Environmental Worries Can Be Divided into Three Parts

Trivialities, bullbleep, and the greenhouse effect.

Trivialities are real phenomena that are much less important or intractable than environmentalists like. They include worries about the lower classes doing something uppity in supposedly pristine environments (earlier discussed here), things that can be fixed easily (e.g., lead in gasoline), and the extinction of rare species that had only a limited impact on the ecosystem.

Bullbleep is stuff in the category “Are people still paying attention to this nonsense?” It includes “Eek! Eek! There's a DDT molecule somewhere on Earth!” and the ever popular resource shortage scam. The resource shortage scam is currently being dissected at Coyote blog and also see my earlier comments.

Anthropogenic global warming actually has some evidence to back it up. The loudest advocates might be more certain than they should, but it's likely enough to require a backup plan if it turns out to be a menace. Academic environmentalists are currently making a fuss over it because it's the only alleged environmental crisis that makes even a tiny bit of sense.

By the way, the backup plan can be something that's useless from point of view of imposing the hidden agenda of the Other Side (also see John Schilling's all-purpose response to environmentalists).

To the Other Side: While arguing in favor of the theory that anthropogenic global warming is a crisis, you should look around you. From our point of view, you're standing right next to people saying that “Nuclear power killed my poodle.”