This whole climate scare (or should I say hyperventilation?) started with Venus. It was roughly about the time that we discovered Venus had a very hot, crushing atmosphere composed mainly of carbon dioxide that this madness was born. (Goodbye Ice Age scare.) I’ve always thought of it as a form of medical student disease, equivalent to the situation where medical students convince themselves they have the symptoms of the diseases they are studying, leading to much unnecessary anxiety. It’s no surprise to me that Gore was talking about it. Of course, not all analogies are good analogies and comparing a planet with 97% CO2 to one with 0.038% CO2 is fraught with danger. But just as 24-year-old medical students can convince themselves they have diseases basically only seen in 70-year-olds, there are some on this planet who can convince themselves that we have “Venus disease” even when the natural history of the two planets is entirely different. Especially if they are light in the analytical thinking department and lacking in the fundamentals involved. (Which is true of Gore and the senators – and, sadly, most journalists, too, for that matter.)

Ice Age scares went away and were replaced with the global warming scare.