Can You Face Some Unpleasant Facts?

By Gavin DeFreese - Senior Writer
02/06/2007

Rumack: Elaine, you're a member of this crew. Can you face some unpleasant facts?
Elaine: No.

~ from the film Airplane!

Will I be hated by future generations?

Will they dream of the once great cities which now lay in ruins?
Will they know what a polar bear or a penguin looks like? Will
they be able to go out into the open without restrictive protective
garments afraid to bear their skin to the light of the sun?

Will they think I was too arrogant, apathetic, or just too plain
stupid to see the writing on the wall and endless warnings of
the coming conflagration?

This weekend I heard it from almost every talking head on every
channel… global warming is real and it is caused by man! The IPCC
has spent the last five years and countless dollars so that it
can now unequivocally say that man is to blame for climate change
and that we will have to deal with some extreme conditions in
the next 100 years.

Unequivocally that is, as long as you agree with their theory
in the first place.

Maybe they should spend the next five years trying to better
understand the word "unequivocal". Better yet, instead of worrying
about climate change that even Stone Age man proved he could weather
and come out the better for it, maybe we should all be worrying
a little more about terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism instead.
Long before global warming can accurately be blamed for the death
of a single innocent, the deranged hand of man will have claimed
millions.

Worry about global warming in today's times is kind of like worrying
about smoking while playing Russian roulette!

It will not be a two or three degree rise in temperature that
will make future cities uninhabitable, but instead the thermonuclear
fire of rogue a WMD. Polar bears and penguins will be unheard
of by our children, not because the polar environment has vanished,
but because the learning environments have. Women will not be
able to go outside without protective clothing, but it will be
the religious police that cause them to hide their skin, not the
ravaging sun.

Will the next generation scorn my existence because I was too
concerned with what the talking heads of the major networks were
saying about global warming, instead of paying attention to what
the severed heads of Daniel Pearl and Nicholas Berg were bearing
witness?