Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Me and Mrs. Jones
I have three rules in life that I seldom break, as experience has taught me that no good can come from doing so. (1) I never take myself too seriously. (2) I don’t allow myself to be a burden to other people. (3) I never, ever, read Mother Jones. I fell off the wagon on number three today. In my defense, it has been a slow couple of days for news.
Entering their website is a bit like stumbling upon the unfiltered id of the liberal psyche. All stories warn of impending disasters of a global, or at least national, scale. Warnings of “Big Food” and their corrupting influence on the nation’s dietitians are given a prominent position near an endless string of climate change alarmism stories. These are buttressed by a never-ending series of articles that chronicle how Republicans are the cause of every one of these oncoming disasters.
This formula is rarely violated. The drum of crises fed by evil conservatives is beat day and night with astonishing fortitude. No amount of exaggeration or distortion is unjustified in the face of the palpable and callous villainy perpetrated by the right. Case in Point:
This Is What a Holy [EXPLETIVE] Moment for Global Warming Looks Like
According to two new studies, the collapse of much of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may now be irreversible. That could ultimately mean 10 feet of sea level rise.
Everyone pack your bags, it’s time to move to Colorado. Al Gore’s doomsday predictions have at last come to fruition. We shall all rue the day we ever voted for a Republican.
Two new scientific papers, in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters, report that major glaciers that are part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet appear to have become irrevocably destabilized. The whole process may still play out on the scale of centuries, but due to the particular dynamics of this ice sheet, the collapse of these major glaciers now “appears unstoppable,” according to NASA (whose researchers are behind one of the two studies).
“The simulations indicate that early-stage collapse has begun,” notes their paper. What’s more, the Thwaites Glacier is a “linchpin” for the rest of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; its rapid collapse would “probably spill over to adjacent catchments, undermining much of West Antarctica.” And considering that the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough water to raise sea levels by 10 to 13 feet, that’s a really big deal.
If you have followed the story of the West Antarctic Ice sheet at all, you’ve likely noticed the repeated use of the word “collapse.” The narrative has been that the sheet is apparently “collapsing” and would not have done so if not for human greenhouse gas emissions. A pox on the house of climate denier Rubio.
But do glaciers really collapse in hundred year time frames because of minuscule temperature increases? Andrew Revkin thinks not, and the New York Times somehow allowed his skeptical comments to appear on their website.
To the public, collapse is a term applied to a heart attack victim on a street corner or a building stricken by an earthquake or bomb. To a glaciologist, it describes the transition to unavoidable loss of an ice sheet — a process that can take centuries to get into gear, and millenniums to complete.
This doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as The Day After Tomorrow promised.
To translate a bit, that means sometime between 200 and 900 years from now the rate of ice loss from this glacier could reach a volume sufficient to raise sea levels about 4 inches (100 millimeters) a century.
If this is what a Holy [Expletive] moment for Global Warming looks like, then there are no Holy [Expletive] moments for Global Warming. But that’s no reason for Mama Jones to refrain from using the story to impugn journalists who fail to see the crisis as they do.
“The results? CNN didn’t cover the Antarctica story on air on Monday or Tuesday, while MSNBC covered it several times. Just two segments—on MSNBC and Fox—took the Antarctica news and produced it into a full story on its own terms, and that was the day after the news broke”
For events with millennium-long time scales, “breaking news” seems like a poor descriptor.
Mother Jones’ own David Corn weighed in on Rubio on Hardball with Chris Matthews, pointing out that climate change and sea level rise is a major threat to Rubio’s home state of Florida. “It’s a big deal, as you point out,” Matthews said. PoliticsNation’s Al Sharpton also told Rubio to “go back to science class” on climate change.
You hear that, Marco? The biggest threat to your home state is a doomsday prediction a thousand years in the future. When will the voters hold you accountable for ignoring their biggest concern?
We often laugh at the left’s timetables for destruction, and note how they are rarely held to account for predictions that have proven incorrect. They seem to have found an answer: Make sure everyone is long dead before your forecast can be verified.
I think I’ll give this a try myself. If innovation hasn’t brought us a cheaper and more ecologically superior power source than fossil fuels a hundred years from now, I’ll eat my hat.
Update: I have been given four Pinocchios by the Ricochet fact-checkers for my assertion that any aspect of The Day After Tomorrow was exciting. I apologize for the error.
Published in General
Algore’s sequal:
The Day After An Inconvenient Millinium
Not to mention that if there is some warming, it will cause more water to evaporate from the oceans causing them to recede. The evaporated water vapor will cause more rain in places that really need it. San Diego? N. Mexico? Arizona?
OK, so another thousand years and then we might start to get our feet wet. But if we start driving around in little electric cars we will be good for what? 1010 years?
Probably less. Statistically speaking, you’re much more likely to die in the clown car during a minor fender bender than you are to live a thousand years.
I don’t want to discuss the merits of Mother Jones’s global warming reporting, but over the past year I have read a couple Mother Jones articles after being pointed to it by a either a post on Ricochet or National Review. I was actually surprised by the quality of the reporting. A stopped clock is right twice a day, but it does seem that there are at least some contributors at Mother Jones that actually do try to do an honest job reporting.
Now I have to go take a long shower, to wash this stink of defending Mother Jones off my skin.
Mother Jones once produced a piece that suggested that no mass shooting had ever been stopped by a civilian concealed carrying a gun.
No one at the organization thought to themselves “huh, maybe we aren’t finding any, because we are only looking at incidents where lots of people died, because no one with a gun was there to stop them.”
Ann Coulter destroyed the piece in entertaining fashion, producing numerous incidents where mass shooters had been stopped, often before anyone was injured.
This about summarizes what I encounter every time a liberal friend links to Mother Jones.
It also occurs to me that I may have used the wrong title.
Is it safe to assume that Mother Jones is a single mother?
I’m sure she goes by Ms.
This shocks me. A nun would surely want creationism to be taught in school. Mother Jones the website would not approve.
Speaking of rules for living…
I once subscribed to Mother Jones. The experience was one of the first contributors to my political evolution from standard issue recent college graduate nitwit to conservative. The New Yorker was another. Really!
Frank, you need to turn up the vitriol a notch or two. You’re starting to become predictable, buddy.
It’s interesting that no one is connecting the active volcano near the section that’s melting to the melt. Here’s an article about it in the Daily Mail. There was also something about it on HotAir or the Daily Caller this week, with a map showing the proximity of the volcano to the glaciers in question, but I can’t find it.
Adbusters did that for me, but it took a couple of years before I really noticed just how often they published things that were verifiably, factually incorrect.
The clincher was when they claimed that if your “droppings” float in the toilet it means that you eat too much fat in your diet, because fat floats. [eyeroll]
By the way, I’m kinda surprised that nobody’s mentioned that the extent of Antarctic sea ice is currently the largest on record:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/12/global-cooling-antarctic-sea-ice-coverage-continues-to-break-records/
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
To be fair, the Daily Mail is almost as reliable as Mother Jones.
;-)
I am? What am I going to write about next? No seriously, let me know, it will make the process easier.
How about cartel price controls in the Quebec maple syrup industry?
Fine, make me work for it. National Geographic reported it too, a year ago, – and that it would impact the melt.
Fine, make me work for it. National Geographic reported it too, a year ago, – and that it would impact the melt. Not sure if it’s the same volcano, but it’s in the region.
She wasn’t a nun. She was a widow and union/political agitator. She constantly agitated for miners strikes and got herself locked up for conspiracy to commit murder. Socialist “community organizer”. Her namesake magazine does a good job of carrying on her unhinged Leftism.
In my more mischievous days I enjoyed being a troll on Kevin Drum’s comments section – my moniker was “Minion of Rove.” It was as fun as tying a string of ribbons to a dog’s tail.
Frank, you are being regularly promoted as an antidote to leftist ideology. Kudos for the promotion. It’s your tone that has become predictable. Your posts are always calm and measured, logical and methodic, a step by step reduction of leftist thinking (such as it is). But it’s the vitriol that moves people. Something we need more of on Ricochet in general. The outrageous should be met with outrage. So say I for what it’s worth, but then I don’t get regularly promoted. Just a suggestion, brother. Prefer your old avatar as well. Nothing substitutes for gravitas.
The Most Dangerous Woman in America
Frank: congratulations on getting Contributor status (I assume that is what the ‘C’ is for next to your avatar – it would be nice if the editors would write a congratulatory/promotional post when they make these additions), you are a good and thought provoking writer.
However, I want to take issue with your comment on the nun – why would she surely want creationism taught in schools? You may have meant this in jest but I hope you know that the Church doesn’t hold this position (creationism that is). She surely teaches creation, but leaves it to the faithful to determine how the world evolved, and She is certainly supportive of science in search for the truth.
Bash the Pope all you like for his economic proclamations, but you are better than this to intimate something as you did.
It was joke. Nothing more.
OK, thanks. Keep up the good writing.
To clarify, it was specifically a joke about how hostile Mother Jones is to Christianity. I was commenting that it was impossible for Mother Jones to have been named after a nun,