Mark Steyn - Nothing to Fear but the Climate Change Alarmists

  Nails it! ~ Janice

<http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1619877/posts>Nothing
to Fear but the Climate Change Alarmists
Chicago Sun Times ^ | April 23, 2006 | Mark Steyn
Posted on 04/23/2006 6:06:42 AM EDT by Tom D.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1619877/posts

Do you worry? You look like you do.

Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an
advanced society demonstrates his virtue: He feels good by feeling bad.

But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah,
that's just some racket cooked up by the
Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist
buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take
over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about
nukes is so '80s. "They make me want to throw up.
. . . They make me feel sick to my stomach,"
wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who
couldn't stop thinking about them 20 years ago.
In the intro to a collection of short stories, he
worried about the Big One and outlined his own
plan for coping with a nuclear winter wonderland:

"Suppose I survive," he fretted. "Suppose my eyes
aren't pouring down my face, suppose I am
untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles
that all mortar, metal and glass has abruptly
become: Suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and
it's the last thing I feel like doing) to retrace
that long mile home, through the firestorm, the
remains of the thousands-miles-an-hour winds, the
warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then -- God
willing, if I still have the strength, and, of
course, if they are still alive -- I must find my
wife and children and I must kill them."

But the Big One never fell. And instead of
killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do with
divorcing her. Back then it was just crazies like
Reagan and Thatcher who had nukes, so you can
understand why everyone was terrified. But now
Kim Jong-Il and the ayatollahs have them, so
we're all sophisticated and relaxed about it,
like the French hearing that their president's
acquired a couple more mistresses. Martin Amis
hasn't thrown up a word about the subject in
years. To the best of my knowledge, he has no
plans to kill the present Mrs. Amis.

So what should we worry about? How about -- stop
me if you've heard this one before -- "climate
change"? That's the subject of Al Gore's new
movie, ''An Inconvenient Truth.'' Like the
trailer says: "If you love your planet -- if you
love your children -- you have to see this
movie." Even if you were planning to kill your
children because you don't want them to live in a
nuclear wasteland, see this movie.

The mullahs won't get a chance to nuke us
because, thanks to rising sea levels, Tehran will
be under water. The editor of the New Yorker,
David Remnick, says the Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet."

The archbishop of Canterbury, in a desperate
attempt to cut the Anglican Communion a slice of
the Gaia-worship self-flagellation action,
demands government "coercion" on everything from
reduced speed limits to ending cheap air travel
"if we want the global economy not to collapse
and millions, billions of people to die."

Environmentalism doesn't need the support of the
church, it's a church in itself -- and
furthermore, one explicitly at odds with
Christianity: God sent His son to Earth as a
man, not as a three-toed tree sloth or an Antarctic krill.

An environmentalist can believe man is no more
than a co-equal planet dweller with millions of
other species, and that he's taking up more than
his fair share and needs to reduce both his profile and his numbers.

But that's profoundly hostile to Christianity.

Oh, and here's my favorite -- Dr. Sue Blackmore
looking on the bright side in Britain's Guardian:

"In all probability billions of people are going
to die in the next few decades. Our poor, abused
planet cannot take much more. . . . If we decide
to put the planet first, then we ourselves are
the pathogen. So we should let as many people die
as possible, so that other species may live, and
accept the destruction of civilization and of everything we have achieved.

"Finally, we might decide that civilization
itself is worth preserving. In that case we have
to work out what to save and which people would
be needed in a drastically reduced population --
weighing the value of scientists and musicians
against that of politicians, for example."

Hmm. On the one hand, Dr. Sue Blackmore and the
bloke from Coldplay. On the other, Dick Cheney.

I think we can all agree which people would be
"needed" -- Al Gore, the guy from the New Yorker,
perhaps Scarlett Johansson in a fur-trimmed
bikini paddling a dugout canoe through a
waterlogged Manhattan foraging for floating curly
endives from once-fashionable eateries.

Here's an inconvenient truth for "An Inconvenient Truth":

Remember what they used to call "climate change"? "Global warming."

And what did they call it before that? "Global cooling."

That was the big worry in the '70s: the
forthcoming ice age. Back then, Lowell Ponte had
a huge best seller called The Cooling: Has the
new ice age already begun? Can we survive?

The answer to the first question was: Yes, it had
begun. From 1940 to 1970, there was very slight
global cooling. That's why the doom-mongers
decided the big bucks were in the new-ice-age blockbusters.

And yet, amazingly, we've survived. Why? Because
in 1970 the planet stopped its very slight global
cooling and began to undergo very slight global warming.

So in the '80s, the doom-mongers cast off their
thermal underwear, climbed into the leopardskin
thongs, slathered themselves in sun cream and
wired their publishers to change all references
to "cooling" to "warming" for the paperback edition.

That's why, if you notice, the global-warming
crowd begin their scare statistics with "since
1970," an unlikely Year Zero which would not
otherwise merit the significance the eco-crowd invest in it.

But then in 1998 the planet stopped its very
slight global warming and began to resume very slight global cooling.

And this time the doom-mongers said, "Look, do we
really want to rewrite the bumper stickers every
30 years? Let's just call it 'climate change.' That pretty much covers it."

Why did the Earth cool between 1940 and 1970?

Beats me. Hitler? Hiroshima? Maybe we need to
nuke someone every couple of decades.

Meanwhile, Blackmore won't have to worry about
whether to cull Jacques Chirac in order to save
Sting. Given the plummeting birthrates in Europe,
Russia, Japan, etc., a large chunk of the world
has evidently decided to take preemptive action
on climate change and opt for self-extinction.

Pace the New Yorker, much of the planet will be
uninhabited long before it's uninhabitable. The
Belgian climate specialist will be on the
endangered species list with the spotted owl.
Blue-state eco-bores will be finding the
international sustainable-development conferences a lot lonelier.

As for the merits of scientists and artists over
politicians, those parts of the world still
breeding are notable for their antipathy to
music, haven't done much in the way of science
for over a millennium, and politics-wise incline
mostly to mullahs, nuclear or otherwise.

Scrap Scarlett Johansson's fur-trimmed bikini and
stick her in a waterlogged burqa.

©Mark Steyn, 2006
Received on Wed Apr 26 00:30:33 2006