Warmist Sen. Harris to Trump CIA nominee Pompeo: Repent, climate heretic
POSTED AT 4:01 PM ON JANUARY 12, 2017 BY ED MORRISSEY
Confirmation hearings often reveal more about the panelists than they do about the nominee, and that’s certainly the case in the exchange that took place between Mike Pompeo and newly installed Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA). Donald Trump nominated Pompeo for director of the CIA, a role for which his years as chair of the House Intelligence Committee have prepared him, including an understanding of the role intelligence services play. Harris seems to have a strange set of priorities for intelligence operations, and her obsession with climate change leaves Pompeo almost laughing in bemusement. (Allahpundit will have more on the rest of Pompeo’s hearing in the next post.)
Bear in mind that this followed Harris questioning Pompeo on LGBT policy, and you get a sense of the silliness on display:
HARRIS: CIA Director Brennan, who spent a 25-year career at the CIA as an analyst, senior manager, and station chief in the field, has said that when, quote, “CIA analysts look for deeper causes of rising instability in the world,” one of the causes those CIA analysts see as the — is the impact of climate change. Do you have any reason to doubt the assessment of these CIA analysts?
POMPEO: Senator Harris, I haven’t had a chance to read those materials with respect to climate change. I do know the agency’s role there. Its role is to collect foreign intelligence, to understand threats to the world. That would certainly include threats from poor governance, regional instability, threats from all sources, and deliver that information to policymakers. And to the extent that changes in climatic activity are part of that, we’ll deliver that information to you all and the president.
That was Pompeo’s attempt to acknowledge her concern at climate change while politely reminding her that it’s not the CIA’s primary focus, or even secondary focus. (If it has been in the past, perhaps that’s why we missed the real nature of the “Arab Spring,” the rise of ISIS, and Russia’s determination to team up with Iran to keep Bashar al-Assad in power.) Harris didn’t take the hint, however, which forced Pompeo to become a little more blunt:
…HARRIS: In the past you have questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. Nevertheless, according to NASA, multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals showed 97% or more of actively published
Tillerson: Climate change not ‘imminent national security threat’
Testifying before the Senate, Secretary of State nominee Rex Tillerson says that climate change is not an “imminent national security threat” as Senate democrats claim.
LA Times: Seeing the devastation of climate change in the ruins of Aleppo
Cheers! Trump’s national security adviser doesn’t think climate change is a national security threat
The newest member of Trump’s national security team is Fox News analyst K.T. McFarland, recently tapped to be deputy national security adviser. And like Trump’s earlier national security picks — National Security Advisor Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and CIA Director Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) — McFarland dismisses the idea that climate change constitutes a threat to national security.
In 2015, McFarland criticized President Obama’s decision to attend the U.N. climate conference in Paris just months after terror attacks rocked the city. Obama called his attendance “a powerful rebuke” to the attacks.
“President Obama thinks that climate change is the greatest strategic and geological and existential threat to our future,” McFarland said on Fox News following Obama’s remarks. “Here we are, and the irony. If it were not so tragic, it would be funny. Here we have ISIS, who are attacking with suicide vests and Kalashnikovs and potentially chemical weapons in the French water supply. What are we doing? We’re going to fight ISIS. We’re going to have windmills, we’re going to have solar panels. We’re going to show them.”
McFarland continued: “All it does is it gives encouragement to the terrorists who feel that they have been selected and chosen by Allah to establish the caliphate and kill everybody who disagrees with them. They now look at this and they are laughing.”…
The Atlantic mag: ‘Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene’ – ‘Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism’
More from The Atlantic’s associate editor Robinson Meyer:
Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees. I pictured, in other words, something not so far from Trump 2016.
I just assumed it wouldn’t pop up until 2040.
…
Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees.
…
Trump is showing us how ill-prepared the United States is for post-climate demagoguery, and he gives us an opportunity to improve our societal immune response.
…
Climate change could push Western politics toward demagoguery and authoritarianism in two ways, then. First, it could devastate agricultural yields and raise food prices; destroy coastal real estate and wash away family wealth; transform old commodities into luxury goods. Second, it could create a wave of migration—likely from conflict, but possibly from environmental ruination—that stresses international reception systems and risks fomenting regional resource disputes.
In effect, it could erode people’s sense of security, pushing them toward authoritarianism.
…
Global Warming Doesn’t Actually Cause Wars, Scientists Say
By Andrew Follett
New research by Scandinavian scientists claims the link between global warming and war is greatly exaggerated.
Claims that global warming causes war don’t hold up to scrutiny, according to the study. The scientific team, led by Dr. Nina von Uexkull, examined conflict data for Asia and Africa since 1989 and found that ethnic political exclusion, political tensions, proximity to pre-existing violence or other various country-specific risk factors are much better explanations for why wars occur than global warming.
Researchers paid particular attention to the Syrian civil war, which environmentalists typically blame on a drought they say was caused by global warming.
“Calling Syria a climate war, for instance, means ignoring longer-term historical tensions across the region, and lets the humans involved off the hook,” states a summary of the research. “Our well-meaning celebrities and politicians would perhaps be surprised to hear that Uexkull and colleagues found the impact of drought on conflict was generally ‘limited.’”
The new study concurs with previous research by scientists at the free market Cato Institute, which said that blaming the Syrian civil war on global warming was “absurd” and stated rainfall models that blame global warming for Syria’s drought are “fudged.”
The research was financially supported by the Peace Research Institute Oslo and Department of Peace and Conflict Research, which are supported by the Norwegian and Swedish governments respectively.
“[W]hat this study by Uexkull and colleagues confirms is that most communities are in fact quite climate resilient,” researchers concluded. “It generally takes a lot more than a dry spell to kick off a war. This should give us some hope that more intense weather events, such as severe droughts, do not automatically lead to more conflict or even civil war among those affected.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/18/global-warming-doesnt-actually-cause-wars-scientists-say/#ixzz4NSBRvC24…
America’s most influential enviro McKibben: Use America’s defense budget to fight climate war
Via The HARRY READ ME File: Described by the Boston Globe as “America’s most important environmentalist”, 350.org founder Bill McKibben says America’s defense budget must “be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face” — climate change.
BILL MCKIBBEN: “It should be possible to build large quantities of solar panels and turbine blades, and it should be possible to put lots of people at work on good jobs doing that, okay? And it should be a huge priority, and if you think we don’t have the money then you’re not paying attention. We have things like the defense budget that need to be put to work defending us against the most dangerous adversaries we face. The conceit of that New Republic piece was that we are in fact already at war though we do not really recognize it. But, by all the measures that we normally count as warfare, that’s what’s going on. We’re losing territory day by day. People are being killed day by day in great numbers. There will probably be added to that death toll tonight someplace along the coast of Florida. We’re at war, we’re just not fighting back, and the time has come to do that, and it will take as the history of WWII shows, government leadership to make that happen. It will take a concentrated national effort and a concentrated international effort to make that happen. It won’t happen on its own, it requires leadership.”
Bill McKibbin: The Hottest Fight in the Hottest Year
Oberlin College
Oberlin, Ohio
October 6, 2016…
Blameshifting: Obama tells DiCaprio climate change ‘contributed’ to the Syrian civil war
WASHINGTON DC — Discussing the threat of climate change with Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio, President Obama on October 3, said “powerful” studies suggest “the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: “There’s already some really interesting work — not definitive but powerful — showing that the droughts that happened in Syria contributed to the unrest and the Syrian civil war. Well, if you start magnifying that across a lot of states, a lot of nation states that already contain a lot of poor people who are just right at the margins of survival, this becomes a national security issue. And, that’s why even as we have members of Congress who scoff at climate change at the same time as they are saluting and wearing flag pins and extolling their patriotism they’re not paying attention to our Joints Chief of Staff and the Pentagon who are saying this is one of the most significant national security threats that we face over the next fifty years.”
SXSL: President Obama Participates in a Discussion with Leonardo DiCaprio and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (Also see: DiCaprio: Climate deniers ‘should not be allowed to hold public office’)
The White House
October 3, 2016
#
Climate Depot Debunks President Obama’s claim:
Flashback 2014: ‘Why Climate Change Had No Impact on the Syrian Uprising
OBama Shifts Blame From Assad To Global Warming As The Cause Of The Syrian Civil War: ‘National security experts have pushed back against these claims. Former U.S. Army Gen. Robert Scales told Congress in March the “administration’s new-found passion to connect climate change to war is an example of faulty theories that rely for relevance on politically-correct imaginings rather than established historical precedent.” “The point is that in today’s wars, politically-correct theories inserted into a battle plan might well extend war needlessly and get soldiers killed,” Scales said.
Obama’s claims are wrong on three levels: 1) There is no evidence that Climate Change causes drought, nor is there evidence that the number/scope of droughts are increasing.
2) At the time the Syrian civil war started in 2014 the Earth’s temperatures hadn’t warmed for 16 years
3) The Syrian civil war grew out …
Renewable Energy Poses Growing Security Risk, GWPF Warns
Renewable Energy Poses Growing Security Risk, GWPF Warns
http://www.thegwpf.com/renewable-energy-poses-growing-security-risks-gwpf-warns/
In light of the statewide blackout in South Australia, the GWPF is warning that intermittent wind and solar energy pose a serious and growing energy security risk and threaten to undermine the reliability of electricity generation. A paper published by the GWPF two years ago (UK Energy Security: Myth and Reality) shows that the ability of the electrical grid to absorb intermittent renewable energy becomes increasingly more hazardous with scale. In fact, wind and solar power, because of the intermittent nature of the electricity generated, are the real risk to security of supply. Full paper (PDF)
— gReader Pro…
Alarmists Freak Out That Global Warming Will Expose Top Secret Nuclear Facility, It Won’t
Global warming will expose a secret Cold War-era nuclear base in the coming decades — that’s according to The Guardian newspaper on a recent climate study.
The tone of the article is that Camp Century, a defunct U.S. military base in northwest Greenland, is on the verge of being exposed by global warming. The camp and the supposedly radioactive waste it conceals were part of an “underground cold war network that had been thought buried forever, until climate change made that highly unlikely,” according to The Guardian.
Camp Century is “likely to be uncovered by rising temperatures within decades,” The Guardian urgently reported. The study’s lead author added to The Guardian article’s sense of urgency.
“They thought it would never be exposed,” William Colgan, a glacier scientist at York University, told The Guardian.