Even as Hurricane Irma prepared to strike Florida after devastating the Caribbean, discredited former news anchor Dan Rather promoted a Vox story worrying about how climate change is making parts of the state “uninhabitable.”
Climate alarmists seize every opportunity to complain about what they fear will be the impacts of manmade climate change. Hurricane Irma’s potential cost to lives and property wasn’t about to stop them, in fact it seemed to motivated some of them.
Vox writer David Roberts, an established climate alarmist who once called for Nuremberg-style trials of climate “deniers,” published a story Sept. 9, complaining about the lack of a “systemic approach” to deal with “escalating climate damages” including the future collapse of coastal real estate markets.
Perhaps striving for relevance many years after his exit from CBS after promoting false information about President George W. Bush, Rather promoted Roberts’ climate story on Facebook and Twitter. The inappropriate and insensitive timing didn’t bother the former news anchor turned news producer.
He shared Roberts’ story on Facebook at 3:42 p.m. Sept. 9, saying, “Will property markets start collapsing in the face of climate change? How will we decide what to rebuild and how? Who will lose out and how will society respond? These are some of the provocative questions at the heart of this thought-provoking and urgent article from Vox.”
Stories about the hurricane’s progress or how to remain safe during a hurricane would have been a whole lot more “urgent” and appropriate.
Rather also tweeted the Vox story that night, mere hours before Irma struck the Florida Keys.
Roberts’ article wasn’t talking about saving lives, but the potential collapse of real estate markets because of manmade climate change and the need to make a “system” to “deal with escalating climate damages.” His subhead for the article read, “The devastation Hurricane Irma is likely to bring to South Florida this weekend will only make it clearer still.”
The story was published as the state of Florida literally awaited Irma’s wrath and destruction.
“We know that South Florida is slowly, incrementally going to become uninhabitable. We know that, as the process continues, the region will experience economic and social convulsions,” Roberts wrote.
He referred back to a “prescient” Bloomberg story which had warned that as climate change drives up sea levels, Florida coastal property values will drop and mortgages will be hard to obtain “all” “before the rising sea consumes a single home.”
Roberts also quotes from David-Wallace Wells’ July fearmongering piece called “The Unhabitable Earth” which he had promoted at Vox, but which even alarmist climate scientist Michael Mann criticized as a “doomsday scenario” and “overly bleak” picture. Mann called out other problems with the story too.
Before Vox, Roberts worked for Grist.org where his extreme environmental views were on often on display. In 2006, He had to apologize after saying of climate skeptics, “we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.” He later said it was a “horribly stupid & inappropriate thing to say,” but continuing labeling climate skepticism “monstrously immoral.”
