RON HART: Warm-mongering: the latest debunked fashionable worry

“According to a new U.N. report, the global warming outlook is much worse than originally predicted. Which is pretty bad when they originally predicted it would destroy the planet." — Jay Leno, 2006

HARRISON, TENN. — For a long time, most of us were dangerously unaware of the impending annihilation of our planet due to “global warming.”  

We were lucky back then, though. We had so many college sophomores, armed with their Science 101 professor’s tales of certain doom for our planet (and looking to get an A in his class), who were willing to “raise our awareness” and preach the Gospel according to Someone.

The thing that makes the raising of awareness, done mostly by the left, so important is that so many of those who are unaware aren't even aware of it.

Photoshopped pictures from Al Gore were enough to make most heed his cry. Science? We don't need no stinking science!  The man who told us he invented the Internet says it is so.

Just a few short months ago, Henry Waxman, a Democrat of California (so you know he is smart and fiscally responsible), came to us with his movie star good looks and proposed the House version of the Cap-and-Tax bill, which he modestly named the “Waxman-Markey Bill.”

He was responding to rampant fears in West Hollywood that they would run out of frozen Margaritas by 2020.

Even Barbra Streisand told Diane Sawyer of this crisis, with “dust bowls and intense storms” inevitable.  Babs is on record! We do not have the luxury of waiting for Cher or Sarah McLaughlin to weigh in.

We must act — now — before we have to see another picture of a seal on a melting piece of ice (in spring).

But wait a minute. It turns out that scientists now begrudgingly confirm that the Earth has actually not warmed in the past decade, as they originally thought.

Gerald Traufetter (just sounds like a scientist doesn't he?) starts his column by lamenting, “Climatologists are baffled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last ten years.”

Even the data that started this scare has been quietly “revised.”  Britain’s Hadley Centre (that odd spelling is how you know it is in England) for Climate Prediction and Research, which by its name has to be sort of biased, restated the data collected from 1999 to 2008. The earth did not warm by the .2 degrees Celsius the U.N. predicted, but maybe by only .07 degrees. Most of us would not call a .07 degree change over 10 years cause for alarm; I would call it a rounding error.

Some of you might be shocked that the U.N., with its diplomatically immune gathering of third-world thugs and political hacks, would possibly miss something this big. Perhaps they can save face by writing a sternly worded letter to the climate, and by changing Celsius to Fahrenheit.

Or perhaps they could fund a study to understand the multi-cultural nature of weather and why Hurricane Katrina's attack on New Orleans was so racist.

Al Gore, who has another book to sell, was way ahead of the curve when he changed the name of his Chicken Little road show from “global warming” to “climate change,” thereby hedging against  all possibilities.

The now-endangered environmental opportunists’ lobby has fought to make itself understood to Congress. It was urgent, as everything is with alarmists, since Obama’s popularity is just a footrace against reality. The alarmists had to hit that window in Obama’s first 100 daze, while he seemed willing to spend money on anything remotely plausible that made the federal government more central to our lives.

Some are worried their sham may be revealed by recently hacked e-mails showing attempts to squelch dissenting views on global warming. How can they manufacture moral outrage if the facts don’t support it?

Obama landed his 15-aircraft entourage in Beijing and got into his 70-car motorcade to go lecture the Chinese on global warming. One car was for Obama and the 69 other cars held his brain trust of environmental czars and other “climate change advisors.”  

You have to admit that our American politicians do lead by example.

Ron Hart is a libertarian op-ed humorist whose new book, No Such Thing as a Pretty Good Alligator Wrestler, is available on Amazon.com or at www.RonaldHart.com