Silly science: Apocalypse Meow

When it comes to religion and politics, color me full-on bohemian. Believe what you will. Vote however you want. Feel free to debate it. Just don't force me under penalty of law to adopt your peculiar orthodoxy of the moment.

Take the restless natives who currently worship at the Church of Global Warming, for example.

They think man-created pollutants doom the planet to horrific climate change. If you question or oppose their environmental solutions (suspiciously akin to anti-capitalist policies, by the way), you're a "denier" on par with those who deny the Holocaust ever happened.

If these adherents to the silly science of global warming were allowed to round up "deniers" into camps, one suspects they would do so to please their god and save the species from itself.

Here's what they think is at stake.

On the current path, sea levels will rise, ice caps will melt and killer storms will wipe out whole cities. Then will come crop failures, the disappearance of coral reefs and the extinction of species.

Temperatures in Des Moines, Iowa, will routinely reach 100 degrees in December. July in Las Vegas will get to 180 degrees (which, as an aside, will not hurt tourism there any more than President Barack Obama already has).

We're on the this eve of destruction as a planet because mankind (read that as "greedy, rich Americans") burns fossil fuels in their power plants, emits carbon dioxide from cars, promotes methane gas from farting cows, harvests tropical forests and over-fertilizes croplands.

And that's not all, my friends. Now there's a new threat the Church of Global Warming must fight. It's the next test for liberal orthodoxy and believers worthy enough to understand the higher level in the Gospel of Global Warming.

It's killer kittens.

Sure, they look cute enough. But don't let Fluffy, Snowball and Whiskers fool you. Cats -- especially the feral kind -- bring us ever closer to the end.

This month's edition of the magazine Mother Jones tells us all about it in an article headlined "Are Cats Bad for the Environment? How feral felines (and their human friends) pounce on the planet." It even includes a handy graph entitled "Apocalypse Meow."

The article draws you in like a feather on a string.

"After all, how much damage could one pathetic little furball really do?" the article's writer asks.

"As it turns out, a lot. Any cat owner who's ever found a mouse corpse thoughtfully placed on her pillow knows that cats are efficient hunters. Domestic cats, officially considered an invasive species, kill at least a hundred million birds in the U.S. every year -- dwarfing the number killed by wind turbines. They're also responsible for at least 33 avian extinctions worldwide. A recent Smithsonian Institution study found that cats caused 79 percent of deaths of juvenile catbirds in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Bad news, since birds are key to protecting ecosystems from the stresses of climate change -- a 2010 study found that they save plants from marauding insects that proliferate as the world warms."

Something must be done about cats. Forced spaying, of course, is an incomplete solution, for what do you do about those wild cats with no owners that hide under your neighbor's house, or at the shed out back?

As if the world depended upon it, we've got to catch 'em and render them harmless. So say the global warmists.

For me, it's hard to take any of it seriously. For all that afflicts the world, we now must debate techniques for trapping cats worldwide (at what cost?), or something a bit more Draconian like, say, open kitty season? Good for the supply of lining for gloves, but probably not a policy anyone would choose to run on any time soon.

Now don't get me wrong, I believe in climate change … if you're talking about the kind that makes it hot in July and cold in December. I also can find room for accepting climate change as a natural phenomenon, like ice ages and such.

But you'll excuse me if I'm just a bit skeptical about the planet coming to an end due, in part, to farting cows and bird-hunting kitties.

Hey, it's a free country and, you know, if that's your thing, then please be my guest. But you'll pardon the rest of us if we can't keep a straight face.

Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@reviewjournal.com), the former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal and a member of the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.