Or you’ll sink like a stone

Continuing on the subject of why some things aren't funny. …

This cartoon ran on Sunday's editorial page. That's Sunday, April 15, 2007.

We'll get to the content in a bit, but first let's talk about the joke itself. Chicken Little … get it? Al Gore and the IPCC and, you know, all those folks in lab coats and low-lying areas, they're like Chicken Little. They think the sky is falling but it was just an acorn. Get it?

It's been so many years that it's hard to remember, but a joking reference to climatologists as Chicken Little may once have been mildly amusing. It might once have been drolly witty as a passing reference — a bit of comic garnish for some larger meal. Once. But the second time not so much, and not as the main course, the primary joke. Bob Englehart's umpteenth reheating of this stale fare is just sad. If you're going to commit comic plagiarism, at least steal from better source material. Or steal from an original that's actually original.

Hard to believe The Hartford Courant actually paid him for this.

Even sadder, it seems ExxonMobil didn't pay Englehart for this. The fossil-fuel giant is offering $10,000 to scientists to publish exactly this kind of piffle, but it seems Englehart is working for them pro bono (shades of Ezekiel 16).

In his blog entry for this cartoon, Englehart seems to think it's funny because he's being a bad-boy rebel, challenging the religious dogma of what he calls "the global warming hysteria." He seems to think he's not just funny, but courageous for taking on this powerful establishment.

This is a strange and unconvincing pose — rebellion on behalf of ExxonMobil et. al. Like Englehart, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., darkly suggests that his denial of climate change is a brave act of rebellion against Big Science and other powerful conspirators. Here's Inhofe's desperate attempt to portray himself as a rebel bad-boy:

"Stop and think about it: It's all about money. What would happen to the Weather Channel's ratings if people weren't scared anymore?"

So Inhofe thinks global warming is an international conspiracy intended to boost ratings for basic cable since, of course, The Weather Channel is so much more lucrative than ExxonMobil.

(Before Googling around to find the above quote — which I first read in the print edition of Mother Jones — I hadn't realized that The Weather Channel was so vilified by right-wingers. The Scientific American blog has a run-down.)

To Englehart's credit, he works in what is probably the only American city in which powerful corporate entities side with the scientific mainstream on the subject of global warming. Hartford, Conn., is home to some of America's largest insurance companies. For those insurers, as Sen. Inhofe would say, "It's all about money." They cannot afford to be wrong about this, so they have carefully evaluated the evidence for and against climate change. Having done so, they have concluded that it's a very serious threat.

That response is significant. Insurers have a much larger stake in this question than the basic-cable barons of The Weather Channel, but this vast financial interest required them to take a serious, disinterested look at the evidence. Inhofe's essentially Marxist analysis provides a basis for skepticism when evaluating statements from ExxonMobil or from those profit-mad money-grubbers at the Sierra Club, but that same consideration of profit-motive reinforces the credibility of the insurance industry's position.

Unfortunately, Englehart's glib dismissal of the sober conclusions of scientists and actuaries alike doesn't so much make him a courageous rebel bad-boy as it makes him, well, an idiot. So while his recent cartoon doesn't provide a basis for us to laugh with him, at least it allows us to laugh at him.

Incidentally, the photo on the right (by Matthew Jonas) was taken the same day this cartoon appeared in our paper. That's not exactly ha-ha funny, but the decision by the paper of record in a state with a median elevation of 60 feet to publish Englehart's unfunny science-denial on the same day the state is overrun by massive flooding is, at least, bitterly ironic.