Mark Steyn on Climate Change Alarmists

I had a good time, with some other regular commenters at Malott's Blog, going back and forth about Global Warming with Dave of the Sierra Club. I've found that environmental extremists are typically humorless (look at Al Gore), and Dave is no exception.

That was over the weekend, and then yesterday WorldNetDaily pointed me to Mark Steyn's latest column, in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times, on people like Dave.

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.

But the Big One never fell....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.

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."

I didn't realize Al Gore had a new movie. I thought he had some hip new TV channel designed to indoctrinate our youth with leftist propaganda, because they don't already get enough of that at school and in the usual news and entertainment outlets. I love my planet, and I love my children, but I'm not sure I can stomach a whole movie made by our illustrious former-VP-turned-environmental-crusading-screamer.

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.

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."

No matter what they call it, the bottom line is that the eco-crowd thrives on alarm, because through alarm they gain power. It's their bread and butter. No, wait! I think butter might be bad for the planet. It's their bread and tofu. And if we let them get their way, we will be at their mercy, under their thumb, and without any recourse.