Global Warming: Bob Dylan says "Where's the global warming?..."

The Live Earth concerts, which start this Saturday, July 7, are also one last chance for Baby Boomers to relive the "flower power" activism of the '60s. In a recent interview in Rolling Stone, former Vice President Al Gore invoked music icon Bob Dylan to promote the importance of these concerts. Citing Dylan's '60 anthem "The Times They Are A-Changin'". Gore rambled: "What's the old Bob Dylan line? 'Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Rattle your windows' - what's the rest of it? - 'for the times they are a-changin'."

But there's just one problem with invoking Dylan to hype the global warming scare. And that is that Dylan himself has expressed skepticism -- to the same magazine -- at the notion that global warming is a catastrophe. When he was asked by Rolling Stone founder and publisher Jann Wenner in the magazine's 40th anniversary issue if he worried about global warming, Dylan replied with an unexpected rejoinder. He asked Wenner, "Where's the global warming? It's freezing here." Wenner, who has blanketed Rolling Stone and his other magazine Men's Journal with doom-and gloom climate change stories (that often bash my organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute), quickly moved on to other topics after he received his comeuppance.

Yet Dylan's latest statement may signal that in the global warming debate, the times are changing. Even independent-minded celebrities are now questioning the establishment media orthodoxy that the debate over global warming and its effects are all but over. In a phrase familiar to those who study pop culture, it appears that the global warming scare may have "jumped the shark."

"Jump the shark" refers to the precise moment at which a TV program loses momentum or begins the process of losing the element that made the show popular. The phrase comes specifically from an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie jumps over a shark with water skis. Fans argue that the show became less realistic after that. The web site JumpTheShark.com is dedicated to fans debating the precise moment their favorite programs "jumped the shark."

But "jumping the shark" can also refer to a trend or even a line of argument. And as a post on the web site Moonbattery.com has noted, environmentalists' sky-is-falling global warming rhetoric is jumping the shark because of its inconsistencies and contradictions. Bob Dylan has always been something of an iconoclast and has strayed from the party line more than his liberal fans would like to admit (for a list of examples see the web site RightWingBob.com.). But I think on a basic level, it's hard to convince a man who grew in the bitter cold climate of Hibbing, Minnesota that a few degrees of warming over the next century will be that much of a problem.

Other rock stars are questioning the very purpose of the concert. Bob Geldof, who put together the "Live Aid" concerts of the '80s to combat starvation in Africa, asked: "Why is [Gore] actually organizing them? To make us aware of the greenhouse effect? ... We are all [expletive] conscious of global warming."

Similarly, the Who's Roger Daltrey told the London Sun: "I can't believe it. Let's burn even more fuel." Then, in a rare bit of humility for famous entertainers, Daltrey argued that it's possible that rock stars may not have all the answers. "We have problems with global warming, but the questions and the answers are so huge I don't know what a rock concert's ever going to do to help," he said.

And the latest is from the new band Arctic Monkeys, who expressed skepticism about the concert to the French wire service AFP. "It's a bit patronizing for us 21 year olds to try to start to change the world," drummer Matt Helders said. "Especially when we're using enough power for 10 houses just for (stage) lighting. It'd be a bit hypocritical."
......From American Thinker magazine