I’m not sure where it comes from, but there seems to be an innate human need to blame natural disasters on human failings. This receives much deserved ridicule when religious fanatics blame earthquakes on a preponderance of cleavage. The non-religious crowd, however, needs a different type of moral turpitude on which to lay the blame. The obvious culprit of choice is your lifestyle of consumption which causes global warming…err climate change.  Both sides try to make political hay from human suffering and both cases are pretty despicable.

This time around, Newsweek wants you to know that the tragic destruction in Joplin, Missouri is the fault of the Bush administration and its corporate task masters.

“Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage.”

Yes, it was a bad year for tornadoes. The visuals coming out of the areas affected have been heart wrenching. The most that can be said is that it’s an above average year. That’s what happens. Some years have more extreme weather, some less. It’s called climate and it always changes. That’s how nature works.

“From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet.” (more…)

Just when you think that they can’t come up with anything else, the global warming hoaxers unveil something new in their attempt to scare the public into believing their global redistribution of income scheme.

The latest claim is those horrible, massive tornadoes which caused over two-hundred deaths in America this week were spurred by global warming (a claim that was quickly refuted by both FEMA and the NOAA Storm Prediction Center among others).

The other day, Peter H. Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute wrote in the AOL/Huffington Post about the connection between the tornadoes and climate change. When his words are examined carefully it is clear that his article was simply meant to frighten not to explain. He begins:

Violent tornadoes throughout the southeastern U.S. must be a front-page reminder that no matter how successful climate deniers are in confusing the public or delaying action on climate change in Congress or globally, the science is clear: Our climate is worsening.

On first glance he is saying that there is a connection between the warming hoax and the tragic weather; that’s what he intends for the reader to think. But look again at the carefully-scripted paragraph. He argues that the weather should remind you that the climate is getting worse. Well… that and the fact that people who don’t buy into the scheme are horrible people.

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If you were around in the sixties, you remember the scene: the family gathers around the TV, listening to Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra explain in delicious detail what was about to happen as a digital clock on the corner of the screen wound its way down to zero, ever so slowly. Then – finally – the roar of the mightiest engines every built. The cheers. The majestic sight of a Saturn V creeping up past the launch gantry as mission control solemnly declared: “Lift off. We have lift off at seven minutes past the hour.”

It was heady stuff, in a world of endless possibilities. We knew, without a doubt, that we could go anywhere, do anything and that we would continue to answer the burning human question that has driven mankind to new heights for millennia: what’s out there?

The President of the United States, according to this story in the Orlando Sentinel, doesn’t seem to share that sense of wonder or to understand the educational, societal and economic value that comes along with indulging natural human curiosity about the universe we live in. If he has his way, Obama will replace the sonorous call to “boldly go where no man has gone before” with a mere murmur, to blandly study what everyone has been studying for years. (more…)