Time magazine's April 3, 2006 cover declared: "BE WORRIED. BE VERY WORRIED. Climate change isn't some vague future problem — it's already damaging the planet at an alarming pace. Here's how it affects you, your kids and their kids as well."

The film "The Day After Tomorrow," in the words of its advertisement, "takes a big-budget, special-effects-filled look at what the world would look like if the greenhouse effect and global warming continued at such levels that they resulted in worldwide catastrophe and disaster, including multiple hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, floods and the beginning of the next Ice Age." Similar films included the CBS disaster epic "Category 7: The End of the World" (the title say it all) and Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," whose poster depicts a hurricane spinning out of an industrial smokestack.

Matt Lauer, in his "Countdown to Doomsday" special report on the SciFi Channel June 14, 2006, spoke of "the threat of super volcanoes ... We're living on the edge of a mass extinction. ... Massive tornados in Los Angeles are just some of the ways that global warming wreaks death and destruction around the world in the movie 'The Day After Tomorrow.' The movie's nightmarish scenario is not as far fetched as it may seem. ... If the ocean gets warm enough, the methane will defrost and rise from the ocean into the atmosphere. Global warming will suddenly get a steroid injection. If that happens, we will be past the tipping point. Colossal hurricanes would hammer the globe. The oceans would become too hot to support much life. Droughts, forest fires, and famine would rage across the continents. Florida would be gone, completely swallowed by the rising ocean, as well as hundreds of cities all around the world."

Film critic Roger Ebert, in his June 2, 2006 review of Gore's film: "Global warming is real. It is caused by human activity. Mankind and its governments must begin immediate action to halt and reverse it. If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a "tipping point" and begin a slide toward destruction of our civilization and most of the other species on this planet. After that point is reached, it would be too late for any action.... Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be 'impartial' and 'balanced' on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended."

On March 22, 2006, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley equated scientists skeptical of global warming with "Holocaust deniers," and on December 21, 2006, The Weather Channel meteorologist Heidi Cullen advocated that the American Meteorological Society not give its "Seal of Approval" to meteorologists who are skeptical of man-made climate change.

And those are but a dip of the cup in the roiling river of media climate-change hyperbole. It's already enough to drown out the Y2K paranoia of late December '99 and the bird-flu fright of '06. And brother, if you think you're heard hysteria before, you just wait till Friday. You ain't heard nothing yet.

Come Friday, about the only thing you won't have heard is the actual report.