GET ON A BUS AND TAKE IT TO THE PEOPLE!!!

"DALLAS, April 10 (UPI) -- Singer Sheryl Crow wants her fans to do more than have some fun -- she's asking audiences during her U.S. tour to join the fight against global warming. "Mother Earth is a living organism and when she gets sick we get sick," Crow told a crowd at Southern Methodist University in Dallas during her kick-off performance Monday.

"My answer to everything is get on a tour bus and take it to the people," Crow commented."

That's right, Sheryl, the answer to everything is to hop on a large, convenience-filled bus, followed by a truck(s) carrying all your props, maybe another bus with your crew. Who knows how many other buses, vans, planes, will be used by your groupies and hop from city to city. Eleven cities to be exact. It's the answer to everything.

"Taking it to the people" in this case means "mobilizing students to help end global warming." Right. Just let them finish exams first, then chug a few beers, and maybe explain it all to mom and dad and get them to go see "An Inconvenient Truth" as a family fun night.

What's Sheryl going to do? Show clips from Gore's movie? Hand out brochures? Lecture? God forbid! College students hear enough lectures. Assuming the college students attending her concert stick around for any climate-change lecture or keep the brochures (anyone ever seen the litter after a concert?), what will they learn from it?

They'll learn that here's another hypocritical rich celebrity traveling around in style preaching to the great unwashed. She will be telling them about the future she wants them to inhabit, a future that will provide a life less comfortable than the one they are currently living. More darkness, less travel, at least less comfortable travel, more expensive everything, (as food crops get shifted to biofuels all foods will become more expensive), and more importantly, less freedom. Great incentive, Sheryl.

Ubiquitous activist Laurie David is part and parcel of this. She and Sheryl formed the tour idea as "two girls bonding over global warming." How sweet. But there is another girl out there who doubts the veracity of Laurie and Sheryl's professed warming warning. Camille Paglia at Salon.com gives vent to her skepticism on the matter. I take her considerably more seriously than I do Sheryl Crow. Stick to your day-job, kiddo.

Here are some of Paglia's comments. It's a long bit to have copied and pasted here, but interesting nonetheless.

"...I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.

I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" on cable TV recently, I wasn't able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore's lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming -- which is blatantly untrue -- he forfeited his own credibility.

Environmentalism is a noble cause. It is damaged by propaganda and half-truths. Every industrialized society needs heightened consciousness about its past, present and future effects on the biosphere. Though I am a libertarian, I am a strong supporter of vigilant scrutiny and regulation of industry by local, state and federal agencies. But there must be a balance with the equally vital need for economic development, especially in the Third World...."