Inhofe says:
"In case we have forgotten, because we keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record [Inhofe was probably referring to a January report from NOAA and NASA], I ask the chair, do you know what this is? It's a snowball. And it's just from outside here. So it's very, very cold out. Very unseasonable. So here, Mr. President, catch this. But now the script has flipped," Inhofe continues, "this is something that has been happening over a long period of time."During the broadcast, Inhofe also expressed his contempt for President Obama's National Security Strategy, which outlines White House foreign policy priorities, of which global warming was one of eight "top strategic risks" to the United States, along with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and catastrophic attacks on the country. The report states:
"Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water."The US government is blaming global warming for the widespread violence in the Middle East. In the study 'Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Syrian Drought', recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists linked global warming and the civil war in the Middle East. The study claims:
"There is evidence that the 2007−2010 drought contributed to the conflict in Syria. We conclude that human influences on the climate system are implicated in the current Syrian conflict."
The U.S. media immediately responded to Inhofe's February 26th anti-global warming speech by portraying him as a clown, a tactic it employs every time someone says or does something that is incompatible with 'official truths'.
On the March 2nd edition of 'The View', co-host Nicole Wallace slammed Inhofe for bringing a snowball into the Senate. She said that Inhofe's action on the Senate floor was "moronic." Fill-in host Padma Lakshmi said that "the only thing that snowball illustrated was his own lack of knowledge and stupidity."
Daily Kos reported:
"Clowning around in the Senate hit new heights of fun last week when James Inhofe (R-OK) playfully lobbed a snowball pretending to demolish 100 years of empirical data supporting human-induced climate change."New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait called Inhofe's argument "breathtakingly devoid of a factual or logical grasp of its subject matter."
Vox called it "the dumbest thing that happened on the Senate floor" that day.
The Washington Post editorial board wrote that Inhofe's action shows that his position as chair for the Environment and Public Works Committee is a "national embarrassment."
Scientific American cited Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse:
"You can believe NASA and you can believe what their satellites measure on the planet, or you can believe the Senator with the snowball. The United States Navy takes this very seriously, to the point where Admiral Locklear, who is the head of the Pacific Command, has said that climate change is the biggest threat that we face in the Pacific... you can either believe the United States Navy or you can believe the Senator with the snowball...every major American scientific society has put itself on record, many of them a decade ago, that climate change is deadly real. They measure it, they see it, they know why it happens. The predictions correlate with what we see as they increasingly come true. And the fundamental principles, that it is derived from carbon pollution, which comes from burning fossil fuels, are beyond legitimate dispute... so you can believe every single major American scientific society, or you can believe the Senator with the snowball."Inhofe may have been vague and simplistic when making his point, but he was doing it at the level that most people in the U.S. can understand. The U.S. media bombards the U.S. population with "moronic" memes on a daily basis ("we have to bomb his country because he's a bad man"), so they're not really in a position to judge the senator's methods. It HAS been extremely cold and snowy in much of the U.S. this winter, therefore we can at the very least see that the global warmists were dead wrong with their predictions about a warming planet pretty much bringing an end to winter weather.
However, to credit some of Inhofe's critics, it is unclear as to what point he was trying to make: that climate change isn't happening at all, or that it's not man-made? It was easy for the U.S. media to ridicule him precisely because this point wasn't clear. The people Inhofe is speaking to - the Republican base of Fox News viewers - are routinely being told that global warming is nonsense... in the context of ALL "changes in our environment" being nonsense.
This is Senator Inhofe, by the way, in Kiev in October 2014 for the one-year anniversary of the CIA's Operation EuroMaidan:
© U.S. Embassy Kyiv Ukraine
So I think it's important not to see this as the media 'persecuting an anti-global warming activist', but rather as two false opposites representing two sides in a debate that is irrelevant, and which ultimately serves as a distraction. Even if we just put aside Imhofe's other services on behalf of the Empire, and assume that his point was simply that man-made global warming is nonsense, it's clear to anyone reading SOTT.net's Earth Changes category that real changes ARE taking place in our environment.
One can only hope that some day ignorant people will wake up and find out what is going on around them, and who the enemy really is. It's the psychopaths-in-power who started (and are maintaining) the war in Syria; it's the psychopaths-in-power who are responsible for the lion's share of man-made environmental damage; and it's the psychopaths-in-power whose general destructiveness is bringing calamity down on humanity's head in the form of increased natural disasters.
I would like to conclude by quoting Lemuel K. Washburn:
"History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and nothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the double enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of tyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment."
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