Psychiatrists Diagnose 'Climate Change Delusion'

Psychiatrist from the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia have given a name to the depressed psychological state resulting from belief in - and crippling guilt from - the impending death of the planet. (No, it isn't The Gore Complex.) Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun (Australia) writes :

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" - and they haven't even yet got to 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.

(If you haven't kept up with Australian politics, Kevin Rudd, now the PM of Australia, is an enthusiastic believer in global warming.) This poor kid was so brainwashed, so obsessed with guilt over his big, inexcusable carbon footprint that he couldn't bring himself to drink water. I don't doubt that there are many more like him, who are taught that for every breath he draws, some critter will die somewhere.

For those of us who have lived through the many apocalyptic scenarios that have dominated the news over the years (and come to nothing) this kind of unquestioning faith may be hard to understand. But, this is the first eco-scare, I think, to get worldwide political support, together with intolerance of opposition. (Translation: the first internationally recognized opportunity for a massive money-grab via unfettered hysteria.) But Andrew Bolt is one of those who doesn't buy the premise:

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ."

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this -- and must -- but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

Looks like the Brits are beginning to wonder, too, and are looking at the dangerously high price tag. Christopher Booker, in today's Telegraph, puts it this way in his article, "Our leaders are in carbon-cloud cuckoo land":

Despite the best efforts of the global-warming lobby to keep the scare going, the northern hemisphere enjoyed its coldest winter for decades, and this summer has shown the curve sinking even lower.

Even the warmists are having to find excuses for the fact that their theory doesn't exactly seem to be holding up, conceding that the next 10 years may see a period of global cooling, before the "underlying warming trend" returns worse than ever.

Other scientists point out that, rather than look to CO2 for an explanation of global temperatures, a much more convincing link can be seen in the activity of the sun, with current sunspot levels having dramatically fallen to levels associated with historic periods of global cooling recorded in the past.

Yet just when such huge question marks are being raised over the "CO2 equals warming" theory, our politicians have swallowed it whole, as an act of blind faith - using it to justify such massive costs to our economy that our whole way of life seems destined to change significantly for the worse.

The third respect in which all this is becoming seriously dangerous applies specifically to us here in Britain. While Gordon Brown prattles about wind turbines, and plays silly games for the cameras with electric cars, Britain within a few years is facing the near certainty of a massive shortfall in our electricity supplies.

By 2015, thanks to the obsolescence of our nuclear power plants and the forced closure of nine of our major coal and oil-fired power stations under EU anti-pollution rules, we are due to lose 40 per cent of our current generating capacity - and Mr Brown hasn't the slightest practical idea of how to fill the gap.

Forget the nonsense about a 50 per cent cut in carbon emissions by 2050. Our Government has already committed Britain to go even further, by imposing a statutory cut of 60 per cent through its Climate Change Bill.

But long before that, unless those who rule us come down out of cloud cuckoo land very fast, our lights will go out, our computers will shut down, our economy will judder to a halt and we shall face a national catastrophe. We may well be meeting that 60 per cent target sooner than we think - but not for reasons that reflect well on our politicians, of any party.

The idea that ambitious politicians are a serious threat isn't a new one. But now it's not just the global cash-grab. It's making the kids sick. Who knows how many are out there, mentally and emotionally scarred, maybe for life. So let's give the histrionics a rest okay? It's for the children.

(H/T Youchki.)