Walsh explains what happened:
Hill, a mentally ill 20-year-old, seemed convinced the police would kill him because he shot at them, and he might have been right. But Tuff tells him she’ll protect him by telling them he hasn’t hurt her, and he didn’t actually hit anyone he shot at.
“He thought it was over for him because he’d already been shooting at police officers,” she told a local Atlanta television reporter. “I told him, no, that I would allow them to know that he hadn’t hurt anyone.”
As the 911 tape begins, we hear Hill shooting outside, as the dispatcher tells a terrified Tuff to try to get somewhere safe. But when Hill comes back into the school, Tuff begins telling police outside, and the 911 dispatcher, that the cops should “back off” and not enter the building. At first she calls Hill “sir,” until she switches to calling him “baby,” which is when the momentum shifts and she seems to have a chance to save him from himself. Tuff tells the dispatcher that Hill told her “he should have just gone to the hospital instead of doing this, because he’s not on his medication.”
Gradually we hear her convince Hill to let her help him surrender safely to police.
Walsh’s conclusion: “I can only pray that a white woman faced with a heavily armed, mentally ill young black man would have done the same thing.” (Tuff is black.)
The gratuitous racial reference–not surprising from the author of a book called “What’s the Matter With White People?”–is bad enough. But the headline is atrocious: “The Story Bigots Hate: Antoinette Tuff’s Courage.” The URL includes the string “the_story_the_right_hates,” making clear that Walsh seeks to stigmatize all conservatives as bigots. Astonishingly, there is not a single fact in the story to back up the headline. That is, Walsh provides no shred of evidence that “bigots” who “hate” the Antoinette Tuff story even exist.
Gore’s strategy for “winning the conversation” about global warming is to stigmatize and demonize the opposition, just as the left attempts to demonize and stigmatize those who express politically incorrect views about race, sex, sexual orientation and other elements of identity politics.
It won’t work. To the extent that identity politics make any claim on the moral imagination, it is because of the compassionate element of it–the appeal to the human dignity of victims of discrimination or bigotry. Such appeals, and the attendant claims of victimization, are often taken to absurd and unjust extremes or used, as in Walsh’s case, to justify one’s own bigotry. But global warmism cannot even claim to have at its core a concept of human dignity. It has nothing to offer but fear and hatred.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
