David Letterman's Global Warming Rant: "We Are Dead Meat" (VIDEO)

"We are dead meat," said David Letterman last night in the midst of a lengthy rant on global warming. He blamed a lack of leadership over the last several decades. He also said he didn't think that little steps like reusing party toothpicks or turning lawn clippings into mulch could possibly help.

WATCH the clip:

Related: Grist's David Roberts complains that Thomas Friedman, the guest on the show, failed to be interesting at all.

Who did a better job -- Friedman or Letterman?

Comments

[DanSmith]

We all just need to eat less meat or no meat at all then we'll reverse this crisis.

[Diogenis]

Americans.be disciplined? Will never happen. We are a Nation of consumers..and obese.

[mediahack]

Larry King has Chuck Norris on tonight, Last night he had on Joy Behar.
Even Bill Maher is on a lot ..

Why to Americans care about celebrity opinions .

And then I read this AP story about Britney Spears' comeback :
"Britney Spears, who wore a short silver mini-dress with a plunging neckline showcasing her svelte figure, was given a standing ovation from the star-studded crowd even before she opened her mouth."

And immediately I understood the Obama phenomenon and now the Palin worshipping.

[bryansmith]

OH, yeah....

That dooosh wrote a book called, and I'm not joking: "Black Belt Patriotism"

What a clown

[greginwva]

In King's defence,this is what he's been doing for decades.He may have Pamela Anderson on one night and tony Blair the next.

[theknightb4]

In Kings defense, all those celebs are practically political figures.

Charlie Rose would be to your taste. He sometimes almost fights with his guests, lol. I think Rose viewers know what I'm talkin about

[Melissa]

I don't know what happened to Joy Behar. She used to be really funny and now she rants and raves like someone's crazy Aunt.

[helloworld2008]

Unfortunately Dave voted for Nader in 2000 and cheerleaded for him on his show.

Instead of Al Gore, Mr. Climate Change.

By doing so, Dave helped elect Bush, who has destroyed America and perhaps the planet.

Thanks for nothing Dave!

[way out left in san francisco]

Agreed. No personal responsibility on his part. It is frightening how the audience laughed at the line "We're screwed!" it wasn't a nervous laugh. It was a "Dave - you are so funny" laugh.

[ydouask]

How do you know who he voted for?

[notastinkinlib]

Hey Dave, thanks for helping to elect Bush. I hate to think how many more terrorist attacks would have happened if Gore or some other pansy had been in office on 9/11. You know why the Iranians released the hostages upon Reagan's inauguration? Because they knew he'd send our boys to deliver an ass-whoopin' if they didn't. They toyed with Carter because they knew they could get away with it.

[notastinkinlib]

Hey Dave, thanks for helping to elect Bush. I hate to think how many more terrorist attacks would have happened if Gore or some other p*nsy had been in office on 9/11. You know why the Iranians released the hostages upon Reagan's inauguration? Because they knew he'd send our boys to deliver an a55-whoopin' if they didn't. They toyed with Carter because they knew they could get away with it.

[Zubeck]

You have no idea what you're talking about.

[rowzeer]

Did you even take history in school? They released them because it longer served their purpose to hold them. Iranians elected a democratic leader which we (America) deposed and placed the Shah back in power. US government claims they want democracy in the ME but we know that's not true. They want to control oil interests in the region and the hostages were Iranians way of showing us that they controlled their country not US interests. The revolution overthrew the shah and by 1980 when Reagan was inaugurated the Clerics had taken over no need for hostages any more. And the Bush Admin has the nerve to say they hate us for our freedoms...what a crock.

[BatedBreath]

Is Letterman serious or is he being sarcastic? I don't watch him and can't judge from the video.

[llmitchellb]

On this one he's not being sarcastic. He's just trying to have some humor.

[Diogenis]

Catch your breath. He is serious.

[NedFlanders19]

Look to december to be the time when the human race gets what we deserve for treating the planet like an ashtray.

The experiment that was the USA has failed and we are leading the world off a cliff.

We ignored the wake up calls for years and when the time comes it will be so huge that it will mark a great shift in consciousness. We are being squeezed from all sides, and the pop will be showing up soon. No worries though, for these remarkable times will be known as the era when humanity finally got "it."

Dum vivimus vivamus

[bugjackblue]

Whaddaya mean "we?" I was more or less a good boy most of the time. Screw everybody else though-- they deserve it in spades.

Why December though? I mean, it might well be that something cataclysmic does indeed happen in December but is there a particular reason why you single out that particular month? When making this kind of radical prediction, one must substantiate with some sort of at least superficially convincing rationale. Otherwise one looks silly.

However December would be good. I'm down for December. America elects Sarah Palin president-in-waiting and ET finally decides he can stand it no longer, the time has come to harvest before we kill ourselves off and the buffet closes its doors...

[notastinkinlib]

Spoken like a true enemy of personal freedom.

[ErnestineBass]

Spoken like a true enemy of democracy.

[Adrienne Williams - Huffpost Blogger]

I love David.... oh, the pessimist.

[Agent420]

Is that the best you can do? Everyone talks about global warming, but nobody talks about global warming on Mars and it has been noted on Jupiter as well. So it sounds like a solar system problem, not just a problem on Earth.

[rfshunt]

O.K., let's talk about Mars.

The climate change denial community has gleefully seized on one of the polar co2 ice caps receeding as evidence of global warming on Mars. But it's only the south polar region, it isn't global. And it appears to be caused by dust storms, not solar activity - which is the only common variable between the earth and mars.

"inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192

[lioness39]

And we are concerned about Mars because?

[rowzeer]

Don't you mean the "realist"? There are holocaust deniers too.

[mezz1962]

Oh Please how many hurricanes did we have last year zero?

If he is so worried about global warming then Dave close your mouth that will stop a lot of hot air from polluting our atmosphere

BTW average temp in New York in Feb 32 degrees

[myangeldog1]

Hey Mezzi, I've lived in Kansas/ Missouri all of my life (and I'm no spring chicken). I will tell you first hand that up until 10 years ago I had never SEEN an Armadillo. Now you see them like racoons. I have never seen tornados in so great a number and worst yet they are HUGE F5 MONSTERS that completely wipe out towns (much larger than Wasilla). I mean COMPLETELY. I have 100 year old OAKS and other hardwoods UPROOTED still lying out in my front yard. I have seen these things take a train and twist and tear the steel like aluminum. Our winters are nothing but ICE. There was a period this spring that we were hit by a killer ice storm (without power and heat for 3 weeks) then the very next week we a had to deal with an F4 tornado that wiped out Picher Oklahoma.

Mezzi......it is REAL

[Agent420]

What have you guys done to piss off your god?

[mouselion]

Wild turkeys in northern Vermont starting about 10 years ago --- never before that were they ever seen that far north. . .

[theophagousmonkey]

This past year the Mississippi River, at Grafton, where the Mississippi and the Illinois Rivers Converge north of St. Louis, was awash in pelicans. We'd been going up there a few times a year to hike at Pere Marquette forest and stay at the lodge there. We asked a local about the pelicans (we used to live in Australia with heaps of them and hadn't seen many since returning, so they caught our attention) and she said that she'd been living there for thirty years and had never seen a pelican before. Species migration follows habitat disruption, not the other way round. Animals (humans included) don't generally like to strike out for new territories - even normally migratory animals like to stay close to known, habitual pathways). By the time you see the animals acting strangely and in places you don;t normally see them, it's a sign that you're a bit late to the party.

[BobsNotWorking]

I'm no spring chicken either, and I'm here to tell everyone - It is no doubt real. I live in Corpus Christi, Texas. I am once again living in a home on the water that my wife and me built in 1971. I've been gone from here all my life, but recently returned in order to keep the house in the family. In '71 I was a young surgical technician at the Naval Hospital here. I often rode my bicycle to work (about 7 miles from my home). The road I traveled runs right along the Laguna Madre (the estuary between Padre Island and the mainland). Not one time in those years did I encounter water over the road. Now, that same road is covered with water, depending upon tidal fluctuation, for about four to six weeks out of the year. I also have a concrete sea wall at my home. Not once did the water cover the top of that wall between '71 and '73. Now the water level is frequently about 12-inches above the top. It is real all right and it has become much more noticeable just in the past five years that I've been back here.

[notastinkinlib]

They had Armadillos and tornados in Missouri and Kansas in the 1960s, I saw them. Al Gore is an inconvenient occurence of the 20th century, you've swallowed the hoax hook, line and sinker. Kansas and Missouri were called "Tornado Alley" long before Al Gore said we caused it. All that ice must be from the global warming.

[rfshunt]

Oh Please how many hurricanes did we have last year zero?

Amazingly enough, you're wrong. In 2007 there were 6 hurricanes and 8 tropical storms.
http://weather.unisys.com/hurricane/atlantic/2007/index.html

Good job on the Feb NYC temperture figure though, you were very close - 33.6 degrees.
http://www.cityrating.com/cityweather.asp?City=New%20York

However, I don't think what's upsetting you is lack of accuracy. I think what's got your skivvies in a twist is the realization for the climate change deniers that when they've lost David Letterman, they've lost the country.

[msbeachwood]

So are you saying that you don't think that global warming and climate change are not real concerns? Personally, I would love to think that we should just ignore all the signs; life in the future would be a lot easier if it was all just a conspiracy cooked up by deomocrats. But the science is just too compelling and hard to ignore.

[unstuppid]

It's not that I don't belive the earth is getting warmer, but how much of it is caused by humans is debateable. I'm not willing to jack up the price of gas and pass strict mandates that will raise the cost of most goods and services to the point where it will be an international depression where societies will be forced to move to socialism just to survive.

[fumes]

is it possible for us to be up to our ankles in co2 and not even know it? this from wiki on co2: ''Acute carbon dioxide toxicity is sometimes known by the names given to it by miners: blackdamp (also called choke damp or stythe). Miners would try to alert themselves to dangerous levels of carbon dioxide in a mine shaft by bringing a caged canary with them as they worked. The canary would inevitably die before CO2 reached levels toxic to people. Carbon dioxide caused a great loss of life at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986, when an upwelling of CO2-laden lake water quickly blanketed a large surrounding populated area.[34] The heavier carbon dioxide forced out the life-sustaining oxygen near the surface, killing nearly two thousand people.'' and co2 is already at a concentration of .038% in our atmosphere!!!!

[cambridgedude]

Two interesting facts that are irrelevant to the greenhouse gas thesis. High CO2 in coal mines reduced the O2 to such a low level that it was insufficient to sustain canary life, which were used as an early warning detector because humans can breath quite normally at these O2 levels. The Cameroon lake CO2 "eruption" totally eliminated ground level O2, and that's not good for anything that breathes. Actually, this incident has often given me and others pause when boosters of some CO2 sequestration projects ensure us that the CO2 goes down the hole in the ground, but never comes back out. Maybe, but maybe not.

[Diogenis]

I'm taking notes. When's the exam?

[ErnestineBass]

WHOA!!!

Talk about yer SBDs.

heh heh

[Pulemerci]

"A lack of leadership over the last several decades." Wow! I thought global warming started when George W. Bush was sworn in. Isn't it all his fault? Several decades! That means the Democratically controlled Congress and 8 years of Clinton and Gore (the planet's savior). Interesting.

[spiderbucket]

So we should just ignore it now, huh ? It's not real anyway, right Rush ?

[realitybase]

It started when Ronnie Raygun took off Jimmy Carter's SOLAR PANELS from the WHITE HOUSE roof.

[Barbyrah]

Oops. I forgot about that. You're right! Carter DID listen to Gore, and put solar panels on the White House. R.R. removed them. Thanks for the reminder.

[msbeachwood]

Assigning blame will get us all nowhere. At this point I don't care who's fault it is and frankly, neither should you.

But make no mistake GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL. Forget about where you think the blame lies for just a moment and instead ask yourself what you can do to fix it.

[Barbyrah]

When Gore was a senator from Tennessee in the late 70s he was already speaking out about it. Unfortunately, no one listened. But his record re: talking about global warming at that time is a pretty well known fact.

[Pulemerci]

Decades in the Democratically controlled Senate and 8 years as Vice president and Nothing got accomplished by him.

[BobsNotWorking]

Why "Interesting"? Democrats don't defend their own on the basis of dogma. We're not at all like Republicans. The mistake you make, the one that causes your sarcastic "Interesting" is the same one liars make when they feel they can't trust anyone. They think everyone else is a liar too. Since all Republican arguments are based upon cynical partisan dogma - they think the same is true of Democrats. It isn't. So, the criticism of Democrats that you find here isn't really "interesting" at all. It's completely normal. It is the way thinking people think.

[roxn]

That was real !!

[greeniefromOH]

Unfortunately, David is correct. A better author on climate change is James Lovelock, who does not sugarcoat it.
I did not know the Republicans had removed it from their platform entirely. John McCain has indeed sold his soul to the devil.
Dark times are upon us despite our best intentions.

[mediahack]

I like Lovelock because he supports nuclear energy. Lovelock ia a green but he entreats his friends in the movement to drop their wrongheaded objection to nuclear energy.
Maybe Letterman could promote nuclear energy on his show.

[GayGrandpa]

He is a funny man at the end of it you have to ask if it is an appeal for apathy. Hilarious!

[TheAlchemist]

I can't tell if he's in a deadpan rant or if he's serious. Strangely, the audience laughs.

We're energy addicts.

We need to start using ATP instead of OIL. A solution to both the obesity epidemic and the energy crisis.

[brooklyncitizen]

Well he's right.

[ProfessorDuh]

You know you are in trouble when David Letterman becomes Howard Beale.