Ladies and gentlemen, climate change is shaping up to be the battle of the century, the millennium, and probably the history of the planet. This fight is bigger than the aching, brokenhearted Rocky Balboa taking down ‘roid-ridden boxing-bot Ivan Drago and, ultimately, Communism.
Drago, in a lot of ways, is eerily representative of the Climate Change deniers. That cold, glassy stare when Apollo Creed dies in the ring? Shade of Sarah Palin rehashing blatant falsehoods like a Denial-Bot, chief among them that there is no proof that human activity has contributed significantly to global warming.
If Palin is the android-like Ivan Drago, that makes RNC head Michael Steele the even more dogmatic spouse of Ivan (played by a pre-plastic surgery Brigitte Nielsen.) To wit, Steele embodies the Mrs. perfectly by pulling the old Cold War word twisting game when opining about global warming:
We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.
Fair enough, Mrs. Drago, some places are getting colder. Over time, as the science has borne out that greenhouse gases are changing our climate in many different ways, we have taken to calling this economic and environmental threat climate change. (Note the absence of air quotes.)
But wait! There’s more! Mrs. Drago continues:
Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? Not very long.
Fact: Greenland was named as such because, as Mrs. Drago understands, sometimes you have to give something ugly, like a pig, something pretty, like lipstick, to entice people to look at it. In the case of Greenland, calling a vast, largely ice covered hunk of land something more inviting helped attract settlers. Kind of like calling a simpleton “the former Governor of Alaska,” you know?
Or like calling ideologues who don’t believe science, um, leaders.