During the past week's heat wave--it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday--I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not?
This woman wrote speeches for the most powerful man in the world. She has a column in a newspaper of national import. She publishes books. She was on Celebrity Jeopardy!, fer chrissakes, and she doesn't have the brains required to read the Sports section. Hold the phone:
If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warning is real, what must--must--the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them?
It is my sincere hope that the Great Minds of Science are meeting somewhere, determined to find a way that the first extinctions due to massive greenhouse-gas-induced climate change involve stupid people. Oops, that goddam bell's ringing again:
You would think the world's greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can't. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized.
Ronald Reagan, the Idiot who keeps on giving. Peggy Noonan is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University. Were I a trustee of Fairleigh Dickinson University this information would be enough for me to campaign, not just to change the name of the institution, and, assuredly, its admission standards, but to physically move the thing at least two time zones.
Bless her heart.
ReplyDelete...which I understand is Southern talk for "screwy bitch."
ReplyDeleteIt is so embarrassing isn't it? Even the empty bottles of Duggan's Dew at her feet don't fully excuse it.
ReplyDelete...the policy issues we face, are too complicated. That you no sooner bone up on Iraq than you must bone up on stem cells and Putin and the history of marriage.
Too bad she didn't "bone up on" the consensus regarding global warming, with the politicization coming primarily from her own conservative neck of the woods.
It is that people with lower IQs somehow tend, in our age, to have a greater apprehension of the meaning of things and the reality of life, than do our high-IQ professionals
This from the woman who thought that gardeners were just retards with spades.
I had to email a comment at the WSJ - doubt it will get posted. The only way I can read Noonan is as a humor column - the writing is an embarrassment even for the WSJ.
ReplyDeleteGlobal warming deniers are little better than Holocaust deniers. The evidence is sharp and clear. The consensus opinion is not at all contoversial among the practicioners of the discipline. And the result of their baffling obsfucation is that millions will die.
ReplyDeleteShorter Noonan: It's not my fault I don't know that what I'm wishing could be done has been done dozens of times over the last decade. I've got a column to write, after all. I can't be expected to pay attention to the people who know the stuff I'm wishing someone knew.
ReplyDeleteMaybe next time the scientists can hold their conference in her living room.
True. But they might leave condensation rings on the endtables, and I uspect with Noonan that would be about as close to a net good as we can get.
ReplyDeleteJesus H. Christ on a pogostick - she went to Fairleigh Ridiculous? I had no idea, but it makes a lot of sense.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Our Dear Peggy could point her web browser over to DeSmogBlog.com, which is sort of like mediamatters.org for climate change, addressing criticism of climate change science head-on.
ReplyDeleteAs we used to ask at my old school, "What is reality?"
ReplyDelete