The Global Warming Gasbags

Nick Schultz does a good job of deflating a few of the balloons flying around about global warming. The past few weeks we’ve seen a stepping up of hysterical rhetoric, complete with Bill Clinton urging Tony Blair on about the whole “global warming revolution…” Eek.

Schultz’ piece recaps the recent glut of hand-wringers:

But first, the alarm bells. Consider:

* This week Time magazine has a “special report” on global warming with the cover blaring “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”

* Australian alarmist Tim Flannery has a new doomsday book out “The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What I t Means for Life on Earth.”

* The Washington Post recently featured a front page article about melting ice in Antarctica.

* ABCNews recently attacked skeptic scientists such as the University of Virginia’s Pat Michaels.

* A cover story in the New Republic this month attacked the popular writer Michael Crichton for his skeptical views on catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

* The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert recently published a book with the telling title “Field Notes From a Catastrophe.”

* And the Advertising Council and Environmental Defense have just launched the first “public awareness” campaign on global warming.

Recall that last September’s “Clinton Global Initiative” (part of several weeks of “Bill Clinton is our savior” focus) leered upon everything BUT terrorism, which has never been on his radar. He’s clearly campaigning for something separate and distinct from his wife’s White House run and global warming hysteria is going to play a big part in it – hence the press is doing its part to beef up the panic.

Some of this rhetoric is troubling, but such rhetoric is always alarmist, as Schultz notes:

Time is right about scientists issuing warnings for decades. It just hasn’t always been about global warming. Three decades ago, as Rich Karlgaard of Forbes reminds us this week, Newsweek magazine was warning not about global warming, but about global cooling. And the rhetoric was just as alarmist then. According to Newsweek at the time, “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically…with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.”

But just because scientists and their acolytes in the media were badly wrong a mere thirty years ago, doesn’t mean they are wrong today. It doesn’t mean they are right, but let’s stipulate that the planet is warming and greenhouse gases due to man’s activities have some effect. What then should we do?

Well, I think one thing we need to do is perhaps take a look at an intiative that sounds sensible and sane and is getting no press. Never heard of it? Surprise, surprise…if a president with an R after his name has an environmental initiative, and and ex-president with a D after his name has a competeing idea, which one is “credible?” If you couldn’t answer that, you go sit in the corner, right now.

That the wrong president’s plan is way, way beyond Kyoto doesn’t matter. Wrong president. Not credible.

I’m not buying the doom and gloom codswallop. Not when there are alternative initiatives that are being ignored. You see, it’s one thing if all the “the world is going to end because of global warming” hoo-ha is all that is out there…it’s quite another thing when other ideas are out there, other “solutions” to the “global warming crisis” are out there, but they’re being ignored by the very people who are supposed to be so very, very concerned about it all.

If you’re really concerned about “global warming,” you work with everyone in power to find “solutions” and you don’t simply ignore alternatives because they come from “the wrong side.” If that IS what you do…then you’re full of hothouse gasses yourself on the whole issue. Or maybe there IS no issue. Maybe this is just what the planet does, sometimes.

Maggie’s Farm casts a satirical eye.