With the wheels coming loose on the global warming hoax, it's time for the Left to start hyping the next phony crisis. It shouldn't be hard to find something scarier than warm weather. The Guardian's Peter Tatchell is floating oxygen depletion:

Compared to prehistoric times, the level of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere has declined by over a third and in polluted cities the decline may be more than 50%. This change in the makeup of the air we breathe has potentially serious implications for our health. Indeed, it could ultimately threaten the survival of human life on earth…

The culprit is of course human civilization, which can only redeem itself by abolishing property rights and repealing the Industrial Revolution.

Now for a word from a grownup:

The reality is, of course, that the oxygen percentage in the atmosphere has been 20.94 or 20.95 percent for thousands of years and probably much longer than that (see the historical graph on page 2 of Dudley 1998 that covers 600 million years). The amount of oxygen in the atmosphere is so huge that the biosphere (and fossil fuels which used to belong to the biosphere as well) is completely unable to change this amount significantly.

The notion that there is substantially less oxygen in cities than elsewhere is particularly absurd due to its rate of diffusion.

Nonetheless, we can probably look forward to new taxes to finance free scuba tanks for disadvantaged minorities.

Hat tip: Greenie Watch; on tips from mega and Archonix. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.