Terrible Ted, Mouth of the South

Captain Outrageous strikes again:

Interviewed Tuesday for Charlie Rose's PBS show, CNN founder Ted Turner argued that inaction on global warming “will be catastrophic” and those who don't die “will be cannibals.” He also applied moral equivalence in describing Iraqi insurgents as “patriots” who simply “don't like us because we've invaded their country” and so “if the Iraqis were in Washington, D.C., we'd be doing the same thing.”

UPDATE: Video courtesy of Hot Air:

If there is anything predictable about Ted Turner, it's that whenever he speaks in public, he'll say something controversial. In 1999, I was the only reporter in the room when he spoke to a "reproductive health" group in Washington. The story's no longer online, but here's what I reported on Feb. 17, 1999:

. . . Though he fathered "five kids -- boom, boom, boom -- by the time I was 30," Mr.Turner said, he now believes overpopulation is a major problem and suggested people should "promise to have no more than two children."
Mr. Turner recalled a discussion many years ago with Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book "The Population Bomb" predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and '80s as a result of global overpopulation.
Mr. Turner said he asked Mr. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, what the ideal world population would be.
"They told me about 2 billion," Mr. Turner said. World population is now 5.9 billion, but the world could reduce its population to that ideal, Mr. Turner suggested.
"We could do it in a very humane way," he said, "if everybody adopted a one-child policy for 100 years." . . .
Mr. Turner, whose net worth is more than $3.2 billion, got laughs with his responses during a question-and-answer session after his speech.
Asked about [House Majority Whip Tom] DeLay, Mr. Turner said of the Republican congressman: "Nobody that dumb could make it through law school."
Asked what he would say to Pope John Paul II, who opposes abortion and artificial contraception, Mr. Turner responded with an ethnic joke -- "Ever seen a Polish mine detector?" -- and then suggested the pope should "get with it. Welcome to the 20th century."

Turner's reference to the discredited Ehrlich is the key to understanding his ridiculous environmental doomsaying. People who buy into catastrophic theories of the future generally do so out of ignorance, and because such views give them a narcissistic ego-boost: They are wise and see the future, while you are a blind fool.

Someone should ask Turner to explain why all of Ehrlich's predictions have proven false, and what that says about such of Ehrlich's disciples as himself.

UPDATE: This story appears to be going viral, so let's do a quick roundup of blog reaction, beginning with Sundries Shack:

Let’s just say for the sake of argument that he’s right about the temperature change and in 30 or 40 years the entire globe will be warmer on average by eight degrees Celsius. That means that his home city of Atlanta, GA will go from an average temperature of about 61 degrees Fahrenheit to about 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the average yearly temperature of Miami, Florida where, last I checked, residents are not generally carving each other into steaks.

Q and O:

So we have [Al] Gore, Turner, Sharpton and Roberson pushing this meme now, do we? Beside the dubious science which now seems to be coming apart at the seams, if you didn't have any other reasons to blow this nonsense off, there are four great reasons to do so.

The big reason I've never bought into global-warming hysteria is that liberals are 100% wrong about everything. Whatever liberals tell me to do, I do the opposite. Liberals warned me about overpopulation, so I had six kids. And you know what they say about a man with big carbon footprint . . .