Are you effing kidding me? This is what our president told new Coast Guard graduates?
This brings me to the challenge I want to focus on today -- one where our Coast Guardsmen are already on the front lines, and that, perhaps more than any other, will shape your entire careers -- and that's the urgent need to combat and adapt to climate change.
As Mark Steyn responds:
"Globally, we could see a rise in climate change refugees": What - from zero to three? At the beginning of this week, Ramadi fell, and so far, from just one Iraqi city, 100,000 refugees have been sent fleeing westward to Baghdad. The implosion of the Middle East has driven millions of refugees everywhere from Jordan (where they're destabilizing the least worst Arab nation) to the shores of Italy and Greece.
And Obama hasn't let this vast refugee tide cut short a single golf game. Why should he take a mythical herd of sparkly unicorns fleeing climate change any more seriously? "I guarantee you the Coast Guard will" never "have to respond" to the President's climate-change refugee crisis. Not this century.
Dealing with car bomb footprints is too easy--and so George W. Bush, really. It's time for the real challenge of carbon footprints!
Yet I can understand the president's desire to pivot away from immediate problems. Since he's so awful at coping with them.
Oh, and China shows no interest in playing well with others in the South China Sea region. So the president has a vital interest in pivoting to something--anything--that seems safer for Holy Legacy.
So why not pivot to "climate change" where rising temperatures, he says, will require our response well beyond even the president's 3-year plan to defeat that junior varsity ISIL threat that safely puts that more localized problem from Hell beyond His term of office?
After all, if the fall of Ramadi is a mere "setback" that doesn't need to interfere with finishing the perfect plan to--in the fullness of time--defeat ISIL--why not pivot to a problem that has been on a 17-year pause, or hiatus, or whatever the term of art is for something that has not been happening in that span of time?
Perhaps it's hiding in deep seas. Or it's just vewy, vewy quiet.
Of course, given that President Bush 41 ushered in the era of victory over Moscow in the Cold War and President Bush 43 left victory in Iraq and a planet that did not get warmer to President Obama, I guess we can look forward to global warming resuming--with a murderous vengeance--any day now, and racking up new victories over the planet.
So maybe the Coast Guard really should update their mass evacuation plans.
Or perhaps contemplate the huge anchor that they have to drag around for 20 more months.
Really, we can move on to the smart part of our diplomacy any time now.
*All Glory to Steyn for that title, which I still kick myself for not coining. So I'm stealing it (with attribution).
But I'll always have The Charge of the Heat Brigade and The Prattle Hymn of the Republic all to myself, right?
UPDATE: Mission accomplished!
Good news: the surface temperatures of the North Atlantic are going to suppress global warming for the next couple of decades…after enhancing them for the past 3+ decades. The bad news: there will likely be an accelerated rise in sea level from Cape Hatteras to Boston during that time.
Even if this counter-action of man-made CO2--and I've never denied that this contributes to the warming side of the ledger--just lasts a couple decades, it demonstrates that natural forces overpower man's inputs. What other factors overwhelm mankind's contributions and why do we think marginal but hugely expensive changes in our outputs will be decisive?
