April showers bring May flowers. But another April torrent brings something considerably less pleasant: the special Earth Day-timed “green” issues with which the publishing industry deluges the reading public.

By most accounts, Vanity Fair kicked off the trend two years ago. Its 2006 “Special Green Issue” was a marketing coup, tapping into Hollywood’s heightened eco-consciousness and appealing to Tinseltown’s sense of importance. The cover, featuring George Clooney and Julia Roberts posing with Al Gore and Robert Kennedy Jr., ominously termed global warming “a threat graver than terrorism.” Below that howler was a tease asking how much of New York and Washington will be under water. Scary stuff. Sure, it might have been factually wrong, but at least it was dramatic and caught people’s attention. That’s entertainment, folks. As they use to say on American Bandstand, “It’s got a good beat, and you can dance to it.”

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Not so the current crop of eco-editions, which play like funeral dirges. Vanity Fair has spawned environmentally themed issues the last two years at magazines ranging from Elle and Glamour to Wine Spectator, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Yet they fail to live up to Vanity Fair’s standard. Oh, they’re just as wrongheaded as VF’s inaugural, just as ignorant of the facts. The real shame of these green magazines, however, is that they make for absolutely dreadful reading.

These self-described “green issues” can be divided roughly into two categories. The first are the self-help editions, which aim to give readers quick and easy tips for a more environmentally conscious lifestyle. Many of these are no surprise and represent the clichés of modern environmentalism: drive smaller cars, turn the thermostat down, switch to compact fluorescents, install a solar panel, and, if you are feeling really ambitious and in harmony with Mother Earth, consider composting.

The packages are slightly different, but the message is the same. Elle offers “30 ways to minimize your eco-footprint and maximize your look.” Competitor Glamour offers the “Top 10 Things You Can Do for the Planet,” advertising this advice alongside the “Five Easy Steps to the Big O.” (Which is more important to Glamour’s discerning readers? One can take an educated guess.)

National Geographic feels so strongly about the need to combat climate change that it dedicates not one issue annually to the topic, but four. Their quarterly Green Guide is advertised as “the resource for consuming wisely.”

“Our goal is to make going green an easy, gradual, affordable process rather than an all-or-nothing plunge,” writes Green Guide editor Seth Bauer, whose maiden issue is full of appeals to recycle plastic sandwich baggies, compost table scraps, and use a ceiling fan instead of air conditioning.

The Sunday New York Times waded into the self-help arena with a green issue promising “some bold steps to make your carbon footprint smaller.” It featured most of the same prescriptions, but with more detail and analysis. This is Glamour for the advanced-degree set — minus, of course, that magazine’s critical “Five Easy Steps.”

A number of airlines have introduced green magazine issues among their in-flight publications, all the better for their captive audiences to consider how to fight global warming while generating huge carbon emissions (nearly a ton per passenger flying roundtrip coast-to-coast on a commercial airliner).