Climate Change's "patient zero"

Andrew Bolt rounds up the reports on the first recorded case of Climate Change Derangement Syndrome:

Psychiatrists have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" — and they haven't even yet got to [Australian PM] Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".

"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies."

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.

I'm still skeptical about the whole "global warming"/"global climate change" thing, and I'm even more skeptical about the demands of activists (and government officials) that we need to radically change our lifestyles in order to combat climate change. It may well be happening, and it might even be significantly due to human action, but to overhaul the entire course of western civilization seems a vast over-reaction to what is not yet confirmed scientific fact.

If the planet is warming up, and if this warming is predominantly due to the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then we still need to evaluate what the most likely results of this change will be — and not just point to the most extreme apocalyptic vapourings of the most hysterical and imaginative activists. It is not as though the planet has not warmed and cooled over long periods of time in the past (see the little ice age and the medieval warm period, for example).

If it turns out that the planet is warming to a level that makes it difficult for humans to continue to live in certain areas, then some action may well be required, but the sudden stampede of the credulous (and the politically ambitious) to support vast overarching controls over the economy just can't end well: central control of economies has been disastrous in almost every instance, and there's no reason to believe that doing it to prevent/reduce climate change would be any different.