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‘Climate hysteria wanes’: ‘The public has caught on and it’s burned out’

http://www.carolinacoastonline.com/news_times/article_8a16f0d0-919a-11e8-8250-0b18e94f761c.html

 July 27, 2018 11:45 am

Lyrics by Irvin Berlin, “We’re having a heat wave/A tropical heat wave …” are apropos today as much of the nation, particularly the Southwest, is sweltering under temperatures well above 100º in some areas.

Mr. Berlin composed the words in 1933 for his musical “As Thousands Cheer.”

The words were featured in many movies including “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1938 sung by Ethel Merman; a 1946 movie “Blue Skies” and “There’s no Business Like Show Business” in 1954 sung by Marilyn Monroe. Ella Fitzgerald also recorded it. It begins:

We are having a heat wave

A tropical heat wave

The temperature’s rising, it isn’t surprising

She certainly can can-can …

With the heat wave, why, asks Investor’s Business Daily, “hasn’t the California heat wave sparked the usual global warming hysteria?” It is that this is July and it’s supposed to be hot?

The short answer – pun intended – the public has caught on and it’s burned out.

Remember says IBD, and we do, it wasn’t so long ago when the liberal, leftist media – with its agenda – “took every opportunity no matter how weak the connection, to blame bad things on global warming.”

But not now. Why?

At the New Republic this week says IBD, Emily Atkin said that despite record-breaking heat and a wildfire season that she says is already worse than usual, “there’s no climate connection to be found in much news coverage, even in historically climate-conscious outlets like NPR and The New York Times.”

On uber-liberal MSNBC, Chris Hayes “responded to a complaint on Twitter that his network wasn’t clanging the global warming alarm bells loudly enough or regularly enough with this tweet: ‘Every single time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer. So the incentives are not great.’”

This sounds like the public is regaining common sense because decade after decade of the end-of-the-world predictions haven’t occurred, and we’ve turned off the sound.

All of which gives rise to public skepticism. There was a story this week about a study which purported to have found a link between suicides and global warming. Which is bunk.

In June, in The Wall Street Journal, Steven Hayward, a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California in Berkeley, said climate change has run its course — it’s over.

Explaining, he said climate change is simply “no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special interest renewable energy rent seekers.”

Citing a 1972 article “Up and Down with Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle’” long before the global warming campaign began, by political scientist Anthony Downs for Public Interest, Mr. Hayward said Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly that mapped the downward trajectory of many political movements.

Experts first call attention to a public “problem,” leading to discovery by the political class, the second stage, which alarms the public, followed by the third stage that solving the problem is exorbitantly expensive. Which morphs into the fourth stage, a gradual decline in public interest, and finally the fifth stage, “prolonged limbo – a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrence of interest.”

A perfect example why climate change was an issue is found in the “nonbinding” text of the Paris Climate Accords – from which President Donald Trump thankfully extricated the United States – that declares climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’”

At the American Geophysical Union meeting in December, climate activist Sarah Myhre, Ph.D., said climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades. “Imagine a world where women are in charge,” she said. “And then you’ll imagine a world without fossil fuels.”

“We don’t have to ‘Imagine,’ said Climate Depot. “The developing world in Africa, South America and Asia has over one billion people who essentially live in a world without fossil fuels, and they live in a world of energy poverty with high infant mortality, shorter life expectancy and no running water and many live in huts made of dung.”

Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change,” said Mr. Hayward “ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses.

“Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics die by politics,” he said.

Remembering that, don’t be surprised, says IBD, “if the media returns to its climate change obsession – if only to take a break from its Trump obsession.”

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