Global Warming

I love a good hoax. Properly executed, they provide entertainment by causing some folks to behave irrationally to the amusement of others. The scale is only limited by the means of communication for the thing. One of the largest was H.G.Wells radio broadcast of War of the Worlds. My own personal favorite in recent history was the “Bananas-as-a-hallucinogen” hoax of the late 60s. Think of them as the practical jokes of the mind.

They can be abused, however, and when this happens, they transform from a relatively harmless hoax to an outright fraud, the difference being that a fraud is perpetrated to separate someone from their life, liberty, or property, and is a crime in most societies.

Historic frauds include various end-of-the-world scams involving perps predicting the imminent demise of everybody, and promising salvation, or something, to anyone who would turn over their soon-to-be-worthless worldly goods to them. Several of these turned out not too badly when the instigators, apparently believing their own prophecies, neglected to leave town in a timely manner with the most portable of the worldly goods, and were treated to their very own apocalypse by their former devotees.

I am NOT advocating that anyone set out to make their living by becoming a professional grafter, but if you must, the best way to run one of these is to describe some vaguely defined, but definitely bad outcome that can only be forestalled by a modest, but regular sacrifice. Money, for example. An example of this is the ongoing NPR fund drive, without which, NPR would have to rely exclusively on taxpayer funding. Donate, they say, or else we’ll be shut down. Unlikely, I say.

The best scam yet, millennial division, has to be Global Warming. For this, you pick a phenomenon that’s been going on since the rocks cooled, and inform people that unless they sacrifice mightily, the phenomenon will …. keep on happening, but you won’t like it. The threat is so nebulous that anything at all can be used to “prove” it, and the consequences so awful (Canadian wine, Manhattan populated by gondolas) that no tax is too high, no regulation too onerous, and no bureaucracy too useless if it forestall the coming doom.

Here is a list of things that will happen, or might have already happened, as a result of global warming. For myself, I suppose I can tolerate the beer shortage . I’ll drink rum and suffer.

H.T. to my friend Robert for the disaster list.