Global Warming Psychosis

That's my diagnosis, after reading this piece in the Wall Street Journal today.  The original story in the Independent Online is here.

There are a lot of poorly supported stats and statements in The Independent story.  For instance,

[t]he World Health Organisation tells us that already 150,000 people die each year as a result of climate change.

Using what yardstick to identify these deaths as due to 'climate change'?  Even the story in The Independent states:

The astonishing storms of the past year are consistent with this, although scientists say it is not yet possible to link them to global warming directly. (my emphasis)

And how exactly global atmospheric warming, if it is really occurring, causes earthquakes and tsunamis I have no idea.  But it does provide a launching pad for the environmentalists to mount their soapboxes once again.

I guess they're looking forward to the release of Chicken Little.

UPDATE: More here from Power Line, of course, including links to video of the tsunami at impact.  The AFP story referenced includes an excerpted quote from "environmental expert" Jeff McNeely, chief scientist at the World Conservation Union.  His bona fides are displayed a little less glowingly here in an article by Tom McFeely, an independent Canadian journalist who was covering the Kyoto meetings in 1997.

Ominously, McNeely started his own presentation by displaying some charts that compared increases in population with increasing energy use and food consumption. The implication was clear: the earth's root ecological problem is a surplus of human beings. Global warming -- "particularly when coupled with population growth" -- will lead to a loss of biodiversity, McNeely warned. "This is basically the problem we're dealing with all the time."

That's the problem, too many darned humans.  Just like Paul Ehrlich said in his 1968 book The Population Bomb.  Ehrlich's predictions of doom never came to pass of course, and were thoroughly discredited in an article for Investors Business Daily by Michael Fumento.