Mike Corrigan

By Mike Corrigan

BN Columnist

Admit it, you never really liked the climate anyway. All that snow and rain and sun and wind and so on. It is way past time for something new! So, eee-hah!  — Climate Change, bring it on!

And look, it turns out that climate is the “change” Barack Obama promised us in 2008 — or it’s the only real change he’s been able to pull off, anyway. Scientists now say we have until 2020 to reduce carbon emissions significantly, or we’ll see hurricanes hitting New York City in November and polar ice caps melting and the extinction of thousands of interesting animal species such as the Australian human spleen borer and the Kardashian sisters. And clearly, some effects are already being felt.

“See that,” President Obama said just yesterday, as pontoons were being fitted onto Air Force One, “Just as I promised: meaningful change!”

The trouble with climate change is that most Americans don’t believe in it, or don’t want to believe in it, which amounts to the same thing. Wait, what difference does “belief” make, you ask, in the face of data and facts? Why, you science elitist know-nothing! Belief is reality. Psychologists have shown that, when presented with evidence, a man will study it for awhile and then carefully select those four facts which best support what he already believed before he even knew there were even any facts at all to be considered, or a supposed “problem” — and then he’ll change the channel to a different football game. Hey, did you see that hit?

Women are different, but since it’s their belief that men will screw up the world anyway, what else is new? Meanwhile, the man with the four facts argues with someone else who has selected the 74 facts that best fit his side of the argument. You’d think the 74 facts would win, but they do not. Studies show that people need as little as one fact to go on, even if they made the fact up themselves, to support their unshakable belief that what they already thought was right, really is. And so it is with climate change, where the world wonders why America doesn’t face the facts and do something serious about carbon emissions, because the rest of the world wants to believe that America is destroying the Earth, and meanwhile America naturally doesn’t want to believe we’re destroying the Earth, and so we deny that anything is wrong at all, except that they’re taking all the big hits out of pro football for some reason. This is called “running the numbers.”

Here are some of my ideas for controlling climate change, whether it's a problem or not.

1. Stilt cars. Retrofit all automobiles with those flexible, stilt-like devices as seen in that War of the Worlds movie starring Tom Cruise as a mostly-sane person, for once. If Hollywood can do it, so can America. Hollywood’s gift for prophecy was proven by such groundbreaking films as 2001: A Space Odyssey, which showed us how to launch scary giant babies into near-earth orbit, and Tootsie, which brought on the cross-dressing fad that eventually reached into the highest offices of the FBI.

2. Plutonium rocket packs. Gradually replace the auto and the bus and the commuter train with millions of individual atomic-powered jetpacks, like the kind we’ve been promised for over 50 years now. (Also: We will have to loosen the federal fracking laws for pitchblende, as more plutonium will be needed. This will preserve our track record of saving the environment on the one hand while completely devastating the environment in an entirely new way, on the other hand. This is called “the balance of Nature.”)

3. Change the building codes. Forty percent of American fossil fuel goes to heating homes and offices and other buildings. So, change the codes to make cluster housing mandatory, to the point of putting all the houses in any one town on the same lot. Also, allow only 10 square feet for each family member; ergonometric design has come a long way in the last 20 years. Americans have always wanted to eat, telecommute and go to the bathroom without once getting out of bed. Ta-da! The American Dream, realized!

4. Convert California and Texas into giant solar collectors. One Blue State and one Red State, so it’s fair — and, really, who’d miss either one? I also have big plans for the sacrifices to be made by the swing states, such as Florida.

One problem though, right? How do the politicians know if climate change is real or not? They look at the poll numbers! Of course! America isn’t about problem-solving anymore, despite what you see in those movies where a giant asteroid is heading toward Earth and everyone agrees something involving Bruce Willis should be done about it, it’s about taking a daily poll so that people can decide if they’ve changed their minds about what’s a problem or what isn’t a problem since yesterday’s poll was taken. And, guess what? Nothing ever changes! Because when it turns out that everyone thinks taxes are a problem, politicians spend two seconds thinking about taxes — and then they remember they already made up their minds about taxes a long time ago. So then they turn from the NFL game to an asteroid movie, where someone at least is sure to be blown up.