ISIS has taken responsibility for the horrifying attacks in Paris that have left more than 150 dead and hundreds wounded. French President Francois Hollande is calling for the closure of his country’s borders. President Barack Obama didn’t condemn Islamic radicals for the attacks, but he did call them “an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians” and “an attack on all of humanity and the universal values we share.”
Friday’s deadly attacks thwarted Al Gore’s long-planned Paris webcast and star-studded concert to promote climate change awareness.
“Out of solidarity with the French people and the City of Paris, we have decided to suspend our broadcast of 24 Hours of Reality and Live Earth,” the group said in an online statement.
Coincidentally, in July 2008, Al Gore called climate change a more dangerous threat than terrorism. “I think that the climate crisis is, by far, the most serious threat we have ever faced,” Gore told ABC News.
Below are 23 times Obama or his administration officials claimed climate change a greater threat than radical Islamic terrorism.
In a January 15, 2008 presidential campaign speech on Iraq and Afghanistan, Barack Obama said the “immediate danger” of oil-backed terrorism “is eclipsed only by the long-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next fifty years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the last fifty: Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Most disastrously, that could mean destructive storms on our shores, and the disappearance of our coastline.”
On January 26, 2009, Obama delivered remarks at the White House on the “dangers” of climate change:
These urgent dangers to our national and economic security are compounded by the long-term threat of climate change, which, if left unchecked, could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines, and irreversible catastrophe.
In May 2010, the Obama White House released it’s national security strategy, which said, “At home and abroad, we are taking concerted action to confront the dangers posed by climate change and to strengthen our energy security.” The document declared climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security.”