Once again, inconvenient weather tosses a monkey wrench at enviro-hysteric claims of looming apocalypse, an alleged threat now entering its third decade.
Most recent example: Rachel Maddow's reporting on her MSNBC show Monday night --
Some big global warming news today. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named a special envoy today for climate change. His name is Todd Stern, he was the United States' chief negotiator for the Kyoto Protocol during the Clinton years. Now he will be America's point person at the next round of climate change talks in Copenhagen this December.
And if that's not big enough news on climate change, how about this -- it snowed in Dubai. Yeah, in the United Arab Emirates and it's not the fake, fluffy stuff they make for an indoor ski resort neither. These were big, chunky snowflakes falling on a mountain in the United Arab Emirates for only the second time in recorded history. The occurrence this weekend was so rare that local residents say they do not have a word for snow in their local dialect.
That falls into the rarely overlapping categories of, Wow! Neat!, and Wow! Worrying!
Note the eel-like fluidity with which Maddow glides from the problematic "global warming" to the palatable but redundant "climate change." This wasn't "fake, fluffy stuff" that fell on Dubai, she informs us. But describing it as an example of global warming qualifies as both.
As a lifelong resident of the weather wonderland known as New England, I'm inclined to view snow as evidence of something other than warming temperatures -- namely, freezing cold. And while I'm not a climate scientist, I'm fairly certain that bracing chill precedes snowflakes everywhere in the world.
Only the second time in "recorded history" this has happened in Dubai, you say? By my reckoning, that's a time frame stretching back several thousand years, tops. Compared to the time frame for humanity -- of several million years. And of the planet itself -- several billion years. But let's not delve back into the climate record any deeper than necessary, what with its potential for upending dogma.
Every time I see alleged journalism like this, I wonder if its practitioners are paying attention to genuine news on subjects they report on. Cutting edge on climate change is no longer Chicken Little claims of a sweltering future ever poised on the horizon -- it's the possibility we're entering an era of cooling temperatures. Scientific speculation prompted, perhaps in part, by frigid cold and "fluffy" snow in places where they are seldom seen.
