seems rather a good moment for us, the monsters!, climate-change-holocaust deniers. if al gore is a crazed sex poodle, then the earth is not really growing warmer. wait! what? well maybe that doesn't bear on climate change at all; but it does show you something about american saints. then there's kevin rudd, who famously just kept saying that climate change is the greatest moral crisis mankind has ever faced, like an al gore message therapist. then he decided to back off on limiting carbon emissions when things went politically wonky. by his own account he should have set himself alight in protest outside the australian parliament, or whatever they might call it down there. stop the killing! or whatever it may be. actually, that five minutes where he decided he would chill out rather than suicide-bomb the parliament was the very five minutes that consituted the tipping point, the moment after which the total destruction of everything became inevitable, no matter what we do. kind of a relief, really. now we are free! that's good enough for me and bobby mcghee.

well anyway, remember when human beings were killing one another by the millions in wars and genocides? that time was right now. remember when we developed technology sufficient to destroy life on earth in its entirety? right now, millions of people are dying of poverty and preventable disease. and you're telling me that climate change is the greatest moral challenge we've ever faced?  definitely, in the computer models we constructed. well at least it's the greatest occasion for grandiloquent moral grandstanding by hypocrites and pseudo-scientists. why were martin luther king or mahatma gandhi leading liberation movements for millions of human beings when they could have been grousing about the weather?

when it comes to the question of what is the greatest moral crisis mankind has ever faced, i say turn it over to the scientists. only some great hack in a labcoat can help you define "greatest" or "moral." often when i am considering some terribly immoral act, i turn to "the journal nature" to discover the exact degree of its moral wrongnitude. frankly, i'd just let the objective facts make policy. oddly, the objective facts agree with me, on this as on so many other points.