It’s war, Time magazine tells us.

In this week’s “Special Environment Issue,” Bryan Walsh’s cover story compares the challenge of fighting global warming to the challenge we faced in World War II. “Think of the overnight conversion of the World War II-era industrial sector in to a vast machine . . . that won the war,” he writes.

The magazine’s call to arms parrots an argument long made by Al Gore and other green interventionists. But there is one major flaw in the analogy: This time, the enemy America is being asked to fight is not Nazi Germany. It’s us.

Time gets right to the task of describing the enemy we’re up against: “The U.S. produces nearly a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gases and has stubbornly made it clear that it doesn’t intend to so a whole lot about it. . . . Although 174 nations ratified the Kyoto Accords, the U.S. walked away from them. . . . President Bush has little environment cred left after seven years of the least green Administration in modern memory. . . . The U.S. business community will fight hard over the details of any cap-and-trade plan.”

Stubborn, aggressive, ignoring international treaties, led by a swaggering tyrant, backed by a mighty industrial colossus. Boy, that America sounds like . . . well, you get the WWII analogy. But if greens insist on this analogy, can they really expect a citizenry to mobilize against itself?

Furthermore, Hitler’s aggressions were quite real, not the product of abstract computer modelings: a blitzkrieg of Poland, tanks rolling through France, London under siege, thousands dead, a Jewish Holocaust. What damage has America’s global warming aggression done?

Other than vague claims of “the steady deterioration of our very climate” (this winter’s record-breaking cold?) or “the survival of the country’s coasts or farms,” Time is skimpy on producing any horrors that would rally the American people to war-time footing. In fact, what Time is calling for is a pre-emptive war on vague future threats based on intelligence from Al Gore and the U.N.

How twisted is the magazine’s WWII analogy? “There are a lot of reasons Western Europe and Japan are so far ahead of the U.S. on energy efficiency, but one is their higher energy costs simply forced their hand.” This time, it’s the statist economies of Germany and Japan that are the good guys!

In making the case for a World War against warming, Time’s analogy should leave its American readers cold.