The New Issue

If there were ever a doubt whether the national media exist as handmaidens to the DNC, this ought to clear it up.

Ok, stay with me here. Republicans typically poll higher on issues of national security, right? (I know, I know, the GOP is doing its best to change all that: See, e.g., Dubai, immigration) Democrats typically poll higher on the environment.

So what's the answer? The average soccer mom is much more concerned about Islamofascists flying airplanes into buildings than she is about a couple more feet of seawater in 100 years. Hmmm...what to do, what to do?

I've got it! Make the environmental threat urgent! As Time Mag says: "Be Worried. Be Very Worried...Never mind what you've heard about global warming as a slow-motion emergency that would take decades to play out. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us."

Even injecting the new-age "Gaia" into the mix, the Time Mag reporter pronounces the debate over, as he breathlessly reports the verdict: "Environmentalists and lawmakers spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts were true, but in the past five years or so, the serious debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it."

But gosh, somebody might want to tell these guys that. Or these guys. Or these guys.

Doesn't it make any of you independent thinkers on the left wonder a bit why the liberals and the media (but I repeat myself) want to run out the clock on the debate? Why so anxious to make a crisis? Could it be the 2006 elections? What was Clinton's position on Kyoto after he was in office?

I'm not a scientist, obviously, but I have taken some statistics classes. And I think that I possess some of the skepticism that many modern climatologists seem to lack. Why is the left pushing so hard to stifle debate?

Look, global warming is probably real, and it might even be statistically significant. The jury is still out on the issue of what extent, if any, man's activities cause it. But, according to the Time Mag reporter, the "crisis" is upon us!

Slow down for a second, partner. The earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old. Even assuming the calamaties are statistically significant, the melting glaciers, big storms, and droughts have been occuring for what, now, 10 years? 20 years? The relationship between 20 years and the age of the earth, is the same as the relationship between 1.33 people and all of the people in the United States.

In other words, it would be akin to locating 2 (I'm being generous) people with green eyes, and from that concluding that every man, woman and child in the U.S. has green eyes.

Look at it another way. If all the glaciers on earth melted and then were re-formed every 25,000 years (remember, it's 2,006 right now), that means this cycle would have occured 180,000 times since the formation of the earth. No, I am not claiming that it has, but it gives you an idea of the numbers.

And some guy from Time Magazine is going to pronounce the debate over based on 20 years of history? How many straight news pieces end like this: "The scolds, however, knew what they were talking about. In a solar system crowded with sister worlds that either emerged stillborn like Mercury and Venus or died in infancy like Mars, we're finally coming to appreciate the knife-blade margins within which life can thrive. For more than a century we've been monkeying with those margins. It's long past time we set them right."

And one more thing. If it's over, if global warming is here, the crisis is upon us, it's waaaay to late to do anything about it. I'm gonna party like it's 1999.

(P.S. Those darn immigration protesters! How are Time/DNC going to re-splash this one?)