Larry Kudlow's Ice Age
January 24, 2024
“The Outlier,” a lone chunk of relatively young basalt resting on a bed of colorful, ancient cobbles in the Spokane River
The other deadly form of hot air
The second week of July—six months ago—was not a good week for the ecosphere. The planet had just experienced three successive days that were the hottest in recorded history.
Rather than push a panic button, I took it as an opportunity to praise a brave politician, a once-popular Republican Congressman from South Carolina, Bob Inglis, who’d refused to cave to the fossil fuel industry. Inglis served on the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology. By the weight of the evidence and testimony gathered by the committee over a period years, Inglis concluded climate change was real, that emissions from human fossil fuel consumption were the major cause, and that he had a duty to to speak that truth and work for legislation to reduce carbon emissions.
The people of his district celebrated his integrity and courage.
(Okay, I just made that part up. Sorry…)
Actually they quickly voted Bob Inglis out of office by a crushing margin. I still see Inglis’s life story as a profoundly disheartening but clarifying moment. To save the biosphere, we will first have to save ourselves from ourselves—from the ways we reward avarice instead of honesty in the face of painful or unwelcome news. It has come to that.
Former Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe with his famous snowball on the Senate floor, February 2015
It won’t be easy. The campaign that swamped Bob Inglis and drove him from office was a populist uprising—funded by fossil fuel money—to persuade the public that the science behind global warming alarms is fabricated. A symbol of this, which I shared as part of the article on Inglis, was a scene from the well of the U.S. Senate nine winters ago. It is of Senator James Inhofe (Republican from Oklahoma and then-chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee) holding a snowball in the well of the Senate. He already written a book—The Greatest Hoax (2012)—about his view on global warming. And now here was more proof of the ruse: It was snowing in the District of Columbia, and if global warming were a real thing, how could he have harvested the snowball?
Inhofe has since retired from public life due to long Covid, but Larry Kudlow has not. Of those who would recognize Kudlow’s name, it’s likely because he’s become a fixture on Fox News and its auxiliary cable network Fox Business News. As the discovery in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against Fox revealed, there was essentially no wall between Fox world and the Trump White House, where Kudlow served as director of the National Economic Council during the last three years of Trump’s term. If there are central casting incubators at Fox, Kudlow is from that ward (74, white, male, humorless, acerbic and contemptuously dismissive of competing views).
During an appearance on Fox News, two weeks ago, Kudlow began by reiterating that it was bitter cold throughout the midwest from Montana to Iowa. He then launched into an attack on former U.S. Senator John Kerry who has served as the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate during the Biden Administration. (Kerry announced earlier this month that he will be leaving his position.)
Here’s a slice of how that went, after Kudlow was welcomed to the Fox News mid-day set by host Sandra Smith. [You can watch the video of the interview here.]
Picking up on the news coverage of January’s arctic air outbreak (and its effects on the Iowa political caucuses) Kudlow emphasized that the Washington Post had reported that temperatures in Montana had dropped well below zero:
Kudlow: Minus 40 degrees. This is the Washington Post. So I just want to know with Mr. Kerry, whatever happened to global warming?
Smith: Wow.
Kudlow: Why hasn't there been front page stories? Every time you get a little heat wave or every time you get a bad rainstorm, everyone runs with these crazy stories about global warming, global warming, global warming and climate change. So we have special envoys and this and that. God knows we have EVs. [Electric vehicles]. We'll get to EVs in a minute. No one wants an EV.
But how about [dramtically raises voice] global freezing !!!? Not just in Iowa but throughout the whole Midwest of the country and maybe more.
Smith: Montana baby, wow!
Kudlow: So it evens out. That's my point! And you can't apply long term cycles of warming to what amounts to bad weather for a week or two. This is what Kerry and these others in the administration…
Smith: Well the fact of the matter is….
Kudlow: The whole thing is, I just want to say, it is a hoax. Global warming is a hoax.!”
If this were a family Thanksgiving gathering, and this was your Uncle Larry going off, this would be the point at which you’d take your fiancé by the elbow and volunteer the two of you to go mash the potatoes. It was a rant and, in patriarchal Fox style, it was okay to bowl over the female host who was at least trying to spritz the open flames.
It’s funny. Except that this is exactly what the former Richard Nixon aide Roger Ailes hand in mind when he created Fox News for the Murdoch family—a format that looks like a news operations but which is really a forum to thrash back at mainstream networks and national, bellwether newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post.
The difference may seem to be Right versus Left, except—as the discovery in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case against Fox proved—while “mainstream” networks and newspapers at least aspire to standards of accuracy and codes of journalism ethics, Fox does not. Holding and expanding audience share is the goal, and baseless rants like Kudlow’s are welcome because they reinforce what an older, conservative audience would like to hear and believe. The cynical business model at Fox is to funnel all events through a contrarian, conservative filter to please the audience.
To dismiss this as all’s fair in show business is a mistake. We’ve well passed the time to hold harmless those who know better, especially those who do so in order to profit from fossil fuel contracts and campaign contributions. We’ve reached the point where inaction is lethal, not just to species facing short term extinction, but to humans in areas most vulnerable to climate change. The World Health Organization forecasts that global climate change will have claimed millions of human lives by the midpoint of this century.
Here’s the reality, and forgive me for reiterating this, but the international scientific consensus is that the climate is rapidly warming and the primary cause is anthropogenic carbon emissions. Here’s the simple, empirical evidence for this based on ice core and (1800 to1959) and atmospheric measurements (1960 to 2022) of carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere.
Here’s a graph showing anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere dating back to the beginning of the industrial age.
As to Kudlow’s rant—that extreme cold weather in the lower U.S. proves climate change is a hoax—he’s just flat wrong.
It does seem counterintuitive that global warming can actually induce bitter cold weather outbreaks. But it’s true, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has had a tutorial explanation of the phenomenon on its website since 2021. It’s entitled Understanding the Arctic Polar Vortex. Every winter, a strong and tightly formed circular band of winds sets up in the stratosphere above the North Pole. In this circular vortex is the coldest, atmospheric air. When it is stable, it has the effect of drawing the underlying polar jet stream to the north, into a fairly stable circle which, above North America, is typically along the border between the U.S. and Canada.
Imagine, if you will, tightly spinning toy top. However. As the planet’s oceans and atmosphere are forced to hold more heat, warmer than normal air pushes north during the winter where it has the effect of causing the polar vortex to lose its stability. Like a toy top losing its spin, the vortex begins to wobble, and when it does it causes more frequent and deeper dips in the polar jet stream. Warmer global temperatures lead to more frequent disruptions in the polar jet stream which—as the illustration above depicts—creates dips in the jet stream—pulling warmer air northward while also allowing the most frigid polar air to reach even the most southern of the continental states.
It’s powerfully ironic that Kudlow would launch into his rant by citing the Washington Post. The newspaper may have been listening. On Sunday the Post published a detailed article by reporter/meteorologist Matthew Cappucci explaining the phenomenon and warning that it may continue to send outbreaks of frigid polar air south this winter.
Climate science clearly verifies the global warming that Kudlow denies. The science also clearly points to escalating human-caused carbon emissions as the cause for catastrophic climate change. But it’s also true we confront another lethal form of hot air. It is the parching wind of disinformation that commentators like Kudlow are given a platform to spew over the airways and internet. Kudlow’s purpose was to belittle Kerry but also discredit anything government might attempt to do to solve the problem. It’s part of a vicious cycle of denial that too often rewards the Larry Kudlows and mocks scientists, climate activists, and honorable public servants.
Just ask Bob Inglis.
—tjc
