I wish I could say Ellen Goodman was an intelligent woman, and not a tool.
Her latest, in the Boston Globe, is among the most astonishing examples of moral equivalence I've ever seen: in this essay, Goodman equates denying Global Warming to denying the Holocaust.
Frankly, Goodman's metaphor makes more sense turned on its head than it does on its own merits:
- Across the country, anyone who disagrees with the Global Warming (GW) "Mission Statement" (that man alone is responsible for any and all climate issues) is hounded out of university and municipal positions, made subject to slander and libel, and their reputations destroyed.
- U.S. and European climatologists who say "the jury is still out on human-caused GW" are removed from their posts by politicians who knowledge of the issue is anything but scientific.
- In the National Socialist Party of the 1930's Germany, anyone who disagreed with tactics of the party leadership and the SS were removed from their positions, denied the right to practice their trade, exiled, and, in many cases, sent on to forced labor in death camps: the Nazis regularly shut down debate, ostracized those who would disagree with them, and in many cases killed them because they wouldn't abide by the party line.
I grew up in Skokie, Illinois, where many of my schoolmates didn't have great-grandparents, and in many case grandparents, Aunts and Uncles, because the Nazis had exterminated them. Goodman's sloppy, self-righteous attempt (see 2nd paragraph references to ownership of a Prius, saintly purchase of environmentally-friendly lightbulbs, and cliched use of the 'carbon footprint' canard) to save her pet issue by making such a grave equivocation offends me in the greatest possible way.
By The Way: Did you know that the world's worst polluters (China, India, Russia & former Soviet Socialist Rebuplics) are exempt from any and all restrictions on their own emissions, and "negative emissions" countries like Iceland are allowed to increase their emissions b/c their emissions don't yet equal that of other nations currently operating at an "emissions parity"?
Do you still think GW isn't about politics and economic redistribution 1st, and the environment 2nd?
Of course, Hurricane Katrina and its devastation of New Orleans (a Category 1 storm ((the weakest level of hurricane strength)) when it reached NOLA) is employed herein as a product of Global Warming, and not the failure of its improperly built and poorly maintained system of levees.
I hope Goodman catches hell for this not only making an insane, fallacious and offensive analogy. The fact that it is couched in such inane, self-aggrandizing papp should embarass the author, as well as other Lefties who are quick to use the same twisted logic in pleading their case.
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No change in political climate (Boston Globe, February 9, 2007)
On the day that the latest report on global warming was released, I went out and bought a light bulb. OK, an environmentally friendly, compact fluorescent light bulb.
No, I do not think that if everyone lit just one little compact fluorescent light bulb, what a bright world this would be. Even the Prius in our driveway doesn't do a whole lot to reduce my carbon footprint, which is roughly the size of the Yeti lurking in the (melting) Himalayas.
But it was either buying a light bulb or pulling the covers over my head. And it was too early in the day to reach for that kind of comforter.
By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.
I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.
But light bulbs aside -- I now have three and counting -- I don't expect that this report will set off some vast political uprising. The sorry fact is that the rising world thermometer hasn't translated into political climate change in America.
Ellen Goodman's e-mail address is goodman@globe.com.
