MSNBC Host Gives Wild Global Warming Speech: 'You Are Either on the Side of Your Fellow Citizens...Or the Side of the Storms

(Photo: MSNBC)

MSNBC host Chris Hayes recently went on a lengthy global warming rant after discussing the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, arguing that we need a "crash program" to "re-engineer" our lifestyle to avoid similar natural disasters in the future.

Newsbusters' Tim Graham joked that Hayes seemed to be under the impression he was giving the "Greenhouse Gettysburg Address," he was so intent on the subject.

After reading Mayor Bloomberg's endorsement of Barack Obama and its reference to climate change, Hayes began, characteristically exaggerating the articulation of every syllable:

It's not sustainable.  Things that can't go on, don't.  It's true-- Sandy was a freak storm.  A bad luck confluence of a number of low probability events that could conceivably have happened in some alternate climate that wasn't warming.  But this climate, our climate, is warming, and as it does low probability events like this will become more probable, and more intense.  Carbon emissions are trapping extra energy in our atmosphere, and with extra energy come more extremes.  Higher sea levels, dryer droughts, hotter heat waves and heavier, wetter storms. 

We need a crash program in this country right now to re-engineer the nation’s infrastructure to cope with and prepare the climate destruction we have already ensured with the carbon we've already put in the atmosphere, as well as an immediate, aggressive transformation of our energy production, economy, and society to reduce the amount of carbon we will put into the atmosphere in the future. [Emphasis added]

But that's not all.  As Tim Graham noted, Hayes then appeared to give a "you're either with us or you're against us" challenge, though not quite in those terms:

The story of civilization is the long tale of crusaders for order battling the unceasing reality of chaos, and it is a kind of miracle that we have succeeded as much as we have, that airplanes fly through the air and roads plunge beneath the water, and the entire teeming latticework of human life exist in the manifold improbable places it does.

But it is the grand irony that imposing this improbable order on the world we’ve released millions of years of stored-up carbon into the atmosphere, which is now altering the climate and threatening the very monuments of civilization that we so cherish.

We absolutely have it within us collectively to beat back the forces of chaos once again, but we must choose to do so, and the time for choosing is now.  You are either on the side of  your fellow citizens and residents of this planet, or you are on the side of the storms as yet unnamed.  You cannot be neutral. So, which side are you on? [Emphasis added]

What exactly does that mean, you might ask?

Presumably, it means we need to take global warming more seriously, and side with the party that lists it as one of its many number one priorities.  If you're a skeptic, or don't believe in "re-engineering" society to reduce carbon emissions, apparently "you are on the side of the storms."

Here's video of the unexpectedly intense monologue, via MRC-TV:

(H/T: Newsbusters)

--

Related:

• What Is President Obama's 'Top Priority'? (Hint: He's Got at Least 18 of Them) 
• 'Come Up With a More Neutral Term': MSNBC Panel Debates Using the Word 'Hero' to Describe Fallen Soldiers 
• 'Stop the Ad Personam Silliness': Fed Up Rudy Giuliani Tussles With MSNBC Panel on Romney Tax Plan