Here's an idea: Let's do nothing

This is it. I think I am officially done.

I know this  post will come as a shock to the lovely people at Change.org who hired me only a month ago, but I have had enough.

For the past few weeks the post-Copenhagen climate community has been dragging around like kids after Christmas. All the decorations are gone, it's time to go back to school and they didn't even get what they really wanted. It seems every major media outlet has run some kind of "post-Copenhagen blues" story about gleeful warming deniers and looking to what's next. I hear Sarah Palin was so excited she named a moose "Copey" and then shot it.*

So I'd like to propose a new strategy. On behalf of the scientific community, I say we just give up. Yes, that's right. Throw in the towel and buy ourselves an Escalade  with a DVD player and as much air conditioning as those suckers can muster. Let's buy Bolivian strawberries in January and leave the windows open all year. Why not? After all, we warned them, didn't we?

Thousands of the world's best scientists got together and produced perhaps the most comprehensive look at global atmospheric processes ever created.  Then we won the Nobel Peace Prize and got to meet Anderson Cooper! What more do we want? Our own reality show (how about Jon and Kate Plus 8°F)?

We busted our butts in windowless labs for decades compiling meticulous data and refining models only to have them dismissed by a handful of lobbyists with B.A.s in public policy. Activists, scientists and green builders, stop working so hard to save the planet. Take a load off. Whatever happens it's God's will. Let's start some hedge funds instead.

After all, there is a minute chance that the deniers are right and that warming is related to changes in the solar cycle. Granted, none of the models really agree with this and we know next to nothing about solar cycles, but I like to roll the dice on this sort of thing. Why not? "Solar cycles" is vaguely sciencey enough to sound plausible coming from a radio host who has never seen the inside of a lab.

The bottom line is I live in a rich country with very little weather-dependent disease. Droughts are bad, but I can live without California rice and Texas cotton. I can also live without wildlife that doesn't respond well to sudden climate shifts. Anyway, most of these things will happen when I am either dead or mumbling to myself in a retirement community built over a former wetland. I don't have kids and even if I do, they will presumably be more into playing Rock Band 5 than going outside.

So in the interests of avoiding confrontation and building consensus, we give up. I don't really care how we do it. My vote would be for NASA and the IPCC to do a teary farewell show on Oprah. We go in front of the nation and world and say, "We were wrong and you were right." Then we just sit back and wait.

Of course all of this comes with a light at the end of the tunnel. In 90 years,  the Earth will be at 500 ppm CO2, drought and fire will have caused global strife and the coral reefs will all be bleached. Arctic ice will be gone and Greenland's will be on its way.  Weather patterns will look a lot like a permanent El Nino and Sunset Magazine will vote Tuscon as "The Closest You Can Get to Hell on Earth."

Then, after all that, our kids and grandkids can come out of their air conditioned bungalows, hold a press conference and - wait for it - in one voice say, "We told you so."

Almost as good as stopping it from happening in the first place, right?

* Don't bother checking, I just made that up.