It's easy to ridicule the U.N., and climate alarmists more generally, but the real-world consequences of the agenda they seek to impose is anything but amusing. Tweet Breaking news: The end of the world is near due to climate change, according to the United Nations. You'll be forgiven if your immediate response is, "What else is new?" We've been hearing the same thing year after year since at least the first "Earth Day," on the heels of Woodstock, the moon landing and Joe Namath and the New York Jets' upset of the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Remember "Out in the Country" by Three Dog Night? It charted around the same time, and featured the repeating chorus, "before the breathin' air is gone, before the sun is just a bright spot in the nighttime..." That was almost half a century ago. Back then, of course, it was global cooling that would kill us all, according to climate "experts." You can look it up. Leading climate alarmist Paul Ehrlich published "The Population Bomb," and assured us that overpopulation and human activity would cool temperatures and lead to massive crop failure. More recently, we've been lectured that recent California wildfires are the direct consequence of anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. More astute observers, however, will recall that almost fifteen years ago, we were told the same thing by the same people about Hurricane Katrina in 2005. That disaster, you see, was also the result of anthropogenic global warming (before the fashionable terminology had changed to "climate change" after predicted warming trends proved inaccurate). We were assured that the United States could expect an onslaught of similar hurricanes going forward. Instead, the U.S. witnessed the longest stretch in recorded history without a major-category hurricane. Oops. Nevertheless, the U.N. assures us that this time the threat is real, as reported by the San Jose Mercury-News: Coastal flooding and crop failures could create an exodus of "eco-refugees," threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, a senior environmental official at the United Nations and director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect. Oh, pardon - that was actually from June 30, 1989. At that time, Mr. Brown added that "entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000." Apparently, we solved the greenhouse effect within his 10-year window by June 1999, because we're all still here and we've yet to see entire nations wiped off the face of the earth. In this latest iteration from the U.N., Britain's left-wing Guardian summarizes the doomsday report in similar and familiar terms. "The world's leading climate scientists," it reported, "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 worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people." Thirty years from now, however, we'll probably set our watches again to a similar serving of climate alarmism, although one wonders what term will have replaced "climate change" by then, just as that term replaced "global warming." It's easy to ridicule the U.N., and climate alarmists more generally, but the real-world consequences of the agenda they seek to impose is anything but amusing. Among other items, the alarmists demand that the U.S. rejoin the Paris climate accord and accept its mandates, from which President Trump wisely withdrew as promised after assuming office. But for a preview of what compliance with that accord would entail, look to what is occurring right now in Paris itself, as ominously reported by The Wall Street Journal this week: President Emmanuel Macron convened a crisis meeting of ministers on Sunday after protests by the gilets jaunes - or yellow vests - escalated violently the day before, leaving the Arc de Triomphe vandalized and the heart of Paris dotted with burning cars and smashed storefronts. The gilets jaunes movement, sparked in October by Mr. Macron's proposal to raise fuel taxes to reduce pollution, gained strength in areas outside big cities where people depend on cars. It has since broadened to a rallying cry for those who say his policies favor the wealthy and punish the working class. And that's precisely what the climate alarmists' agenda does. It allows them to feign moral superiority, even while traveling the globe in carbon-intensive airliners and limousines. They don't alter their lifestyles or pay the price. The working classes, coal miners and other workers across the economy pay the price for their moralistic preening, which they preach but don't themselves practice. Perhaps most outrageously, the U.S. has actually exceeded France, Germany and other European nations in carbon reductions even though we don't submit to their climate alarmist agenda. American fracking has allowed us to increase our use of cleaner natural gas, which has done more to reduce carbon output than those other nations' legalistic charades. The latest U.N. climate report has aroused the usual amplification and preening from the orthodox climate clergy, predictably. We'll all be better off, however, if we place it in proper context alongside the litany of similar pronouncements over the years and even decades, and carry on accordingly.