Editorial: Obama’s Manufactured Climate Hysteria Won’t Work

Nothing has worked so far to persuade the public that everyone is doomed unless the government steps in to change the weather. President Obama is likely to find that manufactured climate hysteria won’t work.

The liberals have called climate-change skeptics many things, none of them nice. Anyone — including a scientist who may have spent his working life studying such things — who is brave enough to question the “settled science” and the demand for drastic government action to make the weather behave, is shouted down, insulted and dismissed as a know-nothing determined to destroy the earth for a few dollars more. Some true-believers of the “settled science” suggest that anyone skeptical of the demand for the higher taxes and expanded regulatory schemes deemed essential to saving the planet, is no better than a criminal, and should be thrown in jail.

President Obama now goes a step further. Skeptics of what was called “global warming” until the globe wouldn’t warm, are not just normal criminals, like bank robbers, rapists and serial killers, but borderline traitors. Through their obstinacy, they make it difficult to defeat the greatest national security threat of our lifetime. Speaking to graduates of the Coast Guard Academy on Wednesday, Mr. Obama made it clear that the gravest threats to the nation’s security are not from Moscow, Beijing or from the fanatics threatening to take control of Iraq and much of the Middle East, or even the loons in North Korea who boast that it has a nuclear bomb that it can drop on the United States.

These are minor threats that pale in comparison to the real threat, the hurricanes, floods and storms about to be unleashed on the nation and the world, and the men and women of the Coast Guard who will deal with refugees seeking high ground as the seas rise, coastal cities are inundated and the Syrian civil war grinds on. The rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria will take further toll. “This is not just a problem for countries on the coasts or certain regions of the world,” President Obama told the graduating cadets. “Climate change will affect every country on the planet.”

Challengers of his doomsday warnings are not just wrong, the president said, but “derelict in their duty” to assist in the defense of the United States. Those most guilty, naturally, are the Republicans who deny what is obvious to him and the liberal left. “Politicians who say they care about military readiness ought to care about this as well,” he said. “It’s time to put aside discredited scientific arguments and partisan politics.”

Mr. Obama spoke as the White House released a paper called the “National Security Implications of a Changing Climate,” arguing that “climate change will change the nature of U.S. military missions, demand more resources in the Arctic and other coastal regions vulnerable to rising sea levels and other impacts, and require a multilateral response to the growing humanitarian crises that climate change is predicted to bring.”

In his frantic search for something positive for us to remember him by, the president has lately turned to “climate change,” casting it in recent weeks as a matter of health, of environmental protection, of international obligation, even as a matter of his daughter’s health. She suffered an asthma attack as a child, and he thinks the changing weather had something to do with it.

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