My mother, who died last year, loved the beautiful farmland and rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia where she spent most of her life. But since the area so close to Washington, DC is threatened with large-scale development, she worried that her beloved landscapes would disappear. Just in the nick of time along came the re-enactors and other “heritage” zealots who organized resistance to development for the sake of retaining the original state of the nearby, famous Civil War battlefields. My mother joined them in their petitions and rallys, why? “I don’t give a damn about this stuff,” she said. “It gets people worked up for the wrong reasons but for the right cause.”

We’ve all been trapped on an elevator or at a cocktail party with the “non-believers”: people who can cite a litany of supposedly counter-valing facts which refute the opinion of all the world’s global climatologists who agree that the world is warming at an alarming rate. “But arctic ice is increasing around Antartica,” they say, or whatever else that supposedly tells us Chicken-Littles that like all soft-hearted, science-other-than-economics-loving lefties we have once again fallen for some elitist propaganda. They will continue to hew to their belief, in fact, all the more so when articles like this appear in the New York Times.

But not to worry. Here’s your counter-argument, no matter what. You say simply: “But if all the world’s climate scientists are wrong and you are right, what harm can be done by addressing the problem anyway? Is it a bad thing for us to begin to curb carbon emissions that pollute the air that yes, you also breathe when you leave the cloisters of your merchant bank, and that will promote investment in new technologies? After all, I’m not asking you to stop driving that Hummer. I’m simply asking that you stand out of the way while I pester economic and political leaders to work to create some light-handed market regulations and market incentives to achieve something that, if you are wrong, might just save the planet for your DNA-laden inheritors.”

“After all,” you add, since an apt analogy might help, “look at the hysteria around technology and ‘Y2K.’ That involved government and corporate investment, and what happened? A financial boom in which you (if he was born before 1975) made millions.”

And, if that doesn’t work, if the mere hint of regulation causes his Chicago-school lip to curl, then throw this at him: “Besides, reducing carbon-emitting fossil fuels will reduce our dependence on the Middle Eastern (Iran!) and South American (Chavez!) tin-pot dictators who insult this country. And we can make fuel cells, batteries and other renewable power turbines right here, in case our boys and girls in the tanks need ‘em for the invasion.” That might get him worked up for the wrong reasons, for the right cause.