Read the latest Newsweek, and you’ll find writer Sharon Begley’s latest scary tale of the dangers of climate change.

I won’t bore you with most of the details, but I feel compelled to highlight one passage:

It’s such a polite, unthreatening word: “adapt.” The kind of thing you
do as you roll with the punches or keep a stiff upper lip, modifying
your behavior to a new situation. But as it will be used in 2008,
adaptation is a euphemism for widespread, expensive changes that will
be needed to cope with climate change. Although some adaptations will
be modest and low tech, such as cities’ establishing cooling centers to
shelter residents during heat waves, others will require such herculean
efforts and be so costly that we’ll look back on the era beginning in
1988, when credible warnings of climate change reached critical mass,
and wonder why we were so stupid as to blow the chance to keep global
warming to nothing more extreme than a few more mild days in March.

What Ms. Begley fails to address is the costly, “herculean efforts” that would have been needed to make any impact on climate ? in 1988, now, or in the future. I make this point because Begley’s argument follows a pattern in which global warming alarmists typically ignore or downplay the massive changes required to make any impact on climate. They also like to ignore the science, ridicule dissent from the dogma, and/or misuse data.

At least the Goracle, in presenting his “lawyer’s brief” for the dangers of climate change, did not downplay the costs of trying to address the issue. He called for a “wrenching transformation” of our lives to deal with the issue. That’s a far cry from the message sent in the excerpted paragraph above. Begley suggests we could have avoided today’s “crisis” by taking simple steps 20 years ago.