Lest we all get distracted by the nationalization of the American auto industry, it’s time for a reminder that humanity’s days are numbered. Impending doom threatens us all, as this feisty planet threatens to hiccup us pathetic mortals right off it. This time the messenger of the end of the world is none other than ABC’s “Good Morning America”.

The world is about to end, or at least that’s according to ABC’s “Good Morning America.” The June 2 segment promoted a new special called “Earth 2100.” The program follows Lucy, a girl born in 2009, and her dramatic story about how if we don’t take drastic measures immediately climate change will cause droughts, floods, mass migration, and starvation.

This may sound straight from a science-fiction movie, but “Good Morning America” went to great lengths to assure viewers this wasn’t science fiction and that by airing this series they were changing journalism. Bob Woodruff, host of the special, called making up what will happen in the future “a different kind of journalism.” The segment quoted him saying, “not a prediction of what will happen, but what might happen.”

Just in case you don’t believe ABC’s prognostication, we are now being told that global warming is the real culprit behind the disappearance of Air France Flight 447.  So now it’s not safe to drive or fly!  Next thing you know, global warming is going to cause horses to spontaneously explode.

Museum edition:

Water, 16 feet of it, smothers the southern tip of Manhattan, covering the landfill of Battery Park City. Tropic coral reefs are stripped of life, their rocks pocked with contusions. Polar bears rummage in junk heaps seeking food amid construction debris. Glaciers split into ice chips, floods ravage coastlines, droughts parch the Earth and forest fires rage untamable.

If the End of Days were going to be portrayed in a museum exhibition, it might look like the array of natural disasters, both real and imagined, that can be found at “Climate Change,” which opens Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History.

There is something almost biblical about these worst-case scenarios, apocalyptically suggested even in the subtitle: “The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future.” And if the plagues promised with global warming don’t include an onslaught of frogs, there is more than enough to worry about: the exhibition predicts proliferation of malaria and desperate foraging of wildlife.

Just don’t wait for the left to get all up in arms about “fear mongering.”  You’re only discouraged to talk about threats that are real, apparently.

And by we, I mean the polar bears.

Polar bears and other rare species are in danger of dying out, scientists fear, as latest figures show the Artic sea ice is at record lows.

Scientists from the World Wildlife Fund, who are recording the ice cover over the North Pole, said less ice is predicted in the Arctic this year than in any other.

Experts say this not only means a loss of habitat to species like polar bears and loss of livelihood for indigenous peoples but could speed up global warming as water absorbs heat rather than reflecting the sun’s rays back into space.

Dr Martin Sommerkorn, senior climate change advisor at WWF International’s Arctic Programme, said: “We are expecting confirmation of 2008 being either the lowest or the second-lowest year in terms of summer ice coverage.

“This means two years in a row of record lows since we started recording Arctic sea ice coverage.“

I bolded the key point there, in case you missed it.  Sometimes I wonder how smart people can be so dumb.  I don’t know exactly how long we’ve been recording sea ice coverage, but it can’t be very long, at most around 50 years.  Polar bears, to make an understatement, have been around a bit longer than that.  They’ve survived with less ice, with more ice, with warm temperatures, with cold temperatures.  They’re not so delicate as to whither and die from fluctuations within, in the perspective of earth’s climactic history, a normal temperature range.