We need an early asteroid warning system

And we need to stop all this fooling around with environmentalism. Or such seems to be the point to Jonah Goldberg's latest.

The year is 2109. Celebrations continue as mankind's heroic, century-long, quintillion-dollar effort to lower the global mean temperature by 1 degree has paid off: July 2109 is just as hot as July 2009. Few can contain their jubilation.

But even as the carbon-neutral champagne corks fly, the sky darkens. A projectile of a different kind is coming our way. An asteroid streaks across the skies, giving the media just enough time to spread the word. The New York Times, now beamed directly into subscribers' brains via digital-neural networks, fulfills ancient prophecy and warns that women and minorities will be hardest hit by the incoming object.

But there's little we can do. The space flotsam smashes into the solar energy farm formerly known as Arizona. The space rock, 100 meters in diameter, hits at 50,000 mph with the force of thousands of nuclear warheads. Millions die.

. . . So horrendous is the calamity that some even wonder if the enormous investment in fending off climate change might not have been better spent.

Um. OK. that seems like an odd argument; but how about this. We build an early asteroid warning system and fix the damn environment?