Cooler heads prevail against climate panic

All that is nothing, however, to the climate fearmongering in Newsweek, which insists the global-warming Rapture is already underway.

“Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions,’’ Newsweek intones, pointing to tornadoes in the United States, floods in Australia and Pakistan, and drought in China. “From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone.’’ This is what comes of burning fossil fuels for energy, which has increased atmospheric CO2 levels by 40 percent above what they were before the Industrial Revolution. “You haven’t seen anything yet,’’ Newsweek preaches. “Batten down the hatches.’’

By now, of course, few things are more familiar than predictions of the environmental catastrophe to which the use of carbon-based energy has supposedly condemned us. In 1992, Al Gore claimed that “evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin;’’ nearly 20 years later he is still warning of “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.’’ Like Camping, Gore and other climate alarmists keep forecasting a Day of Doom that never arrives. And like Camping — who now says the world will end on Oct. 21 — they continue to be sure that disaster is just around the corner.