There are few Canadian journalists as resolutely stupid about climate change as CBC editorialist and Globe and Mail columnist Rex Murphy. Rising above science, soaring over the petty limitations of facts and logic, Rex regularly delivers us from the threat of global warming – if only in figurative flourish.
His most recent outing is a spectacular example. In it, he announces that because it has snowed in Vancouver, we no longer need to take seriously the scientific warnings about future climate change.
Interestingly, he avows early on in this column that he will not draw such a conclusion, allowing the wisdom in the old phrase that “one swallow does not make a spring.”
He says: “I am, most certainly, not going to make the error of our global warming hierophants who leap with troubling eagerness on any ‘extreme weather event’ and pilot it with ferocity to the conclusion that we are all doomed.”
Then he offers his evidence – a cold snap stretching from Victoria to Saskatoon – to suggest that we are clearly NOT doomed. Indeed, he assures us that we may use this wintry wobble to dismiss out of hand several recently reported studies of unchallenged scientific merit. Seeing snow in the trees in Stanley Park in 2009, we can rest assured that there will no be no droughts, no disruptions, no food shortages in 2080.
People who would take a contrary position are, Rex says, “rhetoricians of less scruple than I” – a condition (and herein lies the reference to Murphy’s superlative standing), that I hardly think possible.
