(FORTUNE Magazine) – In My Life and Hard Times, the immortal James Thurber tells the story of a fellow student at Ohio State, circa 1917. It seems this callow collegian aspired to a career in journalism but had trouble getting the hang of it. Assigned by the editor of the campus paper to write something about the university's agricultural school, he came back with a report from the horse pavilion and was told to ''start it off snappily -- something people will read.'' Trying hard to please, the poor guy opened with his idea of a grabby lead: ''Who has noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the animal husbandry building?'' Thurber's story suddenly rose up out of long-term memory the other day, when we opened the pages of Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, published by the National Academy of Sciences, and came upon an equally captivating lead: ''Greenhouse gases and global warming have received increasing attention in recent years.'' How true that is. A more suitable lead, or so we decided after fascinatedly perusing the NAS report, would have been something on the order of, ''Quite a lot of what you have read about the menace of the greenhouse effect is baloney or worse, as we are about to demonstrate.'' During the past three years or so, the greenhouse dialogue has become increasingly apocalyptic. The message you get is that, as the greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, average global temperatures during the next century will rise by 3 degrees to 9 degrees Fahrenheit -- a change unprecedented in all of human history. Millions now assume that this change will mean ecosystems wiped out, coastal cities flooded by rising sea levels (mainly from increased melting of glaciers), farmland turned into desert. All this will happen because the human race, and the Bush Administration in particular, is not acting decisively to curtail carbon dioxide and other emissions. That message was delivered yet again several weeks ago by the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. The mainstream media overwhelmingly agree with this assessment, and Greenwire, the environmental news service, generates an avalanche of news stories in which the moral always seems to be that the Bushmen, typically reported to be dominated on this issue by arrogant John Sununu, are ''stonewalling the world'' (a rhetorical flourish of Senator Al Gore of Tennessee). The NAS panel, consisting of 14 environmental specialists, was basically agnostic about the accuracy of prevailing greenhouse forecasts. Its focus, instead, was on the question of how well the U.S. would cope with the rising temperatures if indeed they came to pass. Its unapocalyptic message: We would cope quite well. The standard disaster scenario, the panel argues, is a ''dumb people scenario.'' It assumes that farmers, engineers, vacationers, and businesspersons in the mid-21st century would go right on doggedly acting as they do now even as temperatures crept upward and sea levels rose. But there is no reason to think they would do so. For many generations, farmers have adjusted the strains of wheat they planted and made numerous other responses to quite temporary changes up or down in regional temperatures. Utilities and manufacturing companies would also be adjusting quite naturally, helped by one + critical detail: Business equipment wears out more rapidly than the climate is expected to change. The ultimate greenhouse scenario, the report leaves you thinking, is one in which there will be winners and losers. Minneapolis in the winter looks like a winner, Galveston in the summer like a loser. Owners of beachfront property look like losers. Overall, crop yields are expected to rise, not fall. Populations will be induced to move. But, of course, Americans have been moving around for years, and usually in the direction of warmer climates -- a trend implying that for some people, the warming trend will make moving unnecessary. Hey, there's a thought for a grabby lead.