Hat tip to CCNet host Benny Peiser for alerting us to (and sparing you my 10th grade German translation of) “some words of realpolitik from one of Germany’s most respected elder statesmen, Helmut Schmidt” on the heels of the now de rigueur rioting by our age’s deep thinkers in the run-up to Germany’s hosting of the G-8 summit:

Global warming — just “hysteria”?

Meanwhile, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt called for an end to

the “hysteria” over global warming in the lead-up to the summit. The

topic is “hysterical, overheated, and that is especially because of the

media,” Schmidt told Germany’s Bild daily.

There has always been climate change on earth, Schmidt said.

“We’ve had warm- and ice-ages for hundreds of thousands of years,” he

said, and added that the reasons behind the multiple climate changes

have been “inadequately researched for the time being.”

To assume that global climate change can be altered by any plans made at

the Heiligendamm summit is “idiotic,” he said.

I must protest as unfair the headline writer’s recasting of the sentiments as “global warming, ’just hysteria’?”. In truth, global warming is much, much more. It is a ready excuse for whatever afflicts or impedes you, an opportunity for the media to outdo past lows, a wonderful vehicle comfortably seating every exiled adherent of last century’s failed “inevitability”, and a very lucrative pony for rent-seeking business to ride to riches for making nothing. And it made a bunch of government weathermen briefly into rock stars no longer needing to beg for their annual appropriation of (taxpayer) debt-financed lucre, but whose area of interest actually now picks our pockets for the same amount we send, I submit, far more soberly, to the National Cancer Institute every year.

In short, recall today’s Caddyshack moment:

Judge Smails: You know, you should play with Dr. Beeper and myself. I mean, he’s been club champion for three years running and I’m no slouch myself. Ty Webb: Don’t sell yourself short Judge, you’re a tremendous slouch.