Yesterday, in a speech in Anchorage starkly laying out the current and future effects of climate change, Obama rhetorically placed his opposition on an island unto themselves, as besieged intellectually as Alaskan islanders now are physically. That reminded me of something. Here's the passage:
But if those trend lines continue the way they are, there’s not going to be a nation on this Earth that’s not impacted negatively. People will suffer. Economies will suffer. Entire nations will find themselves under severe, severe problems. More drought; more floods; rising sea levels; greater migration; more refugees; more scarcity; more conflict.
That’s one path we can take. The other path is to embrace the human ingenuity that can do something about it. This is within our power. This is a solvable problem if we start now.
And we’re starting to see that enough consensus is being built internationally and within each of our own body politics that we may have the political will -- finally -- to get moving.
So the time to heed the critics and the cynics and the deniers is past. The time to plead ignorance is surely past. Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone. They’re on their own shrinking island.
Here's the association. Defending the Iran deal in early August, Obama similarly quarantined the opposition:
