Cannibals, Global Warming, and Ted Turner

CNN founder and noted “Mouth of the South” Ted Turner recently claimed that he was doing better keeping his foot out of his mouth.  He hadn’t said anything “stupid” for ages, he explained.

Except in the same interview, when he exclaimed:

If steps aren’t taken to stem global warming, “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow,” Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.

“Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” said Turner, 69. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable.”

 It’s a wonderful visual.  A few humans left in the midst of the wreckage of industrial civilization, eating the corpses of those who died before.  But even Al Gore hasn’t made claims as crazy as these. 

After all, there is no evidence of temperatures rising that fast.  In fact, they’ve gone roughly no where over the last decade.  And a carbon dioxide-rich environment should encourage plant growth.  But then, Ted Turner never was one to let the truth get in the way of politics.