It's the End of the World as We Know It. Why Do We Feel Fine?
Earth Day reflections on more than 50 years of environmental, end-times forecasts
Welcome to Earth Day. People all over the planet today will be celebrating the planet with community cleanups, tree plantings, marches, rallies, ceremonial gatherings, music and arts festivals, nature walks, gardening events, organized hikes, picnics and other outdoor recreation.
All in all, it’s a pretty festive vibe for what we can only assume—based on decades of predictions of ecological apocalypse—is a pre-memorial, a living funeral.
From an objective vantage point, the earth does seem to be in what could be the beginning of its death throes. As an apolitical co-worker put it, describing the worsening-by-the-year-global-weather and weather-related-incidents, “it sure seems like something is going on.”
It’s true that the earth has experienced natural disasters and storms throughout history, including really big ones. But, the frequency and intensity of their incidence around the world hasn’t been like it has been for the last 15 years or so.
And yes, it has always gotten hot in the summer. But, not like this, with record temperatures being recorded in different regions every year, and the droughts that go on and on, much more than they ever did in most of our lifetimes.
And sure, off-season weather has always cropped up now and then. But, these 60 to 70-degree days in January in the Northeast—they’re new.
So, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that “something is going on.” The something, of course, is climate change.
The problem is that well-intentioned pro-climate forces quickly accelerate from “something is going on” to “something is going on, and if we don’t stop it in the next few years, we’re all gonna die.” Because something or other has been happening for decades and, without fail, whatever it was prompted Chicken Little activists to claim that, if it wasn’t stopped, the sky was gonna fall, and everyone was gonna die.
The looming global cataclysm that, in the 1960s, was poised to end life on earth was starvation, caused by overpopulation. In “The Population Bomb,” by Paul Erlich (1968), the author prophesies that “…in the 1970s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death.”
In reality, less than 4 million people around the world are estimated to have died from famine in the decade, less than 20% of the total in the 1960s and easily the lowest since the 1910s. The population at the time, incidentally, was about 3.9 billion, less than half of what it is today.
But, in the seventies, a new, potential planetary killer captured nightmarish popular imaginations. Like characters of out of the decades-later series “Game of Thrones,” climate researchers and meteorologists ran around throughout decade, breathlessly warning, in effect, that “winter is coming.” Scientists proclaimed the impending arrival of a new ice age to reporters, who, almost without exception, lapped up these predictions like ice cream. A 1978 New York Times article was representative of the journalistic “climate” on the issue in that era, foretelling that there would be “no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere,” a claim that it attributed to “a team of international specialists.”
But, within a year, these specialists had either revised their projections, or the Times was talking to new specialists. Because, in 1979, the paper, this time citing “climatologists,” prognosticated that the North Pole could melt within some of their readers’ lifetimes.
After an interim sprinkle of acid rain hysteria in the early 1980s, the global warming panic would begin in earnest later in the decade. Not to be outdone by The Times, in 1989, the Associated Press reported the forecast of U.N. environmental official Noel Brown that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels” if the earth’s temperature trendline wasn’t reversed by 2000. Brown’s assessment was backed up by U.N. colleagues and other scientists.
Yet, the end of the millennium came and went, and the world’s nations remained above sea level. However, in the 2000s, that didn’t stop world dignitaries from former Vice President Al Gore to Prince Charles to then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown from predicting various points-of-no-return for the climate in the 2010s, none of which materialized.
Undeterred, in 2019, past President Joe Biden and probable future presidential candidate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pinpointed 2031 as the point when the ticking climate time bomb would hit zero. That same year, UN General Assembly President Maria Carces provided an even less optimistic assessment, saying the detonation would happen by 2030, if the climate bomb wasn’t defused.
And then there was Andrew Yang. In a 2019 Democratic primary debate, Biden’s longshot rival for the 2020 nomination declared that it was “10 years too late” to save the world from a climate doomsday. Lawmakers, Yang said, “need to start moving our people to higher ground.”
Yes, a candidate for the most powerful office on the planet stated outright in a globally televised forum that segments of the earth will basically be destroyed by rising waters from climate change. Not that it’s going happen if we don’t keep the earth’s temperature under a “tipping point” level—that it’s going to happen, period, full stop. If what Yang was declaring was even partly true, then not only should Americans have voted for him, we should have followed him to Denver or whatever high-altitude location he chose for our new civilization center.
However, Yang didn’t win the White House, and Biden, who did, didn’t initiate any mass resettlements to the Mountain West. Maybe he was saving it for his second term.
Bu, now Donald Trump, climate change skeptic extraordinaire, is back. Upon taking office, Trump promptly withdrew from the Paris climate agreement (as he did in 2017), through which signing countries have committed to do their part to keep the increase in global temperatures below threshold levels.
Trump has also revived and ramped up the American fossil fuel industry and de-incentivized electric vehicles. All of these actions are seen as having a harmful impact on the world’s climate.
So, we’re dead, right?
I mean, Trump will be in office until 2029, so even if AOC or another Democrat takes back the Oval Office after his term is up, it will be way too late to undo the effects of four years of climate neglect by the second largest greenhouse gas producing country in the world. A few of Trump’s actions may be halted by courts, but, ultimately, the president is the president.
So, it’s time to go, then? Whether you subscribe to Yang’s fringe view or the mainstream climate change position of the U.N., Biden and AOC, by either standard, there’s no hope of stopping global warming in time now, so we all need to make like Andrew Yang, no?
Except Yang, who should be bellowing his warnings from six years ago from the rooftops and riding the amplified message to frontrunner status for the 2028 Democratic nomination, hasn’t been saying much about it. Mostly, he’s been in the news for trying to start a third party.
However, no prominent Democrats have picked up Yang’s old bullhorn and carried on his message either, even though his dire assertions in the 2020 primary were never challenged. The silence surrounding the party line on climate predictions suggests that officials with mainstream climate views either believe that we’re all going to be swimming soon but aren’t saying it to avoid causing a mass panic, as well as for political reasons—doomsday talk sounds cultish and doesn’t play well in Peoria. Or it signifies that they never believed in their own message to begin with, beyond its political utility.
And, when in doubt, just adjust the projections. In 2023, the World Economic Forum published an article declaring that it was absolutely not “too late to halt climate change,” a belief it called “the leading climate myth globally.” Meanwhile, several years earlier, economist and climate change author Eban Goodstein declared that “our action, or our inaction, will determine how much the world heats up…it is absolutely not too late, and will not be for decades.”
Goodstein’s view, while the lacking the urgency that climate zealots crave, is tempered enough to appeal to moderates, whose support is necessary for any climate action to succeed. The problem is that all the preceding decades of hysterical predictions have conditioned a lot of Americans to dismiss any revised climate warnings as just more instances of Chicken Littles crying wolf.
Portions of this post have been inspired my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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