What did you do before the climate changed, daddy?

Myron's been too busy partying with the Republicans to do any work recently. The news these days should leave him with a hang-over.

Scientists -- the people who get out of their air-conditioned offices and discover things about the world -- have observed an effect called Global Dimming.

In short, the atmospheric pollution of the last fifty years has cut the sunlight reaching the earth by 20%. This was confirmed after 9-11 when the Americans banned all commercial air-flight and the sun brightened up again.

Since this is a recently discovered phenomenon, it means the numbers that have been going into the Climate Models have been wrong, and their predictions will be under-estimates.

Panic!!! Sell your children! Better yet, don't have any! The former Transport Secretary in the British government, when no longer cocooned in road haulage industry lobbying briefs, has become aware of its direness. It is said that even certifiably insane Tony Blair is concerned, and will broach the subject with his pal George Bush at the G8 summit this summer.

Apparently, Blair believes he can call in some favours for having helped sell the US-led Iraq invasion to the world. There are two things we can add. First, if Blair bothered to put as much commitment into dealing with Climate Change as he did organizing several mass murders in a wholly defenceless country thousands of kilometres away, it would make a good start.

Secondly, this whole Iraq thing was lose-lose from the beginning. When you're dealing with ignorant psychopaths, you don't get thanks for saving them from disaster, and you don't deserve thanks for helping them into one either. There ain't no such thing as lunch sometimes.

Meanwhile, the point of no return for the climate will be breached in 10-20 years. We are so screwed. It's going to happen in our lifetime, not just in our grandchildren's.

I guess this is what you could call Justice.

When we find ourselves in 2030 with 6 billion people on the planet and an intolerable climate, dying like dinosaurs, remember to eat Myron Ebell first. He is a traitor to the species. He lied and played games with the law when he could have helped to put the fire out.

In spite of what was promised by the noble lies of Science Fiction, there will be no technological quick fix, there will be no intervention by space aliens, and there will certainly be no emigration to Mars. This is it, folks. We live on Earth, and we die on it. Money cannot buy a ticket out.

Myron makes it to the movies

"In truth, Marshall felt that Marisa and the boyfriend didn't seem to belong together. He was American, a beefy, red-faced fellow built like a footballer, with longish hair and wire-frame glasses that did not suit his thick features. He looked like a pig trying to appear scholarly." p94.

Third-rate author, Michael Crichton, has written a cameo role for Myron Ebell into his latest Science Fiction blockbuster, State of Denial. In return for this favour, Myron promotes it as the latest must-read book for winding people up. I expect him to quote from its pages as liberally as he does from other sources of fiction, such as The Cato Institute.

In Crichton's novel, the DNA is extracted from the fossil scales of a dying capitalist and used to clone an entire right wing think-tank called The Andromeda Brain. These green lizards then hypnotize the President and convince him that everyone else in the world is a reptile, except themselves. When it's pointed out the almost all environmentalists are hot-blooded and have hair in their wallets instead of Exxon money, a swarm of nanometre-sized killer-bee robots rises from the pulped pages the book to build a quantum foam wormhole that transports everyone back to the year 1492, on that great day when Myron's ancestors arrived in the New World, shortly before they slaughtered the natives to make way for a nation of fat people and their cars.

This novel can be read as a poor parody of the War on Terror, where a small group of neocons have engineered a State of Fear out of nothing, got given tonnes of money, power, and sex, and then created the exact form of suffering they said they were saving us from.

Have you ever wondered how, when there is a episode of mass state terror in a country, like in Stalinist Russia, or Pol Pot's Cambodia, or Suharto's Indonesia, the leaders always find enough capable middle managers happy to organize these killing machines whilst making no attempt to secretly subvert their evil? Myron will do such a job if the salary is good.