How Climate Change Reversal Efforts Could Destroy Our Planet

Along the same lines as the promises by news media outlets who are perceived authoritarians on any subject just simply due to the fact that they are the reporters of these “facts,” are the promises by individuals who have PhDs in (pick a science) who claim that situation A, B, and C will occur because they have a “credible theory” on the subject.

This suggests that Ukrainian invalids are not unique in their response, but the large numbers of what we might call information casualties represent a particularly egregious example of what can happen from false fears.

Once I looked at Chernobyl, I began to remember some other fears in my life that had also never come true, the population bomb, for one. Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the 1960s, 60 million Americans starving to death. That didn’t happen. Other scientists warned of mass species extinctions by the year 2000. Ehrlich himself predicted that half of all species would become extinct by 2000. That didn’t happen. The Club of Rome told us we would run out of raw materials ranging from oil to copper by the 1990s. That didn’t happen either.

It’s no surprise that predictions frequently don’t come true. But such big ones, and so many! All my life, I worried about the decay of the environment, the tragic loss of species, the collapse of ecosystems. I worried a lot. Poisoned by pesticides, Alar on apples, falling sperm counts from endocrine disrupters, cancer from power lines, cancer from saccharine, cancer from cell phones, cancer from computer screens, cancer from food coloring, hair spray, electric razors, electric blankets, coffee, chlorinated water. It never seemed to end.

Only once, when on the same day I read that beer was a preservative of heart muscle and also a carcinogen, did I begin to realize the bind that I was in.

But Chernobyl started me on a new path. When I began to research these old fears to find out what had been said in the past, I discovered several important things. The first is that there’s nothing more sobering than a 30-year-old newspaper. You can’t figure out what the headlines mean, you don’t know who the people are. Theodore Green, John Sparkman, George Reedy, Jack Watson. Who were they? You thumb through page after page of vanished concerns, issues that apparently were important at the time and now don’t matter at all. It’s amazing how many pressing concerns are literally of the moment. They won’t matter in six months, and certainly not in six years, and if they won’t matter then, are they really worth our attention now?

But as David Brinkley once said, the one function TV news performs very well is that when there is no news, we give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

The second thing I discovered was that attempts to provoke fear tended to employ a certain kind of stereotypic and very intense language. For example, here’s a quote on climate:

Familiar language, isn’t it? But this is not actually about global warming. It’s about global cooling, fear of a new ice age. Is anybody here worried about an ice age? Is anybody upset that we didn’t act now back then, to stockpile food and all the other things we were warned that we had to do?

Here’s a quote from a famous computer study in the 1970s that predicted a dire future for mankind unless we act now. And just notice the language here:

Very heavy stuff.

Here’s Paul Ehrlich talking about what he thinks we’re going to have to do. He’s talking about population. As you know, he favored voluntary controls, but if voluntary controls didn’t work, he favored coercive controls. He said,

Ah, here’s the UN. This is about Y2K:

Now, nearly everybody’s forgotten about Y2K, so let me remind you of what was predicted six years ago. Here’s one author who said he was assuming at least a 12-month disruption of basic goods and services including no electrical power, no clean water, no telecommunications, shortages of food, gas, clothing and retail goods, bank failures, inaccessibility of funds, stock market crash, dramatic drop in real estate prices. We’re still waiting for that.

Economic depression, unemployment, civil unrest, including protests, riots and general lawlessness. This is actually one of the milder predictions.

Here’s another one. Here’s another prediction that simply pointed to a meltdown of civilization as we know it. Can’t get any stronger than that.

Turn to the next page to see the results of what really happened and how this was erroneously attributed to a government entity that had nothing to do with it!

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