Cold as Ice

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

On Feb. 26, 2015, Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), now serving in what seems like his 112th term — I kid, of course. It feels longer — brought a plastic bag to the Senate floor and said the following:

“We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record. I ask the chair, you know what this is?” 

This … was — here, let him tell you.

“It’s a snowball,” he said, holding it high, “and that’s just from outside here, so it’s very, very cold out, very unseasonable, so, Mr. President, catch this.” 

Inhofe then tossed the snowball and said, “Mm-hmm.”  

It should be noted that Inhofe was chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee at the time, so it’s a wonder we’re all still here and not extras on NBC’s “La Brea.”

Inhofe clearly tried to conflate (and let’s assume he knew it was a buffoonish thing to do and not a serious comment on the geological epoch) that if it was cold enough in Washington in February to make snowballs, global warming must be a hoax, for if Earth was really heating up, he’d have nothing in his bag to bring to Senate Show-and-Tell Day. This logic is like seeing a half-eaten chicken burrito on a tray at Chipotle in Sarasota and concluding nobody can possibly be going to bed hungry in Amarillo.  

Inhofe, incidentally, was re-elected in 2014 with 68% of the vote and in 2020 with 63% of the vote, proving we in Oklahoma are some tough sumbitches to embarrass.

I bring this up because recently there was a study done about record cold temperatures at the South Pole that will allow Inhofe to once again claim global warming a hoax and complain how a nefarious group of do-gooding international scientists, drunk on taxpayers’ money, are thwarting the will not only of God, but of altruistic, freedom-loving fossil-fuel-industry executives who, with no thought to their own benefit, simply want to keep the world’s lights on.

In short, the finding in the report was that the South Pole has never been colder. 

In a story in the Washington Post — “South Pole Posts Most Severe Cold Season on Record” — the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, which is operated by the United States Antarctic Program and administered by the National Science Foundation, recorded the coldest temperature on record: minus-78 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus-61 degrees Celsius, if you’re scoring at homes not in the United States. You would think that with the rest of the globe heating up — according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth experienced its fourth-hottest June through August ever recorded — a finding like this would be some good news to those worried about the advent of oceanfront property in Oklahoma.

Alas, though, you would be wrong.

The news was at best incidental, and scientists immediately threw cold water on its significance — you should pardon the expression.

In the Post article, a senior research scientist from the University of Colorado was quoted as saying the Antarctic climate is prone to rapid change and that the more levels of sea ice “tanked to one of the lowest extents for this time of year that we’ve seen,” an atmospheric scientist from the University of Washington told the Post, “One cold winter is interesting but doesn’t change the long-term trend, which is warming”; and a professor of atmospheric science from Ohio State University concluded, “In the long-term average, Antarctica is warming.”

But that’s data and this is politics, and one atmospheric scientist’s “interesting trend” is a climate denier’s fond memories of being a lad and spending steamy (harmless) summer days down at the swimming hole. There will be no context, no mitigation, no nuance — just that it’s colder than ever in Antarctica, Inhofe will say — see, see! — so go ahead and buy the diesel-powered Hummer and run the A/C on “high.” We don’t need electric cars, get rid of those god-awful, bird-killing wind turbines, and, while you’re at it, flog Al Gore in the public square.

It’s how deniers work. Find a flaw, however parenthetical and assuming there even is one — and this is true for debunking scientific research or government programs — and sell the blip as part of a grand conspiracy to blot out the truth. (Remember the ginned-up controversy in 2009 about how emails from a climate study that year proved that there was a cabal of scientists from Jakarta to Jersey monkeying around with climate data? Nothing ever came of it, because those emails did no such thing.) One person previously vaccinated against COVID dies, proving the CDC is lying to us about Ivermectin; one person who receives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance tries to buy Bud Light with her SNAP Card, proving the entire program is riddled with fraud and must be de-funded. 

The anecdotal now drives the narrative. 

This “news” from the South Pole is all someone like Inhofe will need to “prove” that Earth can still make snowballs, thus its never-ending supply of hydrocarbons underground, yearning to breathe free, should be extracted, and that the global scientists are lying to us — just the way HE wants it.

“My point is,” Inhofe said at the time of the snowball, “God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

Mm-hmm.

Barry Friedman is a satirist in Tulsa, Okla., and a lot of people are saying he is doing some very good work there. He is author of at least four books, including “Road Comic,” “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me: A Comedian’s Memoir.” See barrysfriedman.com.

From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2021

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