Michigan, like the Midwest in general, has endured a brutal winter with record cold temperatures, snow two feet above normal as of March, six inches of snow in Detroit on Easter, 26 inches in Marquette on April 5, and more snow predicted for Detroit Metro this weekend as temperatures maintain their sub-normal trend.

But like their news-media brethren, bookstore shelves are strangely at odds with the world outside. While Michigan freezes, local sellers are showcasing Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp’s acclaimed new book about the warming apocalypse called Earth: The Sequel — The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming.

Krupp gets right to it in Chapter One, warning of warming calamity even as current temperature data suggests recent temperature trends have moderated:

The scientific consensus is that inaction will change the earth within a few decades into a place unlike any ever inhabited by humans. Business as usual will open the door to catastrophe: flooding and dislocation of millions of people; chronic drought and mass malnourishment in Africa; wildfires, deadly heat waves, and coastal destruction; the extinction of half the world’s living species.

The words are eerily similar to another acclaimed book on my shelf published 32 years ago.

In 1976 Lowell Ponte — like Krupp, an influential think-tank figure with the International Research Technology Corp. – published a book called The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can we Survive It? It too was written at the apex of a frightening (in his case, cold) climate trend. Here’s Ponte in Chapter One:

In 1975, the U.S. National Academy of Science issued . . . a warning by some of the world’s most prestigious, cautious scientists that an Ice Age (was) beginning in the near future. The tone of the report was one of repressed alarm. A study completed in 1971 by Drs. S. I. Rasool and S. H. Schneider of NASA’s Goddard Institute estimates that man’s potential to pollute . . . could increase the atmosphere’s opacity by 400 percent. That would reduce sunlight enough, say the scientists, to drop the Earth’s surface temperature by 3.4 degrees C, which would almost certainly bring on an Ice Age. (The consequences) will hamper world food production as weather gets progressively worse. The damage this can cause is already apparent in global food shortages and the recent deaths of more than 400,000 people in Africa and Asia. If global famine arises, we can expect world war.

Warming, cooling . . . choose your fad. The prevailing weather is simply an excuse to scare us silly.