ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Climate change, as the Natural Resources Defense Council has written, “is getting unprecedented attention from the growing field of 2020 presidential candidates” — which means the empty-headed bobble bouncers of the left’s echo chamber have ample opportunity to prove how very sheeplike they can be in their thinking.

Indeed. Talk about a competition.

We may have found a winner.

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, one creator of the Green New Deal, just weighed in on the reasons behind her regulatory pressings for climate controls, saying it’s not just life or death — it’s death times 25.

As Fox News reported, Gunn-Wright, in an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi made clear her insistence on Democrats pushing global warming even more so than health care as a top issue for 2020 because, “climate change is one of the main drivers of our public health.”

“So the difference between, say, 1.5 degrees of warming — which is the least that folks think that we can get — to 2, you are talking about 150 million deaths. That’s 25 Holocausts, right? So how is that not a health issue? How is that not about health care?”

Or, as the other brainiacs of the left might wonder, how is that, like, oh my God, not really bad?

In January, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the socialist with maybe the most recent instances of environmentally-tied hyperventilation, said this: “We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

She later recanted, calling the remark a joke and rebuking those evil Republicans for daring to shine a spotlight on her views.

“This is a technique of the GOP,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in May, “to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal.”

In her defense, the United Nations is filled with just such sea sponges.

In October 2018, the authors of a U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote, as The Guardian put it in a headline, “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe.” The story went on to note how “the world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worse the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.”

Sea sponges seem to multiply at rapid rates.

Rep. Barbara Lee, yet another Democrat in a tizzy about impending climate disaster, wrote in April on Twitter: “@AOC is right, we have an expiration date when it comes to climate change. The @UN’s newest report gives us 12 years to turn things around before environmental catastrophe. We need to take climate change seriously. Now.”

Then there was the congressional Democratic-sponsored Climate Action Now Act, requiring President Donald Trump to sign back aboard the Paris climate agreement.

Then there was the call from 2020 Democratic contender Mayor Pete Buttigieg for Americans to treat climate change as “the greatest security issue of our time” because, reportedly “the world is going to end in 12 years.”

Then there was the plea from Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, also running for president, to “attack climate change” in order to help the “climate refugees” pouring across America’s borders.

Then there was the unveiling by yet another Democrat for president, Beto O’Rourke, of a $5 trillion Green plan — a path toward greenhouse gas emission net zero-ness he described as the “last chance” for Americans to survive.

Then there was this headline from ABC News, just this week: “2020 Democratic candidates move to the left, become more progressive as climate change emerges as campaign issue.”

And you thought all the room to the left had already been occupied.

But ‘lest it’s forgotten: Predicting climate change gloom and doom has been a favored tactic of the left for decades. It’s about the left’s quest and lust for control; it’s about the big bucks that can be made with Chicken Little cries of falling skies and too-hot rays of sun. It’s not about fact.

At one time, global cooling was the weather pattern to beat. At another, global warming. When neither panned as predicted, the more generic climate change emerged, in all its hockey stick charting glory. Remember acid rain and the dangers of hairspray cans?

In 1989, a senior U.N. official predicted rising sea levels would erase whole nations from the planet if global warming wasn’t halted by 2000. In 2006, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” gave humanity only 10 years to solve climate issues, else Manhattan and Florida could be forever flooded.

Whom to believe?

What science to embrace?

Follow the money.

The Paris agreement alone brings billions of dollars into global coffers. Gore was able to cash in his green bucks and buy a decent multi-million dollar mansion — located by the very California ocean he once predicted would rise to devastating flood levels. And many of the very same scientists who predict the dire potentials of ignoring climate change, and who feed the politicians with the tools they need to further their legislative environmental controls, are themselves dependent on funds that come from compromised sources.

The sheep on the left would have it bleated otherwise.

But this whole global cooling, global warming, climate change debate is pure propaganda. It’s not about clean air. It’s a Democratic fight for control and dominance and wealth and power. And given this batch of Democrats for president, it’s a fight that’s only going to grow louder and more ridiculous in the months to come.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

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