RALEIGH – Still wondering what about the modern American Left continues to repel modern middle America? One example might be the activist set’s aggressively absurd approach to environmental issues.

Take North Carolina’s recent spate of destructive hurricanes. Certainly there are appropriate public-policy responses to the costs and dangers of tropical weather. Some reasonably argue that too many people live and work in the path of the storm, reacting to perverse incentives such as subsidized beach renourishment and flood insurance.

But to some fanatics, the hurricanes themselves are a consequence of public policy – and, specifically, President George W. Bush’s unwilling to sign the Kyoto Protocols to limit global warming. The Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), founded years ago by Ralph Nader and Co., was a key actor in the left-wing strategy to register as many like-minded voters as possible before Election Day. Young PIRG operatives were among those signing up the likes of Mickey Mouse and Jessica Rabbit in North Carolina and other states to meet their voter-registration quotas and score some extra “coffee” dollars.

At the same time, PIRG has engaged in, well, an aggressively absurd effort to suggest that our air is getting dirtier (no, it’s getting cleaner), our water is getting fouler (not exactly), and pollutants are causing a cancer epidemic (no, since life is 100 percent guaranteed to end in death, progress against other diseases striking folks when they are young is leaving cancer as a default cause of death). On global warming, a recent PIRG report provides the following, unintentionally hilarious bit of environmental hypochondria:

Scientists have linked rising global temperatures to increases in the frequency and severity of weather phenomena such as extreme heat, droughts, fires, intense precipitation, floods, hurricanes, and the shift in ocean systems known as El Niño. Recent increases in such extreme weather events are consistent with scientists’ predictions.

Well, if you predict that the independent variable of climate change will result in changes in any one of a wide range of dependent weather variables, your prediction has a high probability of being consistent with observation. But it won’t mean anything. If you predict that human-induced accentuation of the greenhouse effect will cause heat, or else cold, and too much rain, or else too little, you have to be prepared for the possibility that rational people will respond with skepticism.

Specifically, more coherent treatments of the potential relationship between human-induced global warming and severe hurricanes suggest that the two are not likely to be related to any significant degree. This is true even if you grant the questionable claim that global warming has caused El Niño effects, since that would have reduced the maximum speed of hurricane winds and thus the potential development of highly destructive storms.

In propagating inanity, PIRG has a rival in, I am sad to say, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which argued last month that global warming is leading not only to bigger hurricanes but also to exotic diseases, crop failures, and the spread of kudzu and poison ivy.

That’s right – if you start to feel itchy, blame President Bush.

And what did the Coastal Federation’s Frank Tursi write in a recent letter to the editor? That “only the politics of Armageddon can save us. Things will have to get a lot worse before good Americans realize that they’re not Republicans after all.” Just delightful.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.