Don Quixote to the Rescue

          A question often asked by critics of Hillary Clinton is, “Can you name just one positive thing she accomplished in her four years as U.S. Secretary of State?”  The best her supporters can offer in reply is some fatuous claim such as, “She fostered goodwill.”  The sad fact is that, for all her globe-hopping, she has very little to be proud of.  And she surely doesn’t like to be reminded of her culpability in the Benghazi scandal.

          Now John Kerry, her successor, is determined not to leave a legacy of failure when his tenure is over.  He is out to build a monument to himself.  But John Kerry has a problem, a simple one: he’s an idiot.  Worse, he’s a pompous idiot who sees himself as the messianic champion of the world.  He’s the Don Quixote of diplomats tilting impotently at windmills in Israel, Palestine, Syria, and Iran. 

          Undeterred by his lack of success in lessening tensions or resolving conflicts in the Middle East, our Man from La Mancha has now ridden his skinny horse to Asia to fight other imaginary enemies: global warming and climate change.

          In a recent speech Kerry showed himself to be the master of apocalyptic hyperbole.  He said climate change is a threat to the world that ranks as high as terrorism.   To press his point he added that climate change is perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.  A lot worse, I suppose, than the threat of nuclear annihilation.

          The irony is that Kerry chose to deliver his speech in Indonesia, the country with the greatest number of active volcanoes in the world, and this after an eruption of Mt. Kelud disrupted his air travel.  Of course, Kerry failed to mention that volcanoes are the worst natural air pollutants on our planet.  The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, for example, sent 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, which climatologists estimate caused the surface of the earth to cool for three years by as much as 1.3 degrees.

          Kerry insists on the unanimity of scientific opinion regarding global warming, yet even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has admitted, based on the evidence, that scientific models have overestimated the effects of greenhouse gases on global warming, and that there is little evidence to suggest that climate change caused by man has had much to do with the duration of droughts or the intensity of hurricanes.  In spite of IPCC’s dire predictions, the earth’s temperature has risen a minuscule 0.1 degrees Celsius since 1990.  If CO2 emissions have been causing global warming, why, ask doubters like the Wall Street Journal, hasn’t the globe been warming?

          President Obama has been quick to denigrate people who disagree with him on climate change as “flat-earthers.”  To his way of thinking, that’s enough to justify asking for a $1 billion climate change “resilience fund.”  Why not.  After all, we can believe the president.  He never lies.  And neither does Don Quixote.