Posted on June 19,
2019
Spot The Loony
Trump has a chin-wag with Prince
Charles
by
Daniel
Clark
During his recent visit to England, President Trump
met with Prince Charles to talk about “climate change.” Well, it’s not all that clear that Trump had
that in mind, but if you’re going to have a 
conversation
with the prince, it will inevitably be on that topic. Attempting to discuss anything else would be
like trying to dissuade Cliff Clavin from telling you
about his vacation to Florida.
Reports of the meeting got it half right, in that they
portrayed one of the two participants as a cartoonish, egomaniacal blowhard who
is intellectually incurious, and prone to spreading baseless, alarmist
propaganda. Where they got it wrong is
that they applied that description to the wrong man.
Henny Youngman used to joke that his doctor had given
him six months to live, but when Youngman said he couldn’t pay his bill, the
doctor gave him another six months.
Prince Charles has been practicing that kind of ecological medicine for
at least 20 years now. In 1999, he
warned that manmade global warming would cause whole nations to sink underwater
within a decade. When that time was up,
he revised his prediction to 100 months from that point. That deadline has expired also, and still the
prince calls “climate change” a “wolf at the door.”
How could Charles’ predictions be so wrong? For the same reason that all eco-alarmists’
predictions are wrong: they start from completely ludicrous premises. In the case of global warming, the main
premise is that carbon dioxide – as in, the stuff that breath is made of – as
in, the stuff on which all plant life subsists – is a pollutant. In addition to that are liberals’ assumptions
that they are somehow or another at one with nature, and that therefore they
know exactly what the earth’s temperature and its atmospheric CO2 levels ought
to be.
The hypothesis of manmade global warming (Let’s not
flatter it be calling it a theory) is essentially an obsessive compulsive
disorder on a global scale. Never mind
that everyone knows the mean temperature of the earth has never been constant,
but has gone through rising and falling cycles without any help or hindrance
from mankind. Never mind that
atmospheric CO2 levels are both minuscule and wildly variable, such that the
earth has had no problem compensating for its fluctuations over time. No, to those who presume to speak for
science, our ecosystem is so precariously balanced that even the slightest
deviation will make the whole world go kerplooey.
Not
content to warn of our geological demise, the self-appointed voices of science
find excuses to blame the fictitious phenomenon for every real and imagined
negative development in the world.
Charles even attributes the war in Syria to manmade global warming. He starts with the totally inaccurate
characterization of it as a “conflict over scarce resources,” combined with his
peculiar assumption that a drought in the desert must not have occurred
naturally. No, he believes the reason
for this Mad Max scenario is that the
lack of rainfall in the Arabian Desert is caused by an increase in CO2
emissions, meaning that the real villains in the Syrian conflict are – Wait for it? – our cars! That’s how loony Prince Charles is. Why, if looniness
were earwax, he wouldn’t even have enough storage space.
The goofiest thing Trump is known to have said during
their exchange is that “the United States right now has among the cleanest
climates there are.” Referring to an
American climate sounds silly, because “climate” by definition is a regional
set of characteristics. The Everglades,
the Ozarks and the Mojave Desert do not share a climate. If Trump is talking loony, though, Charles is
outdoing him many times over, whenever he refers to the “global climate,” or
simply “The Climate,” as if the entire world were geologically, topographically
and meteorologically homogeneous.
We know the vaunted “scientific consensus” is a sham,
among other reasons because its members make no effort to use scientifically
precise terminology. “Global warming,”
for example, is a wholly more accurate term for the phenomenon they believe in
than “climate change.” Trump is right to
question the activists’ rejection of the former term in favor of the latter. If manmade CO2 really is causing global
warming, and everyone but a few contrarian cranks agrees that it’s happening,
then what is the motivation behind its rebranding? If our news media had any journalistic
integrity, they’d be hounding the prince for an answer, instead of lazily
scolding the president for asking the question.
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