by J.M. Schell

Created on: October 22, 2008

Doom, Political Style.

Whatever happened to Global Warming? Well, it stopped. The mild warming the planet had been experiencing, topping out at a massive 1-degree F average increase (most of which occured in the 1930s) stopped um, cold in 1998. So, true believers in Anthropogenic Climate Change (AGW) have been doing yeoman's work to change the hearts and minds of people. Now, it's not that humans are causing the planet to get warmer, necessarily, it's that we're causing climate to change from its "normal" static state, and that we are causing instead "climate change." Today, any change in climate can be laid squarely at the feet of evil humans.

AGW is not the first (nor is it likely to be the last) "scientific" the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it (TEOTWAWKI) scare. It's just the most successful, to date. And it should be. It's proponents and those who stand to gain power and wealth from it have learned the lessons of the past, and have used the political correctness in which the American (and W. European) education and media systems are mired to force politicians to accept AGW as a fact and to begin doing things that will increase the power of the movement and the wealth and power of its elite leaders.

The 1960s and 1970s were a hotbed of TEOTWAWKI theories. It began with Rachel Carson's television documentary (and book) "Silent Spring" (CBS, April, 1963) and ended with major American news magazines running cover stories about the "coming Ice Age." Carson's documentary savaged American sport hunters through imagery of men and boys (and some women and girls) heading out on crisp autumn mornings like Chinese troops swarming on Cho Sin reservoir, intent upon the indiscriminate slaughter of anything that moved.

Through clever manipulation of the imagery, Carson was able to convince urban Americans that hunting was a barbaric practice engaged in by savage, uneducated hillbillies driven by unquenchable bloodlust. She predicted that if "something isn't done," to stop this slaughter that in "just twenty years" (1963 + 20 = 1983) we'd be facing a "silent spring." Today, even urban Americans in places such as Central Los Angeles and Manhattan, face springtime in a cacophonous din of whistling, cheeping, chirruping, grunting, snorting, baying and howling of wildlife. Silent, it's not. Indeed, as many a pet dog or cat in urban areas has found to its misfortune, hungry coyotes, cougasr and bears are encroaching on previously human-only areas in massive numbers. America's big

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