Nope, nice try—it’s not the “Rush” you thought of. It’s New Jersey congressman and U.S. Senate hopeful Rush Holt, a Ph.D physicist he’ll tell you (making him another Obama-era Chu-toy), who has taken out a YouTube ad to tell us that “millions will die” unless . . . we pass a carbon tax.
Without a single trace of irony, Holt harrumphs against “dumping gases into the atmosphere.” The greater Rush would have a hard time topping this for satire.
Some Power Line readers may want to take in the full 90-second ad, and spot the distortions and omissions that would earn any science student a failing grade if this was presented as a paper in class. Grading with utmost leniency, I count eight mistakes. (Carbon dioxide is “up 39 percent” since . . . when? Holt doesn’t say. I guess baselines or time frames are unimportant when you’re trying to give us a Bum Rush for the Senate.) But I want to draw your attention to the 15-second version of the ad, which features one of the favorite tricks of the climateers:
Here Holt uses a compressed Y-axis scale to scare the wits out of you about rising CO2 levels. Sometimes it is valid to use a compressed Y-axis scale when presenting data visually, but usually you’d be right to take note of the scale and probe into the justification for it. Below, for example, is what the famous “Keeling Curve” of CO2 levels since the pre-industrial era looks like if you plot it from zero, and provide an upper marker for a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels—which is the level that the alarmists generally say we’ll break out of a 2-degree warming zone into the “danger” zone. As you can make out, since the pre-industrial era we’ve gone a little more than a third of the way to a doubling of CO2. Leaving aside the defects in the climate model projections, even with increased emissions from the developing world, we’re likely more than a century away from reaching a doubling of CO2. Doesn’t look so scary when presented this way. The charts like Holt’s that show a steep curve are deliberately designed to mislead.