“We [humans] are the most powerful force in nature.” —Al Gore
Chances are, you’re way too cool for global warming.
As the reader of a hip, indie-rock, alt-lifestyle mag like this one, I’m guessing the whole “climate change crisis” thing just doesn’t do it for you. Well, don’t feel bad, because you’re right:
This really is your father’s global warming crisis.
Without baby boomers, there is no global warming. Not because boomers are uniquely gaseous, but because they are uniquely egotistical. The notion that, as Al Gore put it on my radio station last week, humans are “baking the planet to death” can only be swallowed whole by those whose appetite for self importance has reached global proportions.
For boomers like Al Gore, nothing ever happened in the world until it happened to them. The first president ever assassinated was JFK; no war had ever been protested or opposed before Vietnam; government corruption was invented by Nixon, and Bill Clinton proved the boomers could all still get laid.
And nobody knew how to read a thermometer until 1975. Oops, I better make that “1985,” because in ’75 baby boomers were still reading the Newsweek cover story about a coming ice age and how we would all freeze to death unless “political leaders … take positive action to compensate for climate change.”
Fortunately for all concerned, the boomers weren’t in power yet and we did not take drastic action. And, just in case Mr. Gore hasn’t noticed, we also didn’t freeze to death.
And now it’s time to take drastic action to save us all from global warming because, well, because Al Gore and his “Save The [insert favorite mammal here]” pals are going to save the planet, dammit! Whether we need it or not.
I could fill this column with statistics and studies from prominent scientific journals poking holes in Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truths.” The world is not baking to death. Even the whackjobs pushing the Kyoto treaty are only talking about global temperature increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years (We’re doomed!). That will likely go up another degree or so in the next century, assuming we don’t spend $400 billion a year implementing Kyoto. If we do spend the money, that increase goes down by a whopping 0.17 degrees. (We’re saved!)
And Gore is wrong about the angry Earth Mother sending unusually powerful hurricanes to kill us in her anger over the 2000 election scandal. Hurricane experts Max Mayfield and Bill Grey continue to explain (and Al continues to ignore) that hurricane activity is related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a steady pattern of warming and cooling waters in the Atlantic.
And no, the polar ice caps are not about to melt away and no, global flooding isn’t about to turn Tennessee into beachfront property. In fact, most of the Antarctic ice sheet got colder from 1966 to 2000, and while both poles have been losing some ice in the past five years on their edges, their interior ice and snow masses have been increasing. The net result? According to a study published in the Journal of Glaciology last year, if current trends hold the oceans will rise 0.05 millimeters a year. That means 1,000 years from now, the seas will have risen … two inches! Head for the hills!
And on, and on, and on…
Nobody is denying that the earth’s temperature is changing. It’s always changing. Why, the “Little Ice Age” drove humans out of parts of northern Europe in the 17th century. And if Al Gore had been around, he’d have no doubt roamed the land predicting global catastrophe if we didn’t abandon our ox carts and stop burning charcoal.
What rational people reject isn’t climate change, but rather the baby boomer fantasy that, this time, climate change is somehow different and special. That’s the fantasy of someone who believes “we’re the most powerful force in nature!”
Ponder that arrogance for a moment. We puny humans are, in Gore’s imagination, more important to the earth’s ecosystem than volcanoes or tsunamis. We SUV drivers and backyard grillers are a greater force than the lunar tides or even gravity. Why, we’re more powerful than the sun!
If this were ancient Egypt, we’d all be worshipping ourselves!
Which is what Al Gore’s gaseous emissions are really all about.
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