My daily newspaper informs me that “winter blast leaves Britain shivering.” The poor country, apparently, is in “the grip of the worst winter in 40 years.” I hear on the news that Germany is running out of road salt as car accidents multiply exponentially. Other European countries appear to be in similar straits. Major cities in China have ground to a halt. Much of Canada is shoveling itself out of surf-like snowdrifts and portions of the United States are not much better off. Could this be global cooling? Is the scientific consensus concerning global warming wrong? Has the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change been hoaxed by a cabal of unscrupulous meteorologists?
Not to worry, folks. We all know that global warming is an irrefutable fact and that our feeling of alarm for the planet is fully justified. We know that temperatures are skyrocketing, that anthropogenic CO2 is clogging the atmosphere, that ocean levels are rising as they did in the time of Noah, that South Pacific islands will soon be submerged and within a generation or two New York City will be under water — has not NASA scientist James Hansen assured of this dire probability? We know that polar bears are heading toward extinction as the ice floes dissolve beneath them, that the Antarctic is withering as we speak under the gaping ozone hole, that asthma sufferers are gasping their last by the stretcher-load, that the pavement is sizzling beneath our feet, and that the end of the world is nigh.
Let us not be deceived by what we think we are observing and thus relax our guard. Let us instead take comfort in knowledge. For we also know that we cannot trust the mainstream media, whose accounts are contaminated by a prior agenda. All these articles, reports, and broadcasts about plunging temperatures and unprecedented snowfalls, about entire countries unable to cope with wintry disasters or dig themselves out of subnivean mountain ranges, about thousands of cars stuck on highways and motorists needing to be rescued by emergency teams of army reservists — all this, as we should be aware, is the result of a conspiracy to delude the public about the truth of GGW, or galloping global warming.
The effect of this accumulating disinformation is so insidious that, even as I look out my window here in this little town in western Quebec, I could swear I see vast waves of snow cresting above the windowsill and icicles hanging from the eaves like stalactites. I stare at the thermometer nailed to the garage wall and note it reads -21 degrees centigrade and, dear lord, I can almost believe what I’m seeing. But I know deep down that I am the victim of a nefarious media campaign orchestrated by shadowy powers to trigger delusions and hallucinations, intended to convince me that snow storms are battering the countryside, that the mercury is plummeting, that traffic has come to a standstill, and that the power outage we have just undergone due to over-freighted tree branches falling on electric wires are all products of a media-infected imagination. Plainly, we must fight vigorously against the influence of such manufactured apparitions and cleverly induced mirages.
Consequently, I take consolation in what I really know, and so should all of us. That half of Europe is paralyzed, that the northwestern United States and huge swaths of Canada experienced whiteouts even during the Copenhagen conference convened to combat global warming, that Copenhagen itself was in the midst of an intense cold spell, and that the coming months, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, promise even worse — all these undeniably chimerical manifestations should not disturb us in the least.
For the truth is unassailable. It is growing demonstrably hotter. Winters are rapidly becoming spring-like and summers are unlivably torrid. Hurricanes are ripping up our cities and devastating our farmlands. Voles and moles and all the little creatures of the earth are rapidly dying off. Mutant fish are baking on the rocks. The Himalayas are vanishing. Greenland is breaking up. Tuvalu is a goner. The air is thick with unbreathable effluents. If we do not react decisively, go carbon neutral, install cap and trade no later than tomorrow or the day after, listen deferentially to United Nations bureaucrats, and transfer trillions of dollars to voracious third-world sinkholes — in short, if we do not push for immediate legislation to reverse the industrial revolution, at least in the West, and provide carbon credits to benefit the developing regions of the world at our expense, the fat will soon be melting off our bones.
Let us rally, then, behind our political leaders and climate prophets to avert catastrophe, and let us be ever vigilant against the evidence of our senses, a phenomenon that has been much exaggerated. For we know three undoubted things. First, that Gaia is mad as hell. Second, that weather is not climate, so we may freely disregard cold, darkness, and frozen immobility — assuming, of course, these are realities, which they clearly are not. And third, that as human beings we are susceptible to manipulation and propaganda. This behooves us to do our utmost to resist the brainwashing techniques of the media besieging us with lying reports about record cold temperatures and relentless blizzards of snow and ice shutting down whole nations.
None of this is happening and seeing is not believing. We are as a species far too easily deceived and always ready to confer authority on those who claim to be experts, such as climate skeptics and newspaper reporters. Are we so credulous as to fall for the myth of aggravated winters that is being foisted upon us? Will we submit to this kind of mind massage? Are not our intuitive faculties, supplemented by computer models and the reliable findings of such organizations as the Hadley Climate Research Unit, sufficient to dispel the phantoms of empiricism? Global cooling indeed! For the facts are in, the science is settled, and global warming is threatening our very survival even as I write, the sweat pouring from my brow. The time has come to act.
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