President elect Biden has named former Secretary of State John Kerry, whose greatest accomplishment was the Paris Climate Accord, as his White House Climate Czar.  He will lead Biden’s campaign to stamp out the carbon dioxide emissions that he believes are causing climate change with all its terrors.

Apparently Biden didn’t notice the irony in appointing a Climate Czar who has his own private jet, two yachts, several fancy houses, and who knows how many carbon dioxide producing vehicles.

Let us recall the remarkable speech Kerry gave to a climate gathering in Indonesia in February 2014. In it he made the astounding statement that there is a “very thin layer of gases – a quarter-inch, half an inch, somewhere in that vicinity – that’s how thick it is. It’s in our atmosphere. It’s way up there at the edge of the atmosphere. And for millions of years – literally millions of years – we know that layer has acted like a thermal blanket for the planet – trapping the sun’s heat and warming the surface of the Earth to the ideal, life-sustaining temperature. Average temperature of the Earth has been about 57 degrees Fahrenheit, which keeps life going. Life itself on Earth exists because of the so-called greenhouse effect. But in modern times, as human beings have emitted gases into the air that come from all the things we do, that blanket has grown thicker and it traps more and more heat beneath it, raising the temperature of the planet. It’s called the greenhouse effect because it works exactly like a greenhouse in which you grow a lot of the fruit that you eat here. That  is what’s causing climate change. It’s a huge irony that the very same layer of gases that has made life possible on Earth from the beginning now makes possible the greatest threat that the planet has ever seen.”

This is utterly ridiculous. Earth to Kerry: there is no half inch thick spherical blanket of anything around the upper atmosphere, you puffed-up  ignoramus.

John McClaughry is vice president of the Ethan Allen Institute.