Jerry Brown Likens Climate Change to Nuclear War

On Wednesday night, Governor Jerry Brown, in a hyperbolic rant, informed students and faculty at the Ecole Normale Superieure University in Paris that climate change could be compared to nuclear war.

According to The Sacramento Bee, Brown hyperventilated:

We have to be able to imagine the horrors that might unfold, and then be able to take steps to prevent it, delay it, minimize it. Through this Paris conference, my hope is that these conversations about a horror, which is the radical disruption of the climate, that can pass over into a confrontation, a focusing, a facing of this other great threat, the nuclear danger.

Citing his fears of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia, or a separate exchange between India and Pakistan, Brown warned, “Terrorism killing people is a horror. But terrorists getting nuclear material is even a greater horror. And there are literally hundreds of sites with nuclear materials of one kind or another sitting around, with various degrees of containment or security.”

Brown said that the efforts among various countries globally to cut greenhouse gas emissions could be turned to fighting terrorism and the threat of nuclear war.

Brown has likened climate change to nuclear war before; at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 70th anniversary Doomsday Clock Symposium in November in Chicago, he intoned, “I do want to talk about climate change, and I think there’s a connection there with the nuclear arms race: They both have catastrophic consequences; they both are such that they don’t capture the popular imagination right now.”

Last July at the Vatican, Brown issued an apocalyptic harangue about climate change, fulminating:

We don’t even know how far we’ve gone, or if we’ve gone over the edge. There are tipping points, feedback loops. This is not some linear set of problems that we can predict. We have to take measures against an uncertain future which may well be something no one ever wants. We are talking about extinction. We are talking about climate regimes that have not been seen for tens of millions of years.