Tipping Point? Not Yet, Apparently.

James Taranto in the WSJ here uses the power of the Internet to retrieve wild global warming predictions from the past.   This sort of thing is brilliant, and powerfully demonstrates the nuttiness of the climate change hysterics:

• "Global Warming Tipping Point Close?"--headline, ClimateArk.com, Jan. 27, 2004
• "Warming Hits 'Tipping Point' "--headline, Guardian, Aug. 11, 2005
• "Earth at the Tipping Point: Global Warming Heats Up"--headline, Time, March 26, 2006
• "Global Warming 'Tipping Points' Reached, Scientist Says"--headline, NationalGeographic.com, Dec. 14, 2007
• "Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming"--headline, Puffington Host, June 23, 2008
• "Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think"--headline, WSJ.com, April 29, 2009
• "Have We Reached the Tipping Point for Planet Earth?"--video title, StudioTalk.tv, May 11, 2010
• "Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century"--headline, ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011
• "Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?"--headline, BBC website, June 15, 2012
• "In spite of the continued released [sic] of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it's an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point."--Al Gore, interview with Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013

Just how different is this sort of hysteria from the millenial hysteria that the world is coming to an end preached by fringe religious cranks?   Not much, I'd say.  In fact, it seems more and more apparent that global warming is a kind of religion... a version of Druidism perhaps.*

* "The main elements of druidic belief are...

1. Sacredness of all life: A philosophy which deals with the sacredness and divinity of all life in which all life is equal in value. Therefore, humanity is on the same level of importance as plants and animals.
2. The Otherworld: A place of existence beyond our physical senses. It is a place we are supposed to go to when we die but can be visited with the help of meditation, altered states of consciousness, visualizations, chanting, hypnosis, and shamanic trances.
3. Reincarnation: Ancient Druidic practices taught a type of reincarnation in which the soul went to "The Otherworld" between incarnations, which could be in human or animal forms. Most modern Druids hold to this as well.
4. Nature: It reconnects us with nature, our ancestors, and ourselves, by "working with plants, trees, animals, stones, and ancestral stories."
5. Healing: It brings healing using holistic means for both body and spirit.
6. Journey: Life is a journey from one stage to another; birth, marriage, children, death, etc.
7. Potential: Developing one's potential for the development of our creative, psychic, intellectual, and intuitive abilities.
8. Magic: Where ideas are brought into manifestation and divination is used to predict the future."

Yep, that sounds like the climate change alarmists.