Thursday, August 09, 2007

If We Shout, Will You Believe Us?

A few months ago, it was TIME magazine that pooped its collective panties over the current global warming frenzy. This week, it's Newsweek that soils itself, evacuating its proverbial bowels of any remaining shreds of credibility.

In this week's piece (and I use that word advisedly) called "The Truth About Denial" (cute, huh?), Newsweek declares outright war on the global warming "denial machine," which evidently looks something like Hillary Clinton's dastardly "right wing conspiracy." You see, Newsweek can't seem to understand why most people persist in not taking their word for it when they insist a climate catastrophe is on the way.

Now, you might think that Newsweek would adopt a posture of humility on climate issues, seeing as though they wet themselves only 30 years ago over the coming global ice age. But you would be wrong. Humility is not really their forte, and so Newsweek finds itself in high dudgeon against those who dare to question the media's current catastrophic pronouncements.

Evidently, Newsweek is stoked because certain industries that would be hurt by draconian regulation under, say, the Kyoto treaties (namely: all of them), are giving funding to organizations doing research disproving the fashionable climate change theories. Newsweek finds this to be an ethical outrage, and professes to be shocked, shocked that selfish interest could play a role in such life-or-death matters. This as opposed to, say, Al Gore, who in no way personally benefits from being positioned as the savior of mankind, or, say, General Electric/NBC (which carried Gore's Live Earth concerts on all of it's networks, and which publishes Newsweek online), who in no way would financially benefit from global warming alarmism. They, and only they, have taken sides for purely objective and altruistic reasons, rather than for the reams of cash suddenly finding its way into their pockets.

Also today, interestingly, comes the news that forecasters are revising their hysterical hurricane estimates for 2007 downward, the main reason being that there haven't been any actual hurricanes yet. According to global warming theory, we should be seeing tons more of them, and so the forecasts were ratcheted up again this year (like last year). But the storms have thus far failed to materialize (like last year), resulting in the revision. Rest assured, however, that the climate alarmists will tell us that the dearth of storms is also because of global warming--just like a surplus of them would've been. And we'll resist the urge to point out that a theory that purports to explain everything explains nothing. Still, one must wonder: if scientists have no idea how many hurricanes there will be this year (or what the weather will be a week from now, for that matter), how accurately will they be able to predict the global temperature 50 years from now? And how accurately were they able to measure the global mean temperature 100 years ago?

To ask such questions is to become a "denier." But I'll bet any one of the alarmists this: 30 years from now we'll all be sitting around laughing at the overheated climate change rhetoric from the 00's, and they'll be on to the next catastrophe. Whaddya want to put on it? Anyone?

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