It seems every time we start to feel something actually encouraging and good about humanity, some scientific “experts” come along to tell us how we’re totally screwing up the planet in ways that even cause polar bears to hyperventilate.

But wait just a minute. Haven’t we heard much of this climate change crisis stuff before?

And didn’t things turn out a lot differently than they said?

Like global cooling, for example. Remember that “other” climate change catastrophe . . . the one where we were warned (even before SUVs) about how we were prematurely bringing on the next Ice Age?

Yeah, even back in the chilly 1900s, that was our fault also.

Scientists worried that deforestation was increasing Earth’s reflectivity, causing too much sunlight to reflect back into space rather than warm the surface as it was “supposed to.”

This idea obviously didn’t give any credence to proven human-caused CO2 benefits that fertilize those trees and other plants that nourish all creatures that eat veggies.

On October 7, 1912, the Los Angeles Times alerted readers, “Fifth Ice Age is on the Way: Human Race Will Have to Fight for Existence in Cold.” By August 9, 1923, the situation had already become desperate, causing the Chicago Tribune to declare on its front page, “Scientists Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.”

Yet fickle temperatures began warming again by the 1930s, causing many all-knowing scientists and news reporters to conclude that particulate emissions from smokestacks would now block out lots of the rest of the light before it ever got here. As Life Magazine reported in April 1970, “by 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one-half.”

Falling temperatures throughout the 1970s prompted renewed alarm about glacial threats to human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, China, and the Soviet Union.

Major publications quoted scientific authorities who again predicted that galloping glaciers of the next Ice Age were already at our doorsteps.

In 1973, Science Digest breathlessly concluded, “At this point we do not have the comfortable distance of tens of thousands of years to prepare for the next Ice Age,” and that “how carefully we monitor our atmospheric pollution will have direct bearing on the arrival and nature of this weather crisis.”

Consequently, the scientists warned, “Once the freeze starts, it will be too late.”

The March 1, 1975, cover of the respected Science News magazine depicted New York City being swallowed up by an approaching glacier and announced, “The Ice Age Cometh.”

The threat was clear and urgent. “Again, this transition would induce only a small change in global temperature — two or three degrees — but the impact on civilization will be catastrophic.”

The New York Times followed suit with a headline story, “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable.”

The prestigious National Academy of Sciences agreed with this view. In 1975, it issued a warning that there was a “finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could befall Earth within the next 100 years.”

The title of a 1976 book by well-known science writer Lowell Ponte pretty much summed up the crisis, “The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive it?”

Ponte correctly pointed out that “global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for 110,000 years.”

But not to worry after all. Earth’s temperatures soon began to warm up again.

So did the political climate which ratcheted up media thermostats during then-Senator Al Gore’s fiery 1988 Senate Committee on Science, Technology, and Space hearings.

Yup, those same CO2-belching smokestacks which were previously causing hell to freeze over were now setting the planet ablaze. The only salvation would be to shut them all down, immediately pass the UN’s Kyoto Protocol to cap carbon, and subsidize lots of windmills and sunbeam collectors underwritten by hedge fund carbon offset trades which later made him a very wealthy guy.

The scheduling and staging of Gore’s passion play were carefully orchestrated. As subsequently recounted by his co-planner and colleague Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO) in a PBS “Frontline” interview:

“We called the weather bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of summer . . . so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it . . . we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”

That same former senator and vice president Gore testified in March 2007 during a Congressional Joint Hearing of the Energy and Science Committee, exuberantly stating, “as soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave [of investment] in it . . . there will be unchained investment.”

Oh . . . so you seriously imagined that this alarm was really all about saving Bambi and polar bears?