“What is disconcerting to me and so many of my colleagues is that these tools that we’ve spent years developing increasingly are unnecessary because we can see climate change, the impacts of climate change, now, playing out in real time, on our television screens, in the 24-hour news cycle....”

“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.

“Fundamentally, I’m a climate scientist and have spent much of my career with my head buried in climate-model output and observational climate data trying to tease out the signal of human-caused climate change.

It is a sure sign of warmist desperation in the wake of the abject failure of global warming climate models to accurately predict the future. Michael Mann, one of the leading touts of warmism, yesterday told the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee:

Please allow me to translate: The best tool we have to scare people into supporting carbon taxes and regulations that would empower the ruling elites to control every aspect of wealth generation is propaganda pretending that bad weather, like hurricanes and floods are caused by an increase in carbon dioxide, and essential atmospheric ingredient that promotes higher crop yields necessary to feed the earth’s burgeoning population. Most people do not realize that catastrophic weather events have been apart of human history forever, so we can fool them into believing that we can prevent them in the future by limiting the combustion of hydrocarbons.

Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times notes:

His comment drew hoots from climate skeptics, including the website Greenie Watch, which posted his comment under the headline, “‘Scientist’ Michael Mann says there is no need for statistics: You can just SEE global warming.” “Unsurprising. The statistics are pretty doleful for Warmism,” the site said in a Monday post. (snip) Skeptics have hotly challenged the link between rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and “extreme weather” events, noting, for example, that hurricane activity is on the decline. A nine-year “hurricane drought” of Category 3 storms starting in 2006 beat the previous mark of eight years from 1861-1868, the longest such streak since such recording began in 1851, according to a May 2015 study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

But the Democrats, the party of statist control over the economy, are a natural audience for arguments that suggest the use of panic propaganda, not data, to make the case for more government control.