Nothing is so dear to many Americans as the privilege of choice -- so long as it is not claimed by women who wish to exercise their reproductive rights. Otherwise, we have become accustomed to menus with many choices to be had.

 

Americans even have a choice between two Armageddons. The more immediate is the invitation from ISIS to send ground troops into parts of Syria, which its jihadists control. They are savoring the spillage of blood, the beheading of American GIs and -- as they must know is inevitable -- their own martyrdoms. It's in their theological genes so to wish.

 

If the United States and its allies were to decide to crush the jihad in Syria, it could be done. But, like cancer when put out of business in one place only to turn up in another, jihad will be with us at least until Muslim theologians and Qu'ranic scholars bring rationality to both areas of research and come to dominate the teaching of Islam.

 

What must take place also is a wholesale social and economic renaissance for the whole of Middle Eastern Islam along with an intelligent and merciful order in which those who feel, justifiably, that they have missed out on nearly a millennium of opportunity can find meaningful ways to make a living and at the same time help to rebuild their ruined lands. This would mean an end to oil monarchies and the rule of political, military and religious despots.

 

Any of that happening any time soon is a vain hope. Meanwhile, here comes Armageddon No. 1 with a continuation of its calculated chaos that is visited upon one country or another, in one American city or another because jihadists live here, too, and feel compelled to settle their grievances against the Great Satan.

 

Armageddon No. 2 is of far greater magnitude than even ISIS warriors can imagine. The desert lands over which they currently rule are not many decades away from being uninhabitable due to the heat that is coming with climate change. Millions of others -- some of them surely ISIS enthusiasts -- who live near the sea will be pushed back by an incoming tide that will not recede due to rising sea levels.

 

The rest of us who do not live adjacent to an ocean are not exempt from catastrophe as more frequently we experience monster storms, torrential rains and winds of such ruinous velocity that they wipe out whole towns and leave homeless their residents.

 

There are no boots to dispatch to any ground that can turn back the beginnings of Armageddon No. 2. It is upon us as we speak. Its effects can be mitigated -- and only mitigated -- by the kind of action one would want to take if he saw his house catch fire.

 

Certain of the output of the recent Paris Conference ends up sounding to me like a lot of stuff I used to hear at church conclaves -- such well-intended plans as one a quarter of a century ago that instituted a Decade of Evangelism that within 10 years would have churches bulging with new recruits and collection plates overflowing with money. Surely, the thought was, a new era could not be too long in coming. Didn't happen, and things are now worse than ever.

 

That's because the work it would have taken to accomplish an ecclesiastical renascence was not attractive to those who would have had to do it, who would have had to suffer their precious traditions to undergo change or be ditched, who would have been required to learn entirely new ways whilst admitting that the spiritual deficit was already so serious that it nothing but a miracle could save the project. Right.

 

There remained, of course, those who insisted that the estate was impermeable. They, like today's climate-change deniers, looked right past the facts and into the magic mirror that made them look (to themselves) like Horatio at the Pons Sublicius, equipped in body and soul to deal with ever came.

 

Armageddon No. 2, then, is as much if not more in our future than Armageddon No. 1. Jihadists can carry on all they want, burn down villages, behead those they deem infidels and sponsor more and more shootings in this country. Yet as the economist Herb Stein once said, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." The jihad cannot go on forever. Thus to survive, the jihadists will have to eat their young, and that will be it.

 

It is a fact that the force of global warming has given birth to baleful changes in the planet's climate. One denies its existence the way a young child covers his eyes and tells others that they can't see him.

 

Our human-made Armageddon is imminent. All we can do now is slow it down. Should we fail to do that, the climatic consequences will be widespread and in some places catastrophic. By then the jihad will have become a sideshow. Air conditioning for many will be but a fond memory during longer summers of 90-plus degree temperatures and enervating humidity.

 

We can choose another course that would entail firing every member of Congress who refuses to acknowledge the facts as officially acknowledged and accepted by the delegates to the Paris conference. Fire any who have not the political courage to sign on the legislation necessary to force the reduction of carbon emissions. Exeunt omnes.

 

That after all this time there exist such buffoons as James Inhofe of Oklahoma who, from his lofty perch in the U.S. Senate, can get away with repeating and repeating his nonsense that climate change is a hoax put forth by liberals should be the first to go.