TOP SCIENTISTS WARN: SEA GODS ANGRY. Democrats Take A Page From Primitive Tribal Shaman, Blaming Their Enemies For The Weather.
One of the articles that Hillary Clinton cites in her tweet was published in Forbes. The piece reported:
“July 4th was Earth’s Hottest Day in Over 100,000 Years…”
That’s quite a claim, since we’ve only been able to track temperatures for the past 140 years. According to NASA:
“There are too few data before 1880 for scientists to estimate average temperatures for the entire planet.”
Even for the past 140 years, it seems highly dubious to assume that the records are accurate enough to confidently declare that we experienced the hottest day in a century and a half this month. Does anyone think we actually have a precisely accurate idea of what the temperature was everywhere on the planet on, say, August 11th, 1893? How much less do we know what the global temperature was on August 11th, 1893 BC? So suffice it to say, the Forbes piece isn’t particularly strong evidence to support the idea that Trump voters are somehow making it hot during the summer.
Let’s take stock of what’s happening here. This is the kind of thing we often laugh about and then move on from, but we should really spend some time thinking about it. One of the most prominent Democrats in the country, a former Secretary of State and presidential candidate, just sincerely blamed her political opponents for making it hot outside. And she did it on the basis of no evidence whatsoever — in fact, she lied about what little evidence she did present.
On some level we’re used to the climate change hysteria, and constant claims that the world is ending. But what makes this so especially insane is that she’s claiming that not only does human activity change the weather, but that a relatively small group of humans can bring about substantial changes in the weather in the span of just a few years. This isn’t just “human activity has caused global temperatures to rise by 2 degrees in 150 years” or whatever. This is “we’re having a devastating heatwave because of what my political opponents did last Tuesday.”
We’re in full-on primitive superstition territory here. Blaming your enemies for a heat wave is the kind of thing you expect to hear from a tribal chieftain in a loin cloth in the Amazon somewhere. Though I think even most of them are too advanced at this point to believe in that sort of thing.
I’m pretty sure that Ayn Rand didn’t write The Return of the Primitive as a how to guide.
Related: Glenn on Our caveman politics.
(Classical reference in headline.)