It would be so cool to be Aquaman, right?
Well, if scientific expert Dr. Matthew Skinner hypothesizes correctly, we may all get to experience what it feels like to be an aquatic superhero.
Here's the deal, when global warming hits and the ice caps melt, we'll all be living in an underwater community, right? (We'll need a community organizer.) So, naturally, we'll have to evolve to survive.
This is where things take a super cool turn---our bodies will change so we can swim better. We'll get longer fingers and toes that eventually become webbed, and our eyes will adjust to the low light conditions by growing a nictitating membrane. (For you climate change skeptics out there, that means we'll grow a third eyelid. Yay!)
Unfortunately, Dr. Skinner misses one really critical change.
"Now, nowhere does he say that we'll have gills so we can breathe underwater, which would be a good safety tip," Glenn suggested. "But our fingers are going to grow longer. We're going to get webbed fingers, webbed toes."
The most important takeaway, though, is how all of this can be avoided if we save the planet.
"It's just another in the series of scare tactics," said co-host Stu. "Oh, my God. We're going to get webbed feet. I don't want webbed feet for my children. We need to make America great again. No more webbed feet."
You might want to get new floaties and flippers for the kids.
Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors.
GLENN: I have to play this. And, Stu, I want to put together a series. We're launching a new season of the Glenn Beck radio program. And if you're watching any of the behind the scenes stuff, some of it was released on Facebook last night. In the next year, we're going to be making a lot of new changes to the show. Trying some new things out. One of them is going to be a -- a series of serials, if you will, to where we'll take on a topic or a question and we'll try to answer that question over several episodes. And one of them, I think we need to do is the hysteria of global warming and compare it to the futurists of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. The guys who said, "Oh, yeah, by 2020, it's just going to be flying cars and everything else."
By the year 2000, we won't even be eating food. We'll be having little cubes that will have all your nourishment in there. Restaurants will be banished.
Listen to this scientist who says that because of global warming, man's body is about to change.
MATTHEW: The first scenario relates to global warming. We imagine that the ice caps are melting. We see a drastic rise in sea levels. And humans are forced to live in an underwater community. And so what we might see is changes to our body, which help us to swim better. For example, we might see a lengthening of our fingers. This might cause us to evolve webbed fingers and toes.
PAT: Oh.
MATTHEW: Another critical thing that we'll need to do is to be able to see in low light conditions that we find underwater. Perhaps, most striking, we might see something called a nictitating membrane. And this is essentially a third eyelid, which helps protect the eye in an underwater environment.
GLENN: That's Dr. Matthew Skinner. Now, nowhere does he say that we'll have gills so we can breathe underwater, which would be a good safety tip. But our fingers are going to grow longer. We're going to get webbed fingers, webbed toes.
PAT: Webbed feet.
GLENN: Webbed feet, and a new eye lid so we can see --
STU: That sounds awesome. Getting around quicker in the water.
PAT: Plus, we're not going to die. We're just going to adapt. We're going to evolve, right? So what's the problem?
GLENN: So what's the problem? Oh, the earth is going to be -- no, we'll all be living, we'll just be living like Aquaman. This is just crazy. That's one of the craziest things I've ever heard.
PAT: Oh, man.
GLENN: And he says it with a straight face. And the -- and the academic community is like, "Yes, we're going to develop webbed feet."
PAT: Webbed feet and webbed hands.
GLENN: Because we'll all be living underwater. Oh, my gosh. Don't they see it? They just don't see it, do they?
STU: It's kind of embarrassing.
GLENN: It really is.
STU: It's kind of embarrassing that they will go to these lengths. Again, it kind of disproves their own thesis. The point is, we'll all die and there will be no humanity left. No, I thought we were going to evolve.
GLENN: We're going to progress. We're going to progress into something even better. It's progress.
STU: There you go. Can you imagine if a conservative said this. Look, yeah, there might be some global warming, but we're going to get gills. We're going to get a third eyelid.
GLENN: Can you imagine? How do you say that except to a group of maybe first graders who will accept that? Who accepts that, that we're going to grow longer fingers, webbed feet, webbed toes, and a third eyelid? Come on.
STU: It's just another in the series of scare tactics. Oh, my God. We're going to get webbed feet. I don't want webbed feet for my children. We need to make America great again. No more webbed feet.
Featured Image: Photo Credit: DC Comics