Conservative Genius: No Need to Fight Global Warming, Cause an Asteroid Might Hit Earth

Posted by Tana Ganeva, AlterNet at 3:25 PM on July 29, 2009.

With Limbaugh et al. steadily redefining "conservative" to mean "crazy, racist paranoiac", it's a good thing Conservatism's intellectual elite have their shit together, or the movement would be in real trouble. Take, for example, Jonah Goldberg, who has crafted an elegant, irrefutable argument against efforts to curb global warming.

Here's how it goes: AN ASTEROID MIGHT HIT EARTH! (so there's no point in investing and working to stop the effects of global warming.) Seriously. That's basically his argument.

Spurred by last week's discovery that a large object had slammed into Jupiter, Goldberg grimly (though excitedly) fantasizes a cataclysmic scenario cobbled together from some Michael Bay/Jerry Bruckheimer movies:

The space flotsam smashes into the solar energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at 50,000 mph with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Millions die. Dust and debris blot out the sun and will chill the planet for years. Crops fail, billions starve. The heat of impact releases torrents of nitrous and nitric acid rain.

So horrendous is the calamity that some even wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.

Alas, there's no time to defrost Al Gore's frozen head to ask his opinion.

Goldberg's suggestion is to stop investing in policies to curb global warming, and instead put all our energy into preventing the Earth's destruction by a meteor. He doesn't really get into why we need to focus on one but not the other. What he does do, though, is accuse scientists who want to fight global warming of ignoring reality to hew to an ideological agenda.

Anyway, none of Goldberg's absurd, twisty non-logic would matter, except that a large number of Americans don't see global warming as a threat. So finding yet more colorful ways to enforce that misconception -- you should be more worried about being a character in a Hollywood disaster movie! -- doesn't exactly help things.

(h/t Whiskey Fire.)

Tagged as: environment, conservatives, global warming, right-wing