also repeated the claim that 2014 was the hottest year on record, although just the day before, that claim had been walked back by one of its key claimants—Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies—who admitted there was a margin of error in NASA’s data, making the likelihood of 2014 being the “warmest year” a far less onerous 38 percent. Moreover, records begin only in 1880, before which year there were many warm periods, some of great length, with temperatures radically in excess of the present day (and during a time there were many fewer carbon polluting humans on the planet, if any). And then there is the question of how temperatures were measured outside the modern era, when most measuring devices were in grassy fields, not on hot tarmacs as they were later.
But never mind. I am breaking my pledge and beginning to argue the science. What was important about Obama’s SOTU was that vehement standing ovation he received even from many Republicans. The warmth (excuse the expression) of this response was a manifestation of moral narcissism, not of science, just as were the pronouncements of the president himself. But wait, as they say in late-night television commercials, there’s more. And, as in those commercials, the devil is in the details of that hidden more, the unseen payments for postage and handling that often double the cost. In this case, as it is frequently, it is the use of moral narcissism as a motivator for distraction. Obama and also Kerry—not to mention the majority of progressives—seek to use climate change to keep the discussion away from other more important and, to them, uncomfortable subjects, most specifically the danger of radical Islam. Naming radical Islam or Islamism is against their—again, morally narcissistic—entrenched beliefs in political correctness and cultural relativism. (Although the cultural relativism is occasionally tempered for the public with a suddenly remembered obeisance to American Exceptionalism . . . of a carefully diminished sort.) So by invoking a general feeling that we all want to save the world above all things—that climate change is truly the greatest of all dangers—the true danger before our eyes, the danger actually killing people in the immediate sense, diminishes in comparison. Questions about Islam are not asked and don’t have to be answered. The war is not a war but just isolated crimes committed by random misunderstood extremists from impoverished backgrounds, themselves the unfortunate victims of Western imperialism. A thirteen-hundred-year-old ideology adhered to in various manners by an estimated 1.7 billion people has nothing to do with it.
Moral narcissism changes the subject. It elicits simple answers that the self-regarding want to hear and keeps them from asking, or even of thinking of, questions they should really be asking. That is its method, structurally and emotionally. And that self-regard is something to be manipulated and used by those who understand how to do it, and many do at this point, repeating the same pattern over and over. Enough about me. How do you feel about me? And by the way, if you’re unsure of your opinion of me, if you’re ambivalent in the slightest, I am absolutely certain the world is warming and it is our fault, humanity’s fault, like everything else is, and we better do something about it or we’re all going to die in a tidal wave brought on by the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, not to mention the Himalayan glaciers. And don’t give me any evidence to the contrary, because that means you’re a Republican or maybe a fascist. You agree? Good. Now I can friend you on Facebook.
Well, not quite. Not yet. The dang weather keeps getting in the way, giving the idiots in the public, even some on Facebook, pause. As I was working on this chapter in January of 2015, an almost comic example of this discontinuity occurred. New York City was predicted to have a record-breaking blizzard of the sort never seen in modern times. The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio—the kind of moral narcissist who never found a left-wing cause he didn’t believe in and saw fit to have his honeymoon on Cuba (more of him in the subsequent chapter)—urged citizens of his metropolis to batten down the hatches; the equivalent of the Battle of Britain was coming. Roads and the public transportation system were closed as never before in history. Everyone was urged to stay indoors for who knew how long, and to look in on their sick and aged neighbors who would undoubtedly be on death’s door. A panicked citizenry cleaned out grocery stores. Well, it turned out to be a routine snowstorm of the type that happens every year or two, sometimes more often. Gary Szatowski, meteorologist for the National Weather Service, tweeted out in embarrassment: “My deepest apologies to many key decision makers and so many of the general public.”10 He promised to examine their computer models. Never dealt with was why we are supposed to believe in climate change, which is also based on computer models, when the weather can’t be predicted a day in advance based on similar models. Oh, yes, climate is not weather. But then what is climate other than weather over time? No one has explained.
Elites have to fight hard to convince the benighted hoi polloi of the importance of global warming and, for now at least, it’s a losing battle. (Who do you believe—Al Gore or your lying eyes?) Although, as I noted, a scandalous amount of black money has been made, the massive wealth transfer desired by climate change adherents has not happened, and people are still driving around in their retrograde gas-guzzlers, most of which, these days, don’t pollute that much anyway. Progress continues in the way it normally does, largely initiated by the profit motive. The future is still in the hands of people like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs—the ones more likely to bring into being and inspire true advances, despite the best efforts of a swollen bureaucracy. One has the sense that many still adhere to the climate change narrative because to question it would open the door to questioning too many other things. It’s the tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon. Better not to go there or the whole morally narcissistic construct will start to unravel. The most rational approach to climate science I have read comes from Reason magazine’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey, a climate agnostic: “Whenever you encounter information that confirms what you already believe, be especially skeptical of it.” Excellent advice, but few heed it.11
The most narcissistic aspect of the climate debate, however, is the odd notion that we humans are more, or at the very least equal to, the sun, moon, and the stars, not to mention the various galaxies, in the effect on our weather. Call this extreme “homocentrism.” This viewpoint was made to seem particularly ridiculous in the freezing temperatures of the winter of 2015. At the same period, the center of our solar system, aka the sun, had reached a low point in activity measured in x-ray output, which was flatlining. The sun was also virtually devoid of spots to a degree not seen since 1906. According to Vencore Weather for February 17, 2015,
. . . it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a negative impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere—and where we all live. There have been two notable historical periods with decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The first period is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” named after the solar astronomer Edward Maunder, and it lasted from around 1645 to 1715. The second one is referred to as the “Dalton Minimum,” named for the English meteorologist John Dalton, and it lasted from about 1790 to 1830. Both of these historical periods coincided with below-normal global temperatures in an era now referred to by many as the “Little Ice Age.”12
Brrr . . . Are we headed for another ice age? Although New York City just experienced its coldest temperature in eighty-one years, I have no idea. But neither does most anybody, if they’re honest about it. Nevertheless, talk about the real climate denial, the homocentrist view of the cosmos inherent in the climate alarmist’s Weltanschauung, seems bizarrely primitive, like ancient man staring up in wonder at the sun in some Stanley Kubrick movie and then thumping his chest in superiority. Moral narcissism indeed—and in extremis.
When Rajendra Pachauri, the longtime chairman of the UN IPCC and symbolic Nobel Prizewinner with Al Gore, resigned at the beginning of 2015 in the wake of sexual harassment allegations (some say he should have resigned in 2009 in the wake of the “Climategate” scandal), he wrote in his farewell letter “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.” This confusion of religion and “dharma” with science is the essence of what is wrong and the reason we all have to suffer through that endless parade of English majors at cocktail parties
