Maybe New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is running for higher office. He has gone from tempering media alarmism to, as of today, being the alarmist’s alarmist.

As NewsBusters reported last November:

“On Monday’s CBS ‘Early Show,’ co-host Harry Smith interviewed New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg. The liberal mayor has followed in the footsteps of Al Gore and implored the government to take action to address an impending environmental crisis, saying ‘We need to do something now.’ To match Bloomberg’s alarmist rhetoric, Smith added ‘Manhattan will be underwater by 2050.’ Amusingly, even Bloomberg thought that assertion went too far, ‘There’s a — I don’t know that Manhattan will be underwater, but certainly the environment’s going to be a lot worse that we leave our children’.”

Times change, and the New York Sun now cites Bloomberg saying that global warming “has the potential to kill everybody” (conveniently, other papers today offer a quite different view).

Now, it has been quietly suggested that to call the global-warming doomsayers “alarmists” is to engage in name-calling — just as they do when they call global-warming skeptics “deniers.” But the tag “alarmist” isn’t even in the same solar system as suggesting that anyone who disagrees you — with your prophecies of the future, no less – is akin to a Holocaust denier.

“Alarmist” is far less tame than this behavior demands. People insisting that catastrophe is ensured – that, quite possibly, everyone on the planet will be wiped out – unless you do what they want are properly called “hysterics.” Be happy with “alarmist.”