Would we care more about global warming if their hotness caused it?

If it ain’t sexy, violent or gonna happen real soon now, it ain’t worth worrying about till later, so says our brains.

If only gay sex caused global warming

No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site. Why? Because it won’t involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium.

The odds of this happening in the next few decades are better than the odds that a disgruntled Saudi will sneak onto an airplane and detonate a shoe bomb. And yet our government will spend billions of dollars this year to prevent global terrorism and … well, essentially nothing to prevent global warming.

Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features — features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

Global warming isn’t trying to kill us, and that’s a shame. If climate change had been visited on us by a brutal dictator or an evil empire, the war on warming would be this nation’s top priority.

We haven’t quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we’ve only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.



  1. skunky says:

    But wait! That paragon of scientific debate, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, says we have nothing to do with global warming. So that should settle it, right? One paid article by a industry flunkie should refute hundred of peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals!

  2. AB CD says:

    >odds of this happening in the next few decades

    Even the pessimistic scientists model things to take much longer, at least when they’re not hyperventilating for the media. Does anyone really think the icecaps will melt in 30 years?

  3. prophet says:

    So there I am trying to enjoy one panty clad girl licking another panty clad girl’s ear and this damn shiny guy on the right keeps blinding me. I am all for equal opportunity, but this has been taken too far!

  4. prophet says:

    Crap…I guess there was an article of vast global importance somewhere on the page. Oh well…I look for it in a minute.

  5. Mr. H. Fusion says:

    Maybe a few more Cat 5 hurricanes slamming into northern Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York might get some attention. Or more Carolina Barrier Islands disappear and people are forced to flee. Or as Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Colorado have longer and more severe droughts.

    That is a good point though. We all feel that it won’t happen here or to us. I think everyone has a certain degree of invincibility built in. That or a lot of denial of the inevitable. Right up to the time we are confronted with the immediate danger.

  6. Uncle Dave says:

    prophet: Just put your hand up to cover up that side… unless your hand… never mind.

  7. Bill says:

    Where did you get that dyke clip? Serious.

  8. Frank IBC says:

    When was the last time a Cat 5 hit the middle atlantic, Mr. Fusion? Are you actually hoping this just for the sake of proving “Global Warming”?

    Also, why does everyone who screams about “global warming” assume that if it is actually occuring as rapidly and irreversibly as they claim it is, that it will only result in desertification, hurricanes, and blizzards(!) , and not an increase in the size of rainforests and a spread of temperate weather into subpolar and even polar regions?

  9. joshua says:

    #6 Uncle Dave….don’t even go there!!!!

    #7…Bill….probably from all that porn spam you’re supposed to ignore.

    Global warming is upon us. I still believe that we humans, as big a bunch of pollutors as will ever populate this planet, are only a miniscule part of the temp rises. Global warming can’t be stopped, as mentioned in the article, it can only be adjusted to and hopefully lived with.
    Of course if you tell the average joe this, they will keep right on polluting the earth, so it’s better if they think we can stop it, and maybe stop killing ourselves and every other species by pollution.

    And, if global warming looked as good as those people in the photo, most humans would be embracing it, not trying to stop it.

  10. AB CD says:

    #5 Isn’t that the plot of State of Fear?

  11. tkane says:

    Erk – OK, so if someone had the magic switch to stop all production of greenhouse gases in a day or two, are there any studies showing how long it would take to cool the planet back down? Nah, didn’t think so.
    Don’t get me wrong, I think we need to move forward with the greenhouse gas problem. But when the planet starts cooling again by about 2025 or so, I don’t want the pollution problem slid to the back burner again. Cool it with the global warming stuff – we can’t do anything about it.

  12. John Wofford says:

    Prophet: Photo editing software. Crop the girls, lose the dude (unless your wired the other way), blow up whats left and install as wallpaper.

  13. Sean says:

    So that’s Dvorak with his shirt off! Who’d have believed it?


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