Global Warming: It's Not the Heat, It's Our Stupidity

For the first time, the United States Supreme Court last week heard oral arguments about global warming. A case was brought by the State of Massachusetts against the EPA for failing to regulate, among other harmful emissions, carbon dioxide. The first thing the Court wanted to know was whether or not Massachusetts even had any business bringing a lawsuit against the EPA on the facts it was alleging, in particular, whether or not the possible future damage that Massachusetts alleged was merely speculative, or, as required to give the state standing to sue, “imminent.”

I read about the case in a commentary on FindLaw by legal writer and commentator Michael C. Dorf. Dorf believes that global warming is quite real, and he was quite impatient that the Justices were even wasting their time with the question of imminent damage. He was especially disappointed that the Justices were quizzing the lawyer for Massachusetts about whether or not further regulating American car manufacturing would make much difference if the rest if the planet could churn out all the CO2 it wants.

Legal commentators at Dorf’s level are only too at home with the the hair-splitting of constitutional law issues and slow work of appellate reasoning. Yes, it may have taken years for the high court jurisprudence to grind through desegregation, the separation of church and state, and reparations for the interned Japanese. But as Dorf sees it:

OH MY GOODNESS THIS IS GLOBAL WARMING!

It may not be happening that fast, but it is DEFINITELY happening--slowly, surely, inch by inch, inexorably, until one day we will wake up and it will be too late. Failure by the Court to skip the standing issue and to act promptly on the merits of the case is fiddling while Rome burns. Dorf wrote this about global warming's less-than-obvious, but still lethal, dangers:

“Many phenomena are non-linear; that is to say, each small change leads to no discernible difference until a tipping point is reached, after which dramatic change ensues. Warming itself provides a familiar example. A block of ice slowly heated from 29 degrees Fahrenheit, to 30 degrees, to 31 degrees appears largely unchanged, until it hits 32 degrees, at which point it begins to melt.

“To the extent that global warming works in a similar fashion, waiting for cataclysmic change to be imminent may mean waiting to take action until the action taken will likely accomplish far too little to avoid the harm.”

Upon reading this, a light went on in my head, (usually it’s quite dark up there), and I asked myself, How can people who see a threat taking decades to unfold as so pressing, while remaining so utterly indifferent to the documented, unrelenting, clear and present dangers of global Islamic jihad?

It occurs to me that, if a percentage of the intensity and focus of people who are convinced of the imminent danger of global warming could ever be brought to bear on the imminent danger of global jihad, the war against global Islamic terrorism would be won and behind us in five years. If we could but convince the same segment of the population clinging to the “consensus” theory on the greenhouse affect that jihadists are--if not evil, bloodthirsty, and determined to kill us--at least projecting an unacceptably large carbon footprint way beyond acceptable limits recognized by the Kyoto Treaty or the Green Party platform.

Especially bizarre to me is the disjunct between the standard acceptable to global warmists' for showing a danger's "imminence," as compared with that required by people attempting to rally a response to global terrorism.

You all may recall that, on the subject of “imminence,” the Bush administration was savagely attacked for not waiting until the danger of a Saddam armed with WMD had become “imminent,” while at the same time claiming that Bush had lied by claiming that it was. For example, there was this volcanic eruption by Al Gore on the subject, the aftereffects of which are still being measured by climate scientists.

Except Bush did not claim that the danger from Iraq was imminent, but only that the threat was growing, and the logic, (and it was about the last time logic played any role in America’s war policy), was based on recognition that waiting for “cataclysmic change to be imminent,” (i.e., waiting until Saddam was too well-armed to be easily subdued militarily), would be irresponsible and foolhardy.

I quote: "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent....If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.") Yet this is the identical logic of Dorf and the folks who worry about global warming.

Where's the difference? It looks to me that those on the left who tend to be most worried about the imminent danger of global warming, condemned the Iraq war's failure to meet an incontrovertible “imminent danger” standard. They argue that lack of a "smoking gun" have made all the actions taken to meet the potential threat in Iraq—again, to use the language of the liberal side that just won the Congress back—not only questionable, but certainly unnecessary, wasteful of the country’s resources, illegal, and probably were crimes against the Constitution, the UN, and all of humanity. In other words, those who opposed Bush and his aggressive response to worldwide jihad argued that, well, it wasn't imminent enough. Their standard for that category of threat is pretty high: come back when the airliners have changed course, when the dirty bombs have actually gone off, when the towers are actually burning.

As those of you who recall the November 7 election should now realize, the USA won’t be taking any pre-emptive steps in our own defense again. We may not even take them now if danger is imminent. Nancy Pelosi was wrong to keep telling us the election was a referendum on the war in Iraq. It wasn't. It was a referendum on the imminence of global jihad. And Americans voted in favor of the Teletubby version that things aren't really so bad.

And that's why these days, while the West still has time to stop Iran from getting a workable nuclear bomb, no one is willing seriously to discuss military intervention in order to forestall that imminent cataclysmic change: even though we all know that what might be difficult before Iran gets the bomb will be impossible after Iran has the bomb.

And remember how Kaddafi was so scared of George Bush in 2003 he voluntarily coughed up his WMD programs? Now he’s kicking himself between Seinfeld reruns and the Lou Dobbs Show wishing he had them back so he could join everyone else threatening to use them against a weakened Israel. And who's to stop them? Lebanon teeters inches above Syria’s iron glove. Pakistan is making a separate peace with the Taliban. The land-for-peace method of national self-destruction has worked so well for Israel, they're copying it in the cities of Paris, Marseilles, Copenhagen, and Florence, with just as much promise of success.

The global warming argument in the Supreme Court literally came down to whether inches of Massachusetts coastline might be threatened with washing away at some point no earlier than the next few decades. Look at a map of the world and ask yourself how many inches will be lost if we lose Iraq? And when? Democrats are talking about pulling out in months. Or if we lose Lebanon again, and it becomes an armed base for Iran, Syria, and Al Qaeda. We have already lost a province or two of Afghanistan. Israel, our only genuine ally in the region, has been weakened by letting herself be dragged out of her justified fight with Hezbollah. Large areas of European cities, in France, in Denmark, in Sweden, literally, have been de-nationalized and become “no-go zones” that belong now to the Umma.

(I think we lost San Francisco some time in the 1960s, but now the US military isn’t welcome there at all, while you can just bet that any Muslim “spiritual leader” with a few sharp words for America and the Jews can still expect a key to the city).

Whether you believe in global warming or not is neither here nor there as far as the danger of jihad is concerned. It isn't as if the two have to be mutually exclusive. The question is how we react to something that is at least as imminent as global warming, and, realistically speaking, much more so. Islamic militants won't like you better for saving the planet. They still think it all belongs to them, anyway.

If global warming is the biggest threat we all face, maybe there won’t be any polar bears left in 2030, because, as Al Gore pedantically explains, they’re all running out of ice floes to sail around on. But if the jihadists have their way, there won’t be any Europe in 2030, or anything we recognize as Europe, or possibly even any America. Now, while I myself have never actually seen a polar bear, I have seen Europe, and I’d like to go back someday without having to buy my wife a burka. For that matter, I’ve been to the top of the World Trade Center, but I can’t do that any more, and neither can anyone else. I would call that a more present measurable damage than the erosion of the ice caps.

And what difference is it going to make if the shore of the Kennedy compound extends ten fewer feet into Nantucket Sound in 2020, when the whole country is under Sharia law? And what if the global warmists are right and the mean temperature of Michigan rises by 10 degrees in our lifetimes? (Even true believers don’t say it will rise that fast). It gets up to 120 in Iraq all the time, and that’s not what’s killing our GIs--or the Iraqi police--or freedom-loving Iraqis who would choose democracy if anyone would let them do it.

It’s jihadists doing that killing, not the heat. Jihadists like the heat. In fact, they even support global warming, judging by the amount of excitement they show when their spiritual leaders preach about the coming death by incineration of their many, many enemies. If Iran gets the bomb, just the testing program alone will heat things up more than a million Ford Explorers. And if Tehran nukes Tel Aviv, isn’t the dust in the air likely to have a greenhouse effect, (or at least, cause a nuclear winter)? But, to borrow the emotive phrase of the left on issues they do care about, like global warming or Hurricane Katrina, “Nobody is doing anything!”

Remember why global warming is so urgent: “Many phenomena are non-linear; that is to say, each small change leads to no discernible difference until a tipping point is reached, after which dramatic change ensues.”

Global jihad is that block of ice melting, and it's more accurate now to say it has reached the slushy stage. We survived one cycle of this already. It began in earnest in 1983, and slowly progressed to the cataclysm of 9/11, when the world, we were told, changed forever. When America, for about 90 days, had a brief moment of wakefulness. But after that, hundreds of millions of us pressed the big American snooze button and just like that we were back to dreaming.

Now far too many Americans think the terror war is only a “so-called war,” nothing more than a talking point, a concoction. The whole goddamned country will rush to war against Mel Gibson or Michael Richards because they said something stupid while harming no one. But not a peep when our leaders seriously propose sitting down to tea with the fiends who turned Iran into a Muslim prison and Syria into a terror state, tormented our hostages, call for our nation’s death thousands of times a day, and are this minute pouring millions into Iraq to buy bombs to kill American sons and daughters.

Meanwhile the temperature of global jihad is still rising, and it's rising a lot faster than half a degree in 200 years. And yet how many people do you know who aren't convinced global warming is the "growing threat"?

So I propose somehow linking up the threat of global warming with the threat of global jihad. Perhaps a report can be released disclosing how many cubic feet of CO2 800,000 Lebanese Shiites give off per outraged chant of “Death to America!” Or how many polluting gasses are given off by just one Kassam rocket, whether or not it manages to kill an Israeli schoolkid? Or how much sulfur dioxide is given off by every IED, regardless of if it kills a US Marine? Or what an insult it was to the troposphere when the World Trade Center was burning, even if we have made peace with what that act of war as an insult to our national honor?

If it helps you sleep nights, just forget about global jihad as a national security issue. Think of it as an EPA violation.

Think of it as just plain bad for the planet.