I apologize. Lizz Winstead is no longer part of The Daily Show. An earlier version of this article strongly implied that she still directed the content of Daily Show jokes.
‘This tornado is in Oklahoma so clearly it has been ordered to only target conservatives,’ wrote comedian Lizz Winstead, in a tweet, around 3:30 Monday afternoon.
Earlier this Spring I pondered why this year’s Earth Day seemed like a tree that fell in the forest while no one else was around. I came to the conclusion that honorable concern and stewardship over the Earth’s finite resources had been insensibly corrupted by the special pleadings of political interest groups hell-bent on using the emotions of the issue to score political points against pro-business conservatives. Sometimes the saddest things about pessimism are the times you are proven right.
Yesterday tragedy descended upon Moore, OK in the form of a tornado. Nearly 100 known fatalities have been documented as the rescue and recovery operations round grimly into form. So just what do the self-proclaimed friends of Mother Earth do when something this bad befalls a town like Moore, OK? Here we see two different instances of the Left just being the Left. This is because they never let a crisis go to waste. They rape it for what it is worth, because that is what “Progress” implies.
On the one hand, we have a “Comedian” formerly of The Daily Show telling us that Conservatives are out their preparing a narrative that the Democrats deliberately “tornadoed” that Elementary School in Moore, OK because OK voted GOP in the last election. This nonsense was of course intended to make fun of people who are currently upset over politically targeted ORS audits of Tea Party groups and journalists not properly deferential to the current administration.
Here we had this big tornado rummaging through a small town and throwing people’s lives into utter disarray. What an awesome chance to get a cheap shot at people criticizing the partisan nature of the latest IRS audits. Let’s use this disaster to score a few points for Team Liberal. All this does is prove George Carlin right when he stated that comedy is a socially acceptable form of aggression. We can get a nice, happy look at how funny Lizz Winstead typically is below.
And then we get the serious rape of scientific inquiry by Sheldon Whitehouse. He clearly expects us to just assume without loss of generality two facts that are not in legitimate evidence. First, he wants us all to just assume anyone who is a Republican could truly care less if natural disasters happen. Furthermore, that total lack of concern implies that we just pass the bill on to good stewards of our resources like Sheldon Whitehouse who predictably votes in favor of Trillion-Dollar deficits every year when he votes on spending issues. He secondly wants us all to believe that tornadoes increase in quantity and ferocity as the Earth’s temperature increases due to AGW.
The first faulty assumption is one that I won’t waste my time on. A man who believes that ObamaCare is a wise fiscal investment has as no intellectual or moral right to mount the pulpit and deliver a Stewardship Sermon worthy of Jonathan Edwards. He is about as qualified to lecture Republicans on The Tragedy of The Commons as I am to advise Robert Griffin III what audible to call the next time The Philadelphia Eagles dial up a Sam-Will Blitz. I dispense with the obviously stupid with a contemptuous non-response.
The scientism embedded in his second assumption I admittedly find somewhat interesting. I’ve visited this issue before a couple of years back when a day of tornadoes devastated my own community and nearly wiped nearby Harvest, AL off the map. At the time, I looked at a temperature data set and a tornado data set to determine whether there was a mathematical correlation between changes in temperature and changes in tornado frequency. Here’s what I came up with.
We’ll take a nice, happy, ethical look at some work Dr. Roy Spencer has done to quantify changes in both The Median Earth Temperature and the occurrence of tornadic thunderstorms over the last few decades. Spencer gives us a graph of temperatures from 1950 to 2010 that shows an increase of about 1.8 degrees centigrade over 60 years for a DT/dt = 0.03 Degrees Centigrade per year. He then presents a chart documenting a decreasing trend that shown US F3 to F5 tornadoes dropping from 43 to 27 in a fairly consistent linear progression. This gives us a DN/dt = -0.267 F3 to F5 tornadoes per year. Dividing DN/dt by DT/dt gives us a rough proxy for what a slowly rising temperature has given us in terms of increasing or decreasing tornadic activity. This calculation results in DN/DT = -8.89. Thus, for every one degree Centigrade of warming we experience, we’ve got a set of US data suggesting that we will lose 9 F3 to F5 tornadoes.
Now of course putting this data into Minitab will not give you a high 0.90 R2adj. So I therefore don’t advocate a deliberate, large release of Methane in order to block IR from leaving the Earth’s surface as a cure for tornadoes. However, the data easily lends itself to a High School AP level ODE that directly contradicts what the Senator is up on his high horse yammering about. This suggests that his views on the prevailing science have ossified without in any way being informed by actual data that is commonly available to the information-seeking public.
I would further state that his views on “science” depend on how useful he finds that “science” to be when he attempts to further an agenda that has no bearing on the terrestrial commonweal. He, like the “comedian” from the ever-so-hilarious Daily Show, just saw this awesome graphic image on a tornado and went straight for the political usefulness vector.
It shows us why Earth Day is such a pathetic joke. It shows us that the Left suddenly “cares” about the environment when it presents them with a crisis that enables them to make “progress.” The fact that this “progress” involves urinating on the graves of Elementary School kids killed by a horrible tornado doesn’t even cause the average Democrat voter to pause and feel the slightest lilt of embarrassment or shame.
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