Recently, world leaders gathered at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, to listen to the same message echoed for the past fifty (50) years that we are always ten years away from The End of Civilization!
“Disaster is just around the corner!” The media has chimed in bellowing “if developed nations don’t pony up $100 Billion in climate financing’, says Paul Behrens, a professor of environmental change, ‘the only fact about the future I can declare with certainty is that the world as we know it is coming to an end.” Comforting. Curious however is the fact that when talking about this, China and India, the world’s greatest polluters are considered “developing nations” and continue to build coal mines and utilize oil from Iran and Russia. Fascinating.
Well consider this from a 1971 headline from the UN (that’s 51 years ago):
“WE HAVE TEN YEARS TO STOP THE CATASTROPHE!”
Wow! Imagine that! Ten years left before devastation! Better get my bets in for the Super Bowl! You never know if the Jets can do it again! (Yes, unfortunately we do know the answer to that rhetorical question)
Then in 1982, Mostafa Tolba, head of the UN Environmental Program gave this interview and headline to the NY Times at the second annual UN Conference on climate change:
“If the nations of the world continue with their current policies, “we will face by the year 2000 an environmental catastrophe as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” My Lord, that sounds ominous! Oh, wait a second…that was 22 years ago, and we are still here!
Then in 1989, seven years later, a senior UN environmental official shaved a year off that dire prediction saying that “if we do not fix climate change by 1999 we will have global disaster, nations wiped off the face of the earth, crop failures, global hunger, a catastrophe of epic proportions” I guess he missed that prediction because, once again, the seas did not rise and engulf continents and we are still here.
Then, in 1990, Mostafa Tolba returned for an encore engagement to say, “we shall win—or lose— the climate struggle in the first years of the 1990’s” Ah, hell, he was only off a decade or two…maybe he meant the 90’s
The 1990’s passed without the arrival of the End Times as predicted but in 2004, the Guardian Newspaper said a “top secret report from the Pentagon to then President George W. Bush said, “climate change would destroy us.” I’m not sure where this report is as it has never been seen nor published and that is puzzling because, if you recall, George Bush was a Republican and we all know that there is a lot of “leaking” from the White House when a Republican is in office. But no one seems to have seen this secret report. Maybe it is one of those documents seized by the FBI in their raid of Trump’s home in Mar a Lago! Nonetheless, among the predictions: (1) Major European cities would be sunk beneath rising seas: (2) Britain and all of the UK would be plunged into a Siberian Climate by 2020 and (3) Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts and widespread rioting would erupt across the world. The article actually said these things….and none of them happened! Maybe these guys are not very good at forecasting.
And then there is Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States…you remember good ol’ Al… the guy who “invented the internet”! Despite a lack of a science or medical degree, Al Gore suddenly and miraculously became an expert on “global warming” a/k/a “climate change”. Al told us that before the year 2000, Artic Ice would melt, and the seas would rise and subsume land at a frightening pace before the decade was out. Fascinating. That apocalyptic vision was he impetus which caused Barack Hussein Obama, 43rd President of the United States to purchase a multi-million-dollar estate near the ocean in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass! What intelligent person, fearful of floods and imminent disaster, would decide to invest in beachfront property at such a perilous time? Wonder what the former Messiah knows that we common folk don’t know? Perhaps Al whispered something in his ear, or John Kerry, he of the three Purple Hearts, told Obama making such an investment would be OK as the seas would not dare cause him any harm. Sure.
Not to be outdone, in 2007, Rajendra Paschauri, head of the UN Climate Panel said, “If there is no action taken by 2012, that is too late”. H’mm, it seems he was a bit off with this prediction. More to the point, where is he today?
Well, the year 2012 did indeed bring disaster in the form of a Hollywood movie “2012” starring John Cusick, but besides John Cusick’s acting career, the rest of us survived as it is now 2022. Shucks, missed again.
I’m just wondering….did any of these prognosticators ever think about what were the predictions made by those who came before them and how accurate they were? Sounds like they just conveniently forgot about them.
But, not to worry. In 2019 new targets were established. The UN said in 2019 that we have only 11 years left to avert disaster. This of course was echoed by Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the Boston University economics graduate, turned Brooklyn Bartender, turned Congresswoman who exclaimed for all of us that “we have only eleven years left to live” And Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont who never held a job or fretted about making payroll repeated these claims of the impending apocalypse! And their words were emphasized often and loudly by the Screamer in Chief, teenager Greta Thunberg who has shouted angrily and incessantly that the UN needs to declare a “systemwide climate emergency and force…mandate….countries to take action.” Good luck with implementing that in China, India, Iran, Russia, and North Korea.
But now, thank goodness, it appears we have until 2030 to survive…just 58 years after the warnings of 1972. Almost six Decades of fear mongering.
The lesson: Nothing…absolutely nothing….is accomplished by fear mongering. Climate Change may be real. The jury is still out on that score. To date there have been no honest debates pitting both sides of the issue and moderated by objective scientific authorities. One thing is certain however and that is that climate change is not the disaster people have been predicting. Climate change has been occurring for thousands of years, millennia in fact. Guess what? Our planet has survived it all. There is no imminent threat because if there were you would have seen all the elites scurrying to find hideouts and safe havens. Moreover, we can do something about Climate Change. We need to adapt to it. We need to mitigate it with technology that is professionally researched and well planned, not the shoot from the hip frivolous, haphazard approach espoused by politicians who do not know the first thing about science or technology. Will China and North Korea and Russia give up coal, oil and gas overnight? No, and neither should the US. Keep in mind that emissions are falling in Western nations largely because we are innovating, and we are making progress without causing a complete upheaval of modern life and without spending trillions of dollars…money we don’t have…foolishly on the Green New Deal. The real tragedy will be if Joe Biden is successful in actually spending the $389 billion approved by Congress for climate change. That will sound the death knell for the American economy and our way of life. Biden and the Democrats must be stopped from continuing to spend trillions of dollars in the midst of rampant inflation and a stagnated economy. It is suicide to continue down the path we are on simply to appease a minority in Congress.
So here is wisdom: Our future is predicated, as it always has been, on our ability to reason, think, research, invent, innovate…by being proactive not reactive. That is how we built America. We nether have the resources (minerals like cobalt, lithium, dyphorium) and other resources that come from mining in parts of the world controlled by people who hate and want to kill us. Wind and solar are hardly adequate, and our electric grid is dependent… wait for it… on fossil fuels… which Biden has waged war against. That is a sure-fire way to fail. And if you haven’t checked your 401-K and retirement accounts recently, we are failing and have been since Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021.
I’ll stick with the blueprint that fosters and rewards innovation and risk takers while reinstituting America’s Energy Independence. It has served us remarkably well for over 246 years.
