RON HART: Global warming and the lighter side of certain death

“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun — or wait a minute ... it’s just the opposite — the sun is getting colder every year.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

This is the time of year that we start to get warm again.

For years I called it summer, but apparently it is more than that; it is now global warming. And it turns out we all are responsible for it, or so the story goes.

In another sign that we have gone crazy, remember Al Gore’s Chicken Little PowerPoint presentation on global warming for which his liberal media acolytes gave him an Oscar? He then let them know that he would kill for a Nobel Peace Prize, so he got one of those too.
Well, they are making a stage play out of all this. Yep, cut me off a big slice of that one; where does the line form to invest?

The first act of the play was performed last week when Al Gore went before Congress and told that august body that our government needs to spend $3 trillion of your tax money to save the planet. Then, with that look he gets every time he has just saved the planet, he got in his jet and flew back to his home with the heated pool.

But before that, he hung around the Congressional parking lot and told anyone who would listen that he used to go to school there. Gore is sure to get another Oscar for his emissions during his Congressional performance: Best Overly Dramatic Actor in an Adaptive Fiction.

It is incredible to me that, with no proven science, people want our country, which is going broke from wars of choice and pork barrel spending, to throw trillions of dollars at this theory.

Why must the U.S. again pay for this? Why not T. Boone Pickens and businesses? Why just us? China is billowing smoke and will not pony up. I fear that during the Olympics in Beijing, the shotput might get stuck in the polluted air and not make it back to the ground.

Here is a tip for anyone who has to deal with global warming zealots who try to convert you to their religion.

When they say that the Earth has warmed a half degree in the last 50 years or so, simply ask “Then what is the optimal temperature that you think the earth should be?”

For dramatic effect, I like to get out a pen and act like I am going to write down their number. Do not leave until they give you a number. Perhaps they get all Goldilocks and say that 59 degrees Fahrenheit is too hot, yet 58.7 is “just right.” This silly discussion will point out the absurdity of the global warming alarmists, and it mocks the myth that defines them.

My skepticism comes from two reasons.

First, I lived in Memphis for a long time where the Great Ice Age formed the Mississippi River, when glaciers melted and moved toward the Gulf of Mexico. This is the reason the Delta is so flat and such fertile farm land. The glaciers’ melting lasted from 75,000 to 12,000 years ago — well before Al Gore invented the Internet.

Oddly enough (and I can double check this), it was also well before SUVs roamed the land.

Second, these are the same environmental wackos of my youth who protested nuclear power as dangerous, thus keeping us from building any new plants for 30 years. By sheer incompetence and fear of challenging “science” as espoused by leftists, we ended up with all the coal-fueled plants we have now.

To make themselves seem important, politicians have historically created fears for us to worry about.

Their mantra seems to be that everything is worse than you think, but I can fix it. The murkier and more pretentiously moral the “crisis” the better; they then set out to solve these mythical problems of their own creation. Arguably, they did it with Iraq; the liberals are doing it with global warming.

Then they spend our money, usually with their cronies, to fix the problem. No doubt, problems that do not really exist are much easier to solve, so this one should be a big winner for them.

The Earth is an amazing place, and no doubt we could all drive smaller cars, pick up our trash, AC/heat our homes less and leave this place in as good condition as we found it.

The Earth has been around more than 4 billion years and humans have been driving cars only 100 years, or .000000025 percent of that time. Earth has survived famine, the ice age, volcanoes, wars, mudslides, wildfires, locusts, plagues, floods, droughts, asteroids, tsunamis, earthquakes and a number of boy bands as recently as the late 1990s.

We need to treat Mother Earth sensibly, but she will survive us.

Ron Hart is a southern humorist and political columnist. He worked for Goldman Sachs and was appointed to the Tennessee Board of Regents by Lamar Alexander. He is a Florida resident and can be reached at RevRon10@aol.com.