Obama, not ‘Skeptics,’ Serve as President of the ‘Flat-Earth Society’

Published June 26, 2013

I’m loath to even write about President Obama’s banal speech yesterday on his climate change/energy agenda — to be executed via fiat, of course, and not through a Constitutional legislative process he finds so frustrating. A gaggle of Heartland Institute climate and energy policy experts provided a lot of excellent reactionhere.

Yet I find it remarkable how petty this president can be when he deigns to even mention those who disagree with his dogma. He’s been the most powerful man in the world for five years now, but has only gotten smaller in office. It appears we will have to endure several more years of sophomoric rhetoric from the most closed-minded and immature presidents of our lifetimes.

A man who is confident in his position — especially a man in the highest of positions wielding the ultimate public position to deliver his message — would not ordinarily weaken his argument by taking cheap shots at “the other side.” But our president is not “ordinary,” though he is an ordinary lefty ideologue, and that kind of person just can’t resist.

Obama said today of the debate over what is actually happening to the Earth’s climate (emphasis mine):

Nobody has a monopoly on what is a very hard problem, but I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real.  (Applause.)  We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.  (Applause.)  Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.  And ultimately, we will be judged as a people, and as a society, and as a country on where we go from here.

That is a throughly ignorant statement. No scientist in the “skeptic” community “denies” that climate change is “real.” The climate is always changing — as scores of scientists have noted at eight international conferences on climate change organized by The Heartland Institute. The pressing question — one that has enormous ramifications for our economy and our liberty — is whether human activity is chiefly (or even significantly) responsible for the changes we can observe. The New York Times and The Economist — hardly right-wing publications — recently could not avoid reporting this undeniable (if inconvenient) fact: Global temperatures have remained flat for some 15 years.

But Obama, as usual, finds it easier to construct a straw man and set it ablaze than examine that facts undermine his dogma. His derisive characterization on of those who follow data, and not discredited propaganda, as modern-day members of the “Flat Earth Society” is as ignorant as it is petty and cheap. In a healthy democracy, bolstered by a critical media, Obama would be in for mockery for that line. But, of course, his slap was greeted with typical obsequiousness, if not glee.

Again: Not a single climate model — upon which Obama and his ilk relied upon to push a re-ordering of our economy and society — correctly predicted the correlation between increased human CO2 emissions and increasing global temperatures for the last decade and a half. And a prominent “mainstream” climate scientist recently admitted:

If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models.

Note the qualifier “at the latest.” That means within Obama’s second term, there will likely be something “fundamentally wrong” with the climate models Obama says should be taken as “gospel” science — as if 15 years of bogus predictions of doom are not enough.

So who is really the president of the “Flat Earth Society” on this issue? It is not the so-called “skeptics” who rely on scientific data to inform their position. The Flat Earthers are people such as Obama, who ignore that solid evidence and simply declare their religious belief that human activity is catastrophically changing the Earth’s climate.

Scientists since the time of Pythagoras in the 6th Century B.C. knew the Earth was round. What’s Obama’s excuse?