Irritability in Mice

When you've wandered as long as I have through the parched terra cognita of climate denialism, a dirty puddle of alkali water can look an awful lot like an oasis.

By which I mean to imply that whatever other charges you can make against Paul Driessen, you can't fault him for a lack of originality.

Alarmists have blamed global warming for hurricanes, tornadoes, malaria and even the Minneapolis bridge collapse, teenage drinking, terrorism, suicides and "irritability" in mice.

The problem with this argument is that the people who believe in global warming are liberals (or worse), which means they're in favor of teenage drinking, terrorism, and suicide.

Other than that, though, he makes a good case. I agree that the Grand Guignol of climate alarmism has been too reliant lately on the threat of peevish mice; even the Sterno drinkers in the cheap seats have been shrugging it off.

I think we'd do better to pretend that the meltdown of Greenland's ice sheet is unnatural, so that it'll worry people instead of making them feel cheerful and confident.

The rest of Driessen's piece is a bit more predictable, but it does have its moments. The gist of it is that AGW will soon be thoroughly discredited. This means that the dupes, opportunists, Luddites, dirt-worshippers, and unregenerate Marxists who currently comprise the bulk of AGW's true believers will move on to greener pastures (in Greenland, perhaps!), and only lunatics will be left. In other words, everything will change while remaining the same.

In response to the charge that denialism is a particularly lucrative form of wingnut welfare, Driessen explains that he knows you are, and asks what he is:

Newsweek said climate holocaust "deniers" had received $19 million from industry, to subvert the "consensus" it claims exists about global warming. It made no mention of the $50 billion that alarmists and other beneficiaries have received since 1990 from governments, foundations and corporations.

As cute as it is to see Driessen invoke the effects of subversion to suggest that there was never anything to subvert, it's nothing compared to his exquisitely blasé allusion to "other beneficiaries."

Could he mean, say, NOAA or NASA? Or the NSF? Probably not; they'd surely qualify as alarmists. The same goes for these dirty hippies. And these ones.

After racking my brains for the better part of five minutes, all I can figure is that he's talking about the nuclear industry.