Penn & Teller on Climate Change

It was probably inevitable that Penn & Teller would get around to doing an episode of Bullshit! on climate change:

[. . .] Thursday's episode on environmentalism opened with a morose-looking Penn Jillette waving a magazine as he recited one ecotastrophe after another — drought in Africa, flooding in Pakistan and Japan, snowless winters in New England and Northern Europe — I snapped to attention. ''It says right here in Time magazine — the weather's gone nuts and we humans are to blame!'' Teller wailed. "We have bleeped up the environment and now we're going to pay for it!''

Yeah, that global warming is pretty bad. You know, Al Gore says — oops, never mind. Turns out Penn's not reading from the infamous Time cover story of 2006 on global warming, the one headlined BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. No, this Time is from 1974, and the headline is, ANOTHER ICE AGE? And all those violent paroxysms of nature are the pernicious work of global cooling.

Yes, back in the days of disco, the news media echoed with predictions of the world's imminent demise from ice rather than fire. Newsweek warned that temperatures had already dropped ''a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.'' By 1985, Life declared, "air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching the earth by one half.''

Too bad I won't get to see it until this season's episodes come out on DVD . . .