Tim Blair writes:

Just as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led to World War I, so too does today’s global warming hysteria have a curious starting point. It could be that all of the current panic may be due to an American university student’s immature wish to feel hard done by.

Back in 1978, a young lefty called Bill McKibben enrolled at Harvard. McKibben – now a global warming fanatic who recently visited Australia to be cuddled and fawned over by the ABC – followed all of the fashionable causes of the day, yet somehow felt unfulfilled. “My leftism grew more righteous in college,” he wrote in a 1996 essay, “but still there was something pro forma about it.”

Poor Bill. His problem, as US writer Stanley Kurtz recently pointed out, was that he didn’t really have any problems: “Being white, male, straight, and of impeccably middle-class background, I could not realistically claim to be a victim of anything.”

Bill’s immediate solution was to convince himself that he was Irish, so that he could claim a connection with the IRA. He wore a black armband in solidarity with hunger striker Bobby Sands. Even McKibben now admits that this particular craving for oppression was “loony”.

So Bill continued his search for a cause with which he could more properly identify. By the late 1980s, he’d found it. Global warming! Since then, McKibben has become one of the world’s most prominent warming alarmists. Some credit him with making the non-issue a mainstream concern.

Just imagine – if McKibben had been born black or poor or gay, he might have devoted his life to some other quest and we’d have been spared decades of climate scaremongering. From little things, stupid things grow.

Or, more likely, some other rich kid would have risen in McKibben’s place. Global warming, as Kurtz notes, is a perfect emotional vehicle for wealthy leftists who otherwise have nothing to whine about. What could be more perfect than a circumstance where the entire planet is oppressed? At a stroke, all of us are victims.

Little wonder, then, that millionaires like Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Cate Blanchett, Wotif founder Graeme Wood and so many other privileged white folk are so hot for global warming. Their lives are so perfect and painless that they’ve had to probe all the way to the planet’s outer atmosphere for something to make them feel sad.

It’s a weird compulsion. Most people grow out of their youthful need to feel victimised around the same time that they learn about sub-Saharan Africa or other genuinely ruinous third world hellzones. In Somalia they worry about how they’re going to survive the latest raid by death squads. Your warmy crowd, however, worry about what the temperature might be in the next century.

Warmies like to claim that they’re concerned for future generations, which is a puzzling stance considering the views most of them have on abortion. Whatever your opinion might be on the moment life begins, it’s undeniable that even an hour-old bunch of cells in the womb is a lot closer to becoming part of a future generation than are people whose parents have yet to be conceived.

These are the people with whom warmies most deeply identify: a thus-far non-existent bunch living in weather conditions that we can’t possibly predict. How concern over this became a mainstream issue is a miracle of our age.

Probably it’s a measure of western affluence. Global warming is the ultimate first world problem. If your primary problem, above all others, is whether Sydney might have Brisbane’s climate by 2150, then your life is pretty sweet, my friend.

In between dodging beheadings or trying to find drinkable water, third worlders might occasionally ponder the west’s obsession with future minor temperature variations. It would interesting to hear the likes of Greens MP Adam Bandt explain to impoverished villagers why Australia spends so much money on climate nonsense. Those who despair at cuts to our foreign aid budget should look at where replacement funding might come. Hint: absolutely anywhere with “climate” in its title.

As for McKibben, during his visit earlier this year he appeared – of course – on the ABC’s Q & A program. “Look around,” he preached to an adoring audience. “You guys just came through a summer that set every kind of record. You’re having hundred-year storms every couple of years. What are you – what exactly are we waiting to see happen here before we take some serious action?”

He’d be better off still pretending to be Irish. Australia can’t possibly take what McKibben describes as “serious action” on climate change. We only produce 1.4 per cent or so of the entire globe’s human-caused carbon emissions. That’s why the carbon tax is such a vile fraud, and why Labor’s vote fell so far in the last election.

Let’s worry about more pressing matters than climate change. By which I mean every single matter anybody can think of.