That is the gist of a story today at CNN by Sally Kohn titled:
The imminent threat to the U.S. that gets ignored.
Of course, it is a puff piece designed to dovetail with the NYC Climate March, they use the Statue of Liberty as an example of something imminently threatened by climate change.
h/t to CTM
She writes:
As thousands of people are expected to join the People’s Climate March this Sunday, September 21, in New York City — calling on world leaders and businesses to take serous and urgent steps to reduce global warming — the threat that climate change poses to the United States is both direct and undeniable.
The rise in mega-storms like Superstorm Sandy is already hurting coastal towns and our economy, while the rise in temperatures is causing droughts in the Great Plains and Southwest. Scientists have shown these effects will only increase.
Meanwhile, though American intelligence agencies continue to emphasize that they have not detected any imminent threat nor specific planning by ISIS to attack US soil, we are nonetheless marshaling our full political will and military muscle to “denigrate and destroy” this enemy.
Why aren’t we attacking climate change?
…
Unlike ISIS, where the possibility of a future threat was enough to justify action, we absolutely know that climate change will strike America — and that, unaddressed, the severity of that threat will only grow. It’s a crisis we absolutely can solve –but first we have to acknowledge there is a crisis and act accordingly.
Really? While Kohn wrings her hands over future landmark inundations,, this New York Times opinion piece Climate Realities admits that:
“climate change is essentially unobservable by the public”
In the case of using New York to freak out about sea level rise and the Statue of Liberty, I’ve already shot down this lamest of lame arguments:
Even if we believe that sea level will accelerate to 2 or 3 times that rate (as some proponents would have us believe), we are still looking at thousands of years into the future. At a 3x rate, we are looking at 7846 years into the future.
Imminent threat? I think not.
Of course the whole freak out in NYC seems to be a common theme with alarmists, as I’ve said before:
Freaking out about NYC sea level rise is easy to do when you don’t pay attention to history
Based on the 2.77 millimeters per year (call it 3 mm) of current sea level rise as shown by that Battery Tide gauge, in the 344 years (1660-2004) the sea level would have risen by:
344 years x 3 millimeters/year = 1032 millimeters or 1.032 meters.
Clearly, New Yorkers have been able to stay well ahead of that 1 meter rise since the city was founded.
But, what about that “imminent threat’, which is greater?
For me, worrying about some ISIS fanatic lopping off heads is a far more clear and present issue than worrying about some fanatic telling me climate induced sea level rise is going to take away the Statue of Liberty in my lifetime.
Your priorities, Ms. Kohn, are skewed and irrational.
Just in case you are interested…. See the march on live streaming video here :-
“Watch as the People’s Climate March takes over #NYC with our live #webcam at #ColumbusCircle! Starting today at 11:30 am EDT, thousands of individuals will join together to fight against climate change and demand the reduction of global warming pollution. Be a part of the historic event at : ….”
http://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/columbuscircle
Goodness!!!!! What a…………….tiny…………..crowd.
They got flags!
Oh no. not our most sacred jingoistic icon (damn the French!).
Warmists in general and this woman in particular make Chicken Little look like a pragmatist.
“Your priorities, Ms. Kohn, are skewed and irrational.”
As are the priorities of most of the supporters of the CAGW by CO2 concept.
Thanks, A. You said it very well.
“Your priorities, Ms. Kohn, are skewed and irrational.”
In a couple of hundred years or so, we can ask the Dutch to come back to NY.
This is redundant once you’ve observed that Ms. Kohn works for CNN, which currently stands for “Can’t get Noticed Nohow”.
Several people call it Constant Negative News or Communist News Network.
“Climate Naysayer Nannies”
In the spirit of CNN …
BREAKING NEWS … BREAKING NEWS …
http://gridironrats.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The-sky-is-falling.jpg
“Why worry about ISIS when the danger of Climate Change is so much more clear and imminent?
The Statue of Liberty is still here the World Trade Center is not, that’s the difference.
+1 – BINGO best comment!
Brilliant. 🙂
Here is a nice photo and info of land subsidence from the USGS water school.
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/earthgwlandsubside.html
As far as CNN goes, may their ratings sink like that of CNBC, or this statue…
http://sciencefictionruminations.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/statue_planet.jpeg
Planet of the Apes! The Apes did it.
The Apes of the Planet.
That always drove me buggy. The one thing I always wanted to do was climb up that arm, but they would never let me because the arm was so delicate (esp. after the 1905 incident). So that dang arm is the one thing left standing?! Hmph!
This is exactly why I say that most advanced and prosperous societies fail by committing suicide. People get complacent and comfortable, and risk averse for things that actually matter. They focus and obsess over trivial and insignificant things and issues, and deliberately ignore actual, violent, and existential threats like ISIS and such. This continues until the existential threats get powerful enough to come along and eat you. It’s insane, but it appears to be very much a common thing with humans, and dooms us to periodic backslides. It’s also not even required that there is an existential threat, people will commit societal suicide by doing things like abandoning cheap energy and other industrial advancements and deliberately allowing the society to revert to energy poverty and starvation. Insanity.
I note that she picks up on the decline in support for climate change from Republicans between 2006 and 2009, and comments on Tea Party views of climate change being that there is no solid evidence that the earth is warming as if it is bad. Given that we are approaching 2 decades of no warming and currently 52 explanations from the ‘settled science’ team as to why that is, the correct position would be to have doubts about catastrophic warming. Her praising of the Democrats support for the cause shows that this is a case of political ideology(warmists) versus science(sceptics). Science will win in the end since unlike in other areas where dumb political decisions have been made contrary to science, this one is being played out in public with no control over the outcome. You can only fiddle the temperatures for so long before a frozen public will suggest that it really isn’t warming anymore.
CNN has this great story as well…
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/21/opinion/climate-change-march-avaaz/index.html?hpt=hp_c1
And time is short. The world is rushing towards a series of potentially catastrophic feedback loops and tipping points in the climate system, which could see the support system of life itself irrecoverably disrupted. From the release of gigantic amounts of arctic methane gas, to the rapid carbon acidification of our oceans, to apocalyptic flooding, the continued warming of our planet is the greatest challenge our species has faced.
….
But none of this is grounds for despair. The solution to the nightmare of runaway climate change is crystal clear, and beautiful. We need to shift our societies and economies off dirty energy and on to 100% clean, sustainable energy, within a generation. This goal is entirely achievable. Already, 22% of the world’s electricity comes from clean energy and the sector is growing fast — we just need to put our foot on the accelerator.
Now I’m worried. No accelerator on the Earth…
Maybe the 19th century predictions that NYC would eventually be buried in horse manure were correct after all.
Re: Imminent danger: The pair of threats of ISIS and Global Warming are cousins. Their grandmother is ignorance, their mother incompetence. The great-grandchild will be economic catastrophe, with DNA to perpetuate ignorance..
The US is about to be overwhelmed by servicing the debt accumulated over the last two presidencies. Reaction to the two threats is going to exacerbate the problem: more borrowing for a clumsy, wasteful response to ISIS, and a body blow to the US economy for the useless reduction of its carbon footprint.
Two things are on the horizon, a near-certain Republican black eye and a possible Democrat victory.
First, the next president almost certainly will be a Republican, perhaps himself another progressive. His mere presence, to say nothing of possibly favorable economic and monetary policies, is going to kick off a massive economic recovery while the Federal Reserve steps back from buying down interest rates with fresh money. Prices will soar because Dubya and Obama baked it into the cake. It’s called inflation, which is not just a rise in prices, but instead an expansion of the money supply that causes a general rise in prices. Enough expansion has already happened, and Obama has the pedal to the metal. Prices, though, have been held in check by a strangled economy in perpetual recession, causing a snail’s pace in the velocity of money and no place to invest but to buy one another’s stock. Rising prices and rising interest rates are going to overwhelm the economy in the next administration. They will force another round of wage and price controls, hammering on the speedometer of a runaway train, turning the brief recovery into another, deeper recession.
The next problem is a mere possibility, but so threatening that avoidance measures are needed now. The political threat of Obama’s ambivalent, nonwar/war strategy is that it might just accidentally bear fruit. His air strikes could slow the territorial advance of Obama’s offspring, ISIL, long enough for the Arabs slowly to leave the on-deck circle to protect their own interests. Air strikes will drive ISIL to ground in place, perhaps long enough for the armies of Iraq, the Kurds, Free Syrians, Saudi Arabia, and maybe even the Turks, aided with US close air support, arrive to purge the ISIS-held villages and cities.
The combination of events could result in decades more of the ignorant leading the ignorant, of unvetted, progressive leadership, while the US spirals ever closer to a banana republic.
Whatever the medication to mitigate this disaster, and whenever it is administered, it has to begin with a dose of competent, public teaching. Fat chance. The media to carry the message, and the person to deliver it, may be unborn.
It goes deeper. It’s leftist cowardice that has manifested itself as denial throughout history. If the climate would only take a hostage or post a ranting manifesto they would deny that also. Pathetic.
Why worry about Climate Change when the danger of “planned parenthood” is so much more clear and present? We are talking about human lives, right? Their universal frame is notoriously selective.
“Climate change is essentially unobservable by the public.”
Exactly. If you ask an alarmist what effect 150 years of unrestrained CO2 ‘pollution’ has had on them personally they will practically blow a gasket in exasperation because “the effect is everywhere!”, but if you ask them to actually point to something tangible in their own life that ‘all this warming’ has done; not newspaper articles, not theory, not somewhere 10000 miles away, not sometime in the future but now, today, personally and in a strongly negative and easily measurable way, they will struggle because climate change is essentially unobservable because the change is so small as to be nearly undetectable.
Energy cost more. Freedoms are fewer. Now. In 150 years……………?
You’re comment is so ridiculous that I’m not sure if trying to be funny or just trolling or what.
“Energy costs more?” Everything around you represents energy. Your car, your house, your computer, your phone, your tv, the street, the food you eat. Do we have more stuff today than people did 150 years ago or less? More obviously. Several orders of magnitude more. Without energy, most of us would spend almost all our time growing and harvesting food. So we might have some food (and a log cabin we built, and firewood that take tremendous energy to cut to keep us warm), but we would have almost nothing else. It’s not possible for energy to continuously grow and in cost and for everyone to have more of it. The two are fundamentally connected. More energy per person, more stuff per person. Therefore, taking everything into account, energy MUST be cheaper (simple math) in order to ever allow each one of us to have more and more of it (energy per capita).
“Freedoms are fewer?” Fewer than 150 years ago? Really? Never mind this is a complete non sequitur to anything to do with CO2, but blacks and women might disagree for starters. But let’s follow the CO2 trail for fun anyways. If the US was the bastion of environmental purity and didn’t use oil and produce CO2, then how free do you think people in US would be without a capable military (for example) or how free wold a nation be where 90% of the population is out farming in the fields and have no radios, no TV, no phones, no cars or trains, or computers, or modern medicine. Are you more free with all your ‘free time’ to sit in front of a computer and order goods from amazon with the click of a button, or are you more free if you have to work 16 hour days so that you and your family don’t starve to death?
Sea level rise by nearly 1/2 meter in 150 years?? Sorry, but I don’t buy that.
The coastal cliff-undercuts in southern Turkey are exactly on sea level (the Med has no tides).
The coastal cliff-undercuts in the Philippines were exactly on the mid-tide level.
Is someone trying to tell me that these cliffs are rising EXACTLY in step with sea level rise??
In addition, the Romo-Greek ports of Ephasus, Miletus and Phaestos, on the Anatolian coast, are either at sea level, or slightly above sea level. Again, is the land conveniently matching sea levels?
Ralph
What is mostly ignored is that land can go up and down as well as sea level.
I am still baffled at the premise of climate science that we live in a static world, a world where nothing changes except what they are looking at. Talk about a God-complex.
In the end the land and sea will do what it does, ruthlessly, without favor or judgement, at times beneficially for humanity, and other times disastrously.
So it seems Ms Kohn is an apologist for ISIS and their terrorism. “ISIS is not as bad as the weather of the future”
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Hmmmm….so a radical group that is gaining in strength and will behead you now if you don’t believe what they do (atheist are not exempt) is a lesser threat than a computer generated fantasy?
Sure. I’ll buy that.
(Is CNN owned by the TWC?)
…”will behead you now if you don’t believe what they do…”
I am guessing you do not believe in what they do, but are you personally fearful of getting beheaded? I do not believe in what they do and have no fear of getting be-headed along with probably 99.9% of America.
A nation or group can argue the purpose of their war is of higher morality but they can never argue their methods of war are of higher morality. Put another way, is getting limbs blown off as collateral damage by a drone better than being be-headed?
Alx,
#1) I gather you were lucky and not one of the 2900+ Americans killed in Manhattan on 9-11-2001 because they DIDN’T KNOW to be concerned. But, now is different. We have been forewarned. And for those who don’t learn, as it is said: history often repeats itself.
#2) Morality has a sense of cause and effect – – which perhaps has been lost on you. If you punch me, I am entitled to punch back. If you kill one of my fellow Citizens, I and others have a right to retaliate.
#3) If YOU ignore your fellow American’s slaughter by throat cutting – – it is still encumbent on others to see to it that the killers are punished and don’t cut more throats. And if it takes drones & bombs to help straighten out a society that effects such evil – – then innocents near them must be warned – – but then the retaliation for evil is again moral and must proceed.. BTW, clouds are really a very insignificant issue. A significant issue is a societal group that adhere’s to the belief that others must agree with their ideology or face beheading.
The real question is, why have a “war” at all? The “war on coal”? What justifies that? A computer model? A Hockey Stick? A Homer Simpson look-a-like? (That last was a joke, Sal.)
Am I personally fearful that an ISIS member or a priest or a Rabbi or a Baptist will behead me on in front of my house?
No.
But of that group, which do you think would be more more likely to do so?
I live in a country where I can tell you that Jesus Christ is lord and that God raised him from the dead and you can tell me that he was just a nice Jewish boy who went into his Father’s business or even that he never lived at all. Neither one of us could call on the Government to behead or otherwise silence the other.
Are you opposed to such freedom?
ISIS is.
They may not have crossed our borders yet, but they want to. The USA is “The Great Satan” after all.
CO2 crossing borders? Not a threat.
That’s why CNN ignored the march… money & mouths & all that…
This is how nations and empires fall – internal decadence and incompetence, massive failures of leadership, a petulant refusal to face real risks, instead squandering massive resources on unimportant matters.
Well, it has been an “imminent” problem for the past 20-odd thousand years. That was when you could walk into Japan from the continent. The four islands were all connected.
Those bloody cavemen! They caused global warming!
Ask not what you can do for your country, but what BS you can promote for your Party agenda.
When I saw this headline, I gawped at the total disconnection from reality.
As far as I can tell, Climate Change (TM) hasn’t killed anyone.
IS has killed hundreds.
Then I saw that the story was about the threat to America. Dead Iraqis and Syrians don’t count.
Yes, a couple of Israeli/Americans have probably been killed. (The “beheading” videos look like fakes, but that doesn’t mean the men are still alive.) But no, stock anti-American rhetoric notwithstanding, IS is not going to somehow sneak its entire force into Mexico, without the Mexicans noticing, and then come storming across the border.
IS may or may not have started as a CIA/Mossad operation (we will probably never be certain either way) but it did arise from the attempt to overthrow Assad. The US, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Qatar, etc., funded, armed, and trained Syrian rebel groups. (Many, if not most, of whom were not Syrians but foreigners.) IS made use of that assistance to move into Iraq. After Iraq was destroyed and then had a divisive, sectarian constitution imposed, it was ripe for such a group to make a big splash.
And, so as not to mitigate the insanity of the policy, more funding, arms, and training is to be poured into the “moderate” Syrian rebels (the so-called “Free Syrian Army”) even though (1) the “moderate” rebels have made a non-aggression pact with the IS, (2) the “moderate” rebels sell weapons to the IS, and (3) many “moderate” rebels have joined the IS.
Supporting the Goverment which actually is fighting against the IS (i.e. the Assad regime) seems to be a big no-no.
But still, it all helps to keep everyone in a state of fear so they won’t protest at what the Governments are doing.
I’ve noticed that people who don’t believe a word of what the MSM says about Global Warming will often suck up all the lies and propaganda about foreign dangers, and those who have a well-informed scepticism towards the latter will often totally fall for the former, so peddling both types of scare story maximizes the effectiveness of the booga-booga.