“I thought it was best to write about my own raw terror,” says activist Naomi Klein, in a moving interview in today’s Guardian.
Is she talking about the time she flew to Raqqa in Syria to try to audition for the al-Khansa brigade only to discover that the other girls found her politics a bit extreme and that, anyway, like, black so totally didn’t suit her?
Or the time she saw – eek! – a really big spider in her bath?
Or the occasion when the airline said: “Sorry Ms Klein. Business is fully booked. I’m afraid we’re going to have put you in coach.”?
Nope. She’s talking about climate change – and how she has sought to make it exciting and relevant to her readership, with special reference to Hurricane Katrina ten years ago.
“A lot of the way we communicate climate change doesn’t acknowledge the emotional side of it,” she explains.
Which, actually, when you think about it, is about as 1000 per cent the opposite of true as anything even Pinocchio would be capable of saying with his fingers crossed behind his back on International Liar Liar Pants Are On Fire Day.
The way we communicate climate change doesn’t acknowledge the emotional side of it?
The way your lot communicates climate change, Naomi, does nothing else butacknowledge the emotional side of it. That’s because it’s the only remaining vaguely functional weapon you’ve got left in your armoury. The science abandoned you long ago. The business case for environmentalism has all the credibility of “an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is.” All you greenies have left is raw emotion: never mind the awkward facts, just feel the world’s pain and enlightenment will follow.
No doubt this is why Klein has felt compelled to invent a deadly new “cocktail” to liven up her moribund doomsday thesis. It’s a bit like Al Gore’s ManBearPig, only worthier because it has the all important issues of “race” and “inequality” chucked into the mix. The cocktail came into her head – where else? – in New Orleans. It was while she was covering the floods after Hurricane Katrina ten years ago:
It was this cocktail of heavy weather, racism, and crumbling infrastructure. It felt like I was looking into the future. People said it was like science fiction, with a rich country abandoning the residents of one of its cities, vigilantes roaming the streets, with anyone around after curfew fair game.For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we’ll have more storms, it’s how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.
Woah! Sounds terrible!
Except, of course, it is based on a fundamental lie. Hurricane Katrina was NOT caused by climate change.
This was acknowledged as far back as 2007 even by the fervently alarmist New Scientist.
The chaotic nature of weather makes it impossible to prove that any single event such asHurricane Katrina is due to global warming. It is also impossible to prove that global warming did not play a part, so debates about the causes of individual events are futile.
But that wasn’t going to stop shysters like Al Gore trying to make hay while the wind blew (in an address to the Sierra Club)
“Winston Churchill, when the storm was gathering on continental Europe, provided warnings of what was at stake. And he said this about the government then in power in England — which wasn’t sure that the threat was real — he said, ‘They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.” He continued, “The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”“Ladies and gentlemen, the warnings about global warming have been extremely clear for a long time. We are facing a global climate crisis. It is deepening. We are entering a period of consequences.”
And how did global climate respond to this growing threat? Why, only by embarking onthe longest hiatus in hurricane activity in the US in recorded history:
Among the longest records of active hurricane zones is on the US east coast. NOAA’sHurricane Research Division has data back to 1851. No major hurricane (category 3 or more) has hit the continental US since Wilma in October 2005. That is the longest pause on record. NOAA says “It is premature to conclude that human activities — and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming — have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity.
Hence Naomi Klein’s desperate – and risibly dishonest – attempts to hide the decline in hurricane activity by throwing “race” and “inequality” into the mix.
Yes, it may well be that “race” remains a toxic issue in the US.
And we can all agree with her on “equality”: truly it is unconscionable and wrong that millionaire climate racketeers like Al Gore and Tom Steyer are able to enrich themselves at the expense of ordinary taxpaying folk by manipulating green legislation to their financial advantage.
But “climate change” as a justification for “raw terror”? Not so much. Certainly not on the basis of any current scientific evidence…
Kristen McQueary
