Our man in Australia, BH sends this from Sydney's Telegraph newspaper, home to the excellent columnist Tim Blair, who says that Britain’s Independent newspaper reported in 2000 that future UK children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.” The paper claimed that “warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – [will] produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries.”
Happily, writes Blair, few of the alarmists’ dire outcomes have come to pass. The worst of it was some out-of-sequence suburban plant activity down in Melbourne, Australia, where writer Suzy Freeman-Greene described a few months ago how global warming had brought terrifying climate change to her street: “Spring bulbs started coming up in a neighbor’s garden in May.”
"For a public conditioned to anticipate molten polar ice caps, empty dams and – for all I know – the spontaneous combustion of housecats, a few rogue bulbs just aren’t going to cut it. You can imagine how this absence of disaster is going down in climate alarmist circles. The poor dears are beside themselves.
“From depression to substance abuse to suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder, growing bodies of research in the relatively new field of psychology of global warming suggest that climate change will take a pretty heavy toll on the human psyche as storms become more destructive and droughts more prolonged,” wrote Madeleine Thomas last week for the online journal Grist.
“For your everyday environmentalist, the emotional stress suffered by a rapidly changing Earth can result in some pretty substantial anxieties.”
But further reading of Thomas’s piece indicates that environmentalists are not wigging out because of climate change, but precisely because the climate isn’t changing. She quotes Washington DC forensic psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren, who says climate warriors are suffering from something called “pre-traumatic stress disorder.” As Thomas explains, this is a term describing “the mental anguish that results from preparing for the worst, before it actually happens.”