Attacking the Messenger As Per GOP Handbook: Target John Holdren

John Holdren is a science/climate change advisor of the Obama Administration.  Naturally he, like everyone else having anything to do with global warming and climate change is under attack.

What he is currently under attack for is his opinion expressed 40 years ago that global cooling -- a new ice age, for example -- is a threat to human survival.  Which to be precise is a misleading conclusion about what Holdren said all those years ago.  Here's my response to an attack on Holdren from the far right.

Always looking for the quick sound bite, huh, Mr. _____?

You got that from Prison Planet. http://www.prisonplanet.com/john-holdren-in-1971-%E2%80%9Cnew-ice-age%E2%80%9D-likely.html

If you'd read farther down, you would see that this guy Holdren was saying even then that the ultimate threat was global heating and not cooling. He thought cooling was the most immediate threat at the time; plainly he was wrong, about that.

What he was really saying is that we thrive in a narrow window of temperature here on earth. Dead right. Cool things down a few degrees and it's a catastrophe. Warm things up a few degrees and it's a catastrophe. What about that do you not understand?
You are trying to manufacture an inconsistency when there wasn't any. You may be okay as a Tea Party spin-doctor, but you get an "F" as a scientist or informed citizen.

Holdren was also wrong about the source of global heating. Then, around 1970, he was expecting more reliance on nuclear power than has been the case.

See, with nuclear power, or thermonuclear, you are creating heat from matter. When you burn fossil fuels -- or non-fossil fuels like wood or peat or dry grass, for example -- you are (1) releasing solar energy that had been stored up as chemical bonds, sometimes for hundreds of milions of years, and (2) releasing CO2, which, when it accumulates in the atmosphere traps heat on the earth's surface and keeps as much heat from radiating out into space. You get a twofer by burning hydrocarbon, capice?

Holdren thought nuclear energy would heat the earth more than the burning of hydrocarbons -- and he might have been right, if nuclear energy were politically acceptable and widespread. In 1970 and before, it looked like most of man's energy would soon come from nuclear reactions. Didn't happen.

Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl and the movie "China Syndrome" and worries about third world nations going nuclear sure cooled down nuclear energy.