What the Environmentalist Prophets of Doom Got Wrong (and Almost Right) By James Reed
Greta Thunberg, climate change guru of the school strike fame, said back in the heady days of 2018, that without radical deindustrialisation, the world would end by 2023, as result of climate change, killing us all off. Well, 2023 is racing ahead, and it does not look like climate change is going to do us in. These failed prophecies of eco-doomsday were also made throughout the career of Stanford University biologist, Paul Ehrlich, and he is still masking them, this time focussing on wider issues than the human population bomb, such as biodiversity decline. Now this is not to say that the destruction of biodiversity is not a concern, but it is clear that these environmental issues get distorted, and manipulated by those who see that a Leftist agenda can usefully be served by it.
While the environmentalists are likely wrong about a natural end to Western civilisation, it hardly follows that refuting them puts us in the clear. There are resource crises, including food shortages, but this is not due to natural limitations, but to political action by the elites, such as closing down 30 percent of farms in the Netherlands. If there is a population bomb, then food production needs to be increased not decreased. So, it is evident even from a cursory examination, that there is a larger agenda behind the environmentalist’s hysterics. And, it is communism, of the nastiest, woke, globalist sort, a social cancer that would destroy the human essence if let to spread. We must oppose it to the last breath, if need be, making this the hill we die upon, as the old saying goes.
“Being the international spokesperson for a fake crisis can be tough, as the child actor who acts as the mouthpiece for the climate change industry has just been reminded. On Saturday, Human Events senior editor Jack Posobiec tweeted at pint-sized climate scold Greta Thunberg, “Hi @GretaThunberg! Why did you delete this?” The deleted tweet in question had Greta quoting this: “A climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” The date on Greta’s tweet? June 21, 2018. Either we have just over three months to live, or Greta’s tweet was juuuuust a trifle hysterical. Her deletion of the tweet suggests that even Greta knows that the sun is likely to rise on June 22, 2023.
Greta was even more hysterical than her fellow climate mythicist, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Mars), who on Jan. 21, 2019, chastised the older generations for not being sufficiently terrified in the face of impending doom: “Millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up, and we’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’”
Well, yeah, because I’m willing to wager right now that the sun will not only rise on June 22, 2023, but also on Jan. 22, 2031. The climate change hysterics have been trying to frighten the public with false apocalyptic scenarios and predictions of imminent destruction for far longer than most people realize. Back in September 1958, future feminist heroine Betty Friedan published an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Coming Ice Age.” Friedan purported to explain “how a rising of the ocean waters may flood most of our port cities within the foreseeable future — and why it will be followed by the growth of a vast glacier which may eventually cover much of Europe and North America.” Do 65 years count as the “foreseeable future”? Can we safely say that we’re out of the danger zone for this coming ice age now?
In April 1970, Paul Erlich, author of the bestseller The Population Bomb, warned that “population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” This ridiculous claim was published in the fashion magazine Mademoiselle, which gives us a hint of how wealthy Leftist feminists are made.
Erlich was not alone in this. A professor named Peter Gunter wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” None of that happened, and 100 to 200 million people didn’t starve to death by 1980, but a generation of both men and women were thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that it was wrong to have a large family because of the overpopulation “crisis.”
On June 29, 1989, the Associated Press (AP), which for some reason still remains a respected news organization despite the fact that it is one of the leading Leftist propaganda outfits operating today, published an article stating, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Technically, the hoaxer was Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), but AP, and much of the Western world, fell for him hard. Here it is 23 years beyond the date by which rising sea levels were to be wiping nations off the face of the earth, and lo and behold, the nations of the earth are all still here.
Leftists have been using fear as a tool to sell their propaganda for decades. Greta’s deleted tweet ought to serve as a wake-up call for those who still suspect that their doomsday scenarios, which are all designed to force us into accepting poverty and bug-eating while China cements its global economic hegemony, might actually be real.”
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