I’ve realized the other day that the reason I may be feeling so blasé about the whole “Nothing Less Than The Survival Of The World Is At Stake!!!” hysteria is that I’ve been desensitized by watching too many “Nothing Less Than The Survival Of The World Is At Stake!!!” movies. In every one, it all works out somehow. Just last weekend, I tried to watch The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen on DVD. I didn’t get very far, but the survival of the world was totally at stake — I mean, totally; the world just couldn’t have been more imperiled — and I have to assume that the heroes saved it nonetheless, because, obviously, we’re all still here.

I also know from my favorite comedy ever,* The Day After Tomorrow, that even if a global catastrophe starts with the Arctic cracking down the middle, like an ice cube in a cup of hot tea, and proceeds to displacing water from the New York Harbor all the way up Fifth Avenue, the world can still be saved by the evil skeptics finally caving in and signing a piece of paper, which directly and instantly causes the blizzards to be replaced by calm and bright sunshine.

However, while we’re on the subject of pieces of paper, despite all the name-calling and the degree of contempt that only the true believers can muster to heap on the infidels,** the abyss between the faith in man-made global warming and the common sense has grown so wide that even Alexander Cockburn of The Nation weighs in on the side of the latter:

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics the CRU [Climatic Research Unit] e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW [anthropogenic global warming]. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

The Nation, people! The Nation! (For those not familiar with The Nation, I wish I could make the italics lean the other way, to illustrate.) On the side of common sense and intellectual honesty. The argument for blaming the weather on mankind’s activities must have worn thin indeed because hell finally froze over.  Cockburn continues to make another good point:

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention – geoengineering – could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it’s a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it’s a terrible tragedy.***

Temperatures may go up and down for reasons best known to nature itself, but pollution of the air and water and destruction of land is pretty real and certainly man-made. Indonesian forests are being cleared and orangutans squeezed out because there’s demand for palm oil, which, apparently, goes into a lot of foodstuffs. The thought that palm oil, under the all-purpose label “vegetable oil” goes into chocolate, is gross enough to put me off chocolate. I don’t want palm oil in my food. I’d rather live and let orangutans live. Where are they supposed to go? To the suburbs?

Speaking of the suburbs and clearing of the forests, since I do believe golf courses have to be man’s most solipsistically useless invention, I wish any new developments of cookie-cutter bedroom communities could be built directly on the golf courses, without clearing any more land for them. I even wrote a letter to Santa about that; I’m checking my e-mail for reply every five minutes. It’ll leave the golfers out in the cold, but they’ll be fine. They can bunk up with the orangutans.

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* It wasn’t intended as a comedy. Those are the best kind.

** The serving wenches of the Big Oil interests.

***The Nation requires a subscription to read the whole article, but it’s reprinted in full here.

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