http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/opinion/53499.php
Global warming debate still will be heated in 2207
PETER BRONSON
According to a press release from something called Earthjustice,
"Scientific evidence of global warming has continued to mount - so
much so that the scientific debate is over."
But according to something called Earthreality, "Sayin' don't make it
so."
I'll bet some beachfront property in Arizona that the debate will
still be going strong 200 years from now. It will sound like this:
Theology professors in 2207 will argue that global warming was a
secular religion. It had its own pope, Al Gore, a video Bible called
"An Inconvenient Truth," and dozens of Hollywood apostles who were
fundamentalist, "turn or burn" evangelists.
It had heretics ("deniers"😉, sinners (in SUVs) and saints (driving
hybrids). It even had an elaborate system to buy indulgences by
purchasing carbon credits, the same way the church once let sinners
reserve a window table in heaven by tipping the priest at the door.
Anthropologists will say no, global warming was more like a purple
Kool-Aid Jonestown cult. Members were willing to commit mass economic
suicide to prove fanatic devotion to their apocalyptic vision.
They will cite a Time Magazine Global Warming Survival Guide from
April 2007 as evidence of the bizarre rituals and sacrifices practiced
by the Global Warming Cult.
"Only mindless cult members could believe they could stop climate
change with green eye shadow and bamboo fences," they will say. "Any
rational person would understand that climate change was a natural
cycle, carbon dioxide was as normal as breathing and humans
contributed less than 2 percent."
Psychiatrists will call it "environ-mental illness" and give it a
name: "Narcissistic Delusions of Omnipotence, which made victims think
they could save the planet by changing a light bulb."
Historians will link global warming to the 1960s "back-to-nature"
primitivism - a Luddite phobia of technology and industry. "The cures
for global warming required turning the clock back, trading cars for
bicycles, shutting down power plants and factories and reverting to an
agrarian, horse-drawn utopia too backward for an Amish farmer," they
will say.
Comedians will say it was the greatest practical joke of the century.
"What's the difference between Al Gore and a volcano?" they will ask.
"Gore left a bigger carbon footprint." And, "How about Belgium
monitoring greenhouse gases from barbecue grills - with helicopters?"
They will laugh till they cry at pop star Sheryl Crow, who invented
clothes with a "dining sleeve" to replace wasteful napkins and said,
"I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can
be used in any one sitting" - while she toured the country in a
caravan of three tractor trailers, four buses and six cars.
"Considering the warming crowd had no visible sense of humor, they
sure made some great comedy," Jay Leno XIV will joke.
Political scientists will postulate that global warming was actually a
manifestation of cultural Marxism, because the "soak the rich" Kyoto
Treaty would have crippled the United States and democratic Western
nations while ignoring communist China and Third World polluters.
"Earth Day was also Lenin's birthday," they will point out.
"Coincidence? We think not."
Sociologists will say it was mass-media hysteria. Research will show
that at the peak of the global warming panic in 2007, newspapers and
TV networks did not let a day go by without another headline to spread
panic - even during the coldest springtime in more than 100 years.
"After being media-hoaxed by cell-phone cancer, PCBs, heterosexual
AIDS epidemics and another ice age, it's amazing so many people fell
for it," they'll wonder.
Debate over? Hundreds of skeptical climate researchers say, "Don't
hold your CO2-saturated breath."
But one thing everyone will agree on someday: Whatever it was, global
warming theory was to science what bleeding patients was to medicine:
ridiculous.