More Global Warming Hysteria

I don't watch much TV; mainly because I'm too busy. But partly because there's not a lot on that I think is worth watching. Tonight, a Sunday evening, I was flipping through the channels and ran across an old favorite, the History Channel. Everybody loves the History Channel. I stopped to see what was on and they were running some show called "Last Days on Earth".

This was a show hosted by Elizabeth Vargas, who I last saw years ago doing news, I think, for the Today show. So, an ostensibly unbiased reporter (as though that actually exists). The show was about all kinds of disasters that might befall us on Earth and wipe out all life: Super-volcanoes, asteroid hits, gamma ray bursts, and our old friend Global Warming, aka "Global Climate Change." I also noticed, looking at the guide for that channel over the next few hours, that several other shows, one called "Mega-Disasters," reported on roughly the same stuff.

Back in my liberal days I used to enjoy shows like these. Now I look at them differently. I see them now as propaganda machines for the Left. They clearly carry an agenda, and they focus on disastrous situations that, in most cases, mankind is utterly powerless to prevent. Knowing this I found myself wondering, "why show this stuff at all? How can we prevent a gamma ray burst?" In other words, what is the agenda? Is there money to be made? Power to be gotten? If people are made better aware, can these things be headed off? It does not make sense that there is no agenda, so what is it?

Ms Vargas was so obviously biased in this show that it just got disgusting. As if to address the claims of the Right that Global Warming is, at worst, a hoax, they had running interviews with various global warming advocates, cutting from one to another every few seconds, spliced with really grainy TV footage -- in every case with the "Fox News" icon at the bottom of the screen -- of various scientists being interviewed and saying that "it's a hoax" or "I don't believe it's happening, I don't believe it's real," this kind of stuff. At the end of all this they had Vargas, seemingly very concerned and serious, ask the question to an off-camera interviewee, "Is there, in fact, any credible debate about whether global warming is real?" At which point the interviewee is revealed to be ..... Al Gore! Now there's an unbiased guy we can ask that question to!

Al, of course, Mr. Nobel Laureate himself, very calm, cool, and collected, pontificates about how there really is no credible debate at all, and that in fact those big bad oil companies have spent millions of dollars to buy off a half-dozen scientists to cook up opposition to, and create confusion about, whether global warming is real. As if that weren't enough, Vargas obliges this by equating it to -- and showing video of -- the tobacco company presidents going up onto Capitol Hill all those years ago and denying, one after another, that nicotine is addictive. And of course because those guys were so obviously lying, global warming "denyers" are also lying! Don't you see the connection?? They even followed that by having one of their other global warming authors (unbiased, right?) equate "global warming denyers" with Holocaust denyers. He flat-out says this!

At that point they cut to commercial and I decided I had seen enough of this tripe. This is just one more example of the arrogance of the Left ("there is no debate!") and why I just don't trust them. This distrust underpins everything I understand about global warming. That is, it's one of the main reasons I don't take it seriously: I don't trust the sources.

I would also point out that, at no time during this barrage of propaganda was there any attempt at all to actually interview any of the global warming dissenters or even engage any of the credible points they have made about why the whole thing is suspect. Instead it was just the standard liberal ad-hominem attack followed by arrogant attitude. Almost as if to say, "there is no persuasive or valid argument to be made against what I am saying, thus anyone who does not agree with me is a fool and fools should be ignored." This is what passes for science from the Left.

Until the Left begins to show some respect for those who disagree with them, they're going to get no traction beyond those who already agree with them. When will they learn this?