Think Progress is unhappy with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s insufficient enthusiasm in pushing “climate change” propaganda on the farmers he regulates:
“‘Weather variation’ is USDA code for ‘climate change’ — Vilsack.” That was the headline in the E&E News story Monday on U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speaking to reporters at the annual convention of the American Farm Bureau Federation.
Apparently, the USDA “tiptoes around the term ‘climate change’ when it promotes programs to farmers.” Is the USDA motto now, “Speak no climate change, hear no climate change”?
It’s like when a coughing pack-a-day smoker sees a doctor who says she has “health variation” rather than “early-stage emphysema.” Or the dangerously obese man whose doctor tells him he has “weight variation” rather than a chronic, worsening condition. Except doctors don’t do that because they would rightly be charged with malpractice.
So why does Vilsack do it? Per E&E News, he said “farmers shy from politically charged conversations but are worried about drought, excessive flooding, shorter growing seasons and other weather woes linked to global warming.”
“To me, we’re dealing with semantics here,” Vilsack told reporters at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s annual convention in San Diego. “As long as the conversation can continue in some vein, if you want to talk about weather variation, I’m fine with that.”
But if the climate isn’t changing thanks to human activity then the droughts, “excessive flooding” and “other weather woes liked to global warming” are nothing more than random, passing events. In that case, why would a farmer need to prepare for more — and more intense — weather “variations”?
Anyone paying attention to the actual, you know, science, is aware there is no global warming. The fanatics who push this nonsense have been going absolutely nuts trying to explain why all of their vaunted “models” were wrong, sea ice is growing instead of receding, and global temperatures have been flat for 18 years and counting.
Last September, the Daily Caller collected 52 different excuses for the “global warming pause” that’s been in progress since before today’s high school graduates were born. The most popular item on this buffet of foolishness was “the oceans ate all the global warming.” Unless the Angry Sea Gods are preparing to regurgitate all the global warming they’ve consumed onto the plains of Iowa, American farmers wouldn’t have much to worry about if that excuse was valid, would they? More broadly speaking, if you sift through those 52 explanations for facts instead of conjecture and rigged computer projections, you come up with the general notion that “climate change” is a mostly natural phenomenon, influenced strongly by subtle factors such as the titanic ball of nuclear fire blazing in the center of our Solar System, and the Earth has self-regulating mechanisms for dealing with it. If politics and propaganda are set aside to take a rational look at the way those natural systems interact, it would be reasonable to advise farmers to plan for near-future variations: In other words, advise them to take account of the weather, the same way they’ve been taking account of it for centuries.
Extreme weather isn’t growing worse — it’s declining. Our faces are blasted with hot air about increasingly severe weather because (a) the Church of Global Warming trades in fear, (b) big weather events get big news coverage, creating a false impression of their frequency, and (c) those junk-science computer models predicted that severe weather would get worse, and they’re not about to let reality spoil their models.
As the science of climate change falls apart, accusations of doom and blasphemy from its cultists grow more shrill. I’ll see the metaphor about “deniers” being like smokers who refuse to accept a diagnosis of emphysema, and raise you a metaphor about global-warming fanatics as the equivalent of junkies desperate for their next Big Media fix, racing to blame every significant weather event on human apostasy against their theories.
Contrary to Vilsack’s breezy explanation for his rhetoric, there is far more than a semantic difference between politicized pseudo-science and dealing with the weather. No one can blame farmers for being a little nervous when the agency that regulates them begins regurgitating politicized-science propaganda designed to increase the power of government at the expense of commerce and property rights. They are interested in discussing the weather, so evidently the USDA is one of the few wings of the Obama Administration willing to tone down the climate-change rhetoric a bit.
Accusing the rest of this Administration for treating climate-change propaganda with insufficient enthusiasm is absurd. One of the reasons nobody from Obama’s cabinet attended the Charlie Hebdo unity rally in France was that Secretary of State John Kerry was in India at a business conference, where he droned on at length about “climate change” nonsense to the yawns of Indians well aware of their own crop production data.
President Obama himself never misses a chance to push climate change as a reason for ever-increasing government power. He’s one of the primary pushers of the false “97 percent of scientists agree on climate change” talking point, a lie whose political utility allows it to survive any number of debunkings. (For the latest thrashing, see Alex Epstein at Forbes, who describes just how thoroughly the actual work and opinions of climate scientists was distorted to cook up that 97 percent sound bite.)
Global warming is a political mythology, useful to those who would seize power and money by force. They’re in love with an ideological construct that makes resistance to State control quite literally equivalent to religious heresy. There are many powerful interests aligned with the State who can make money from this ideology — profiting from huge government contracts, sucking down “green” subsidies, or using government eco-muscle to kneecap their competitors. The Environmental Protection Agency is one of the premiere examples of “regulatory capture” by lobbyists – it’s hard to tell, at any given moment, where the agency ends and its lobbyists begin. It’s a heck of a racket, but there’s not much in it for farmers, so it’s no surprise that the rhetoric cools down a bit when they comprise the bulk of the audience.