What I'd really rather say is, "John Tierney, bonehead," or worse. But I'm going to control myself.

Tierney is a New York Times columnist, which is an enviable perch, but Tierney wastes the advantage by relying on old-paradigm thinking.

What prompts this criticism is his column "10 things to scratch from your worry list," in which he provides fodder for all those fogies, like himself, who think all this climate talk is a bunch of hooey. He doesn't address climate change specifically so I don't know if he's a denier, but his 10 items put him in the same category.

The most egregious example of his calcified thinking is when he says, "paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags." The chief flaw of this lump of coal is that "paper or plastic" is the wrong question, or rather, the correct answer is, "neither, I have my own bags."

I think he's wrong about plastic being better, no matter what source he cites, because paper will degrade, and plastic will not. Paper, in the ocean, will disappear; plastic will end up in the bellies of sea animals, or contribute to the floating mass of garbage in the Pacific.

But the real point is that new ways of thinking are called for. Hey, John, what's better, the short, stiff buggy whip, or the longer, more supple one?