I don’t know if Thomas “global weirding” Friedman specifically reminded us that weather is not climate, but he sure equates them today:
As we East Coasters know, it?s been extremely hot here this summer, with records broken. But, hey, you could be living in Russia, where ABC News recently reported that a ?heat wave, which has lasted for weeks, has Russia suffering its worst drought in 130 years. In some parts of the country, temperatures have reached 105 degrees.? Moscow?s high the other day was 93 degrees. The average temperature in July for the city is 76 degrees. The BBC reported that to keep cool ?at lakes and rivers around Moscow, groups of revelers can be seen knocking back vodka and then plunging into the water. The result is predictable ? 233 people have drowned in the last week alone.?
This follows another paragraph in ode to China’s oligarchs and precedes the following contradictory paragraphs.
A day before the climate bill went down, Lew Hay, the C.E.O. of NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light, one of the nation?s biggest utilities, e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy, utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments, including nuclear. ?If we invest an additional $3 billion a year or so on clean energy, that?s roughly 50,000 jobs over the next five years,? said Hay. (Say goodbye to that.)
Got that? Energy companies want the regulation. And yet
[C]ontrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: ?Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for … what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ?conspiracy theory?: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: ?Have they no grandchildren??
There you have it. Weather doesn’t equal climate, except when it’s hot and energy companies want federal regulations based on climate change assumptions but are funding the skeptical questioning of bad climate research.
I’m glad he could bring clarity to the issue.