So, you want to understand the fringe of the global
warming religion. I think I have found it.
First, 31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying
there is insufficient evidence that any relationship exists between man-made
emissions and global warming. You can read this here.
In short, the whole global warming scenario is a fantasy.
Second, a truly apocalyptic article appears in New
York, which is a mainstream site aimed at mainstream liberals. That is why
this article is important. It is so utterly mainstream. It begins with a
headline that can hardly be out-apocalypsed: The Uninhabitable Earth. There is a
headline:
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks
us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.
The author is David Wallace-Wells. Who is he? He has no
Wikipedia page. All we know is this: he is a writer living in New York.
Third, there was an immediate challenge by an author in The
Atlantic, another mainstream liberal publication. He is almost as
apocalyptic. He says he just does not know what to think. "But
I vacillate considerably on the doom versus no-doom question." He wails:
Consider the world that climate scientists
say is more realistic: a place where sea levels cause mass migration within and
without the developed world; where the economy is never great but isn’t in
shambles either; where voters fear for their livelihoods and superpowers poke
at each others’ weaknesses.
Does that world sound like a safe and secure place to
live? Does it sound like a workable status quo? And how many small wars need to
start in that world before they all fuse together? Who needs planet-killing
methane burps when nine different countries have 15,000 nuclear weapons between
them? In short, there are plenty of doomsday scenarios to worry about. They
don’t need to be catastrophic on their face to induce catastrophe.
If that's the best refutation a mainstream liberal
magazine can come up with, then the first article is surely mainstream.
These people live in a self-created fantasy world. They
are incarnations of the woman described by Danny Kaye: “Her favorite position
is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.”
THE HEATED SKY IS FALLING
If global warming merely scares you, you're living in an
optimistic fantasy world.
If your anxiety about global warming is
dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of
what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today. And
yet the swelling seas — and the cities they will drown — have so dominated the
picture of global warming, and so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic,
that they have occluded our perception of other threats, many much closer at
hand. Rising oceans are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will
not be enough.
Indeed, absent a significant adjustment to how billions
of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to
uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of
this century.
By the way, almost nobody actually believes any of this.
If people did, real estate prices in these supposedly doomed areas would be
falling like a stone. This is apocalyptic porn. Nobody takes it
seriously, but lots of liberals love to stare at it. They want to dream great
dreams. They want to scheme great schemes.
But no matter how well-informed you are, you
are surely not alarmed enough. Over the past decades, our culture has gone
apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective
result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating
real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of
imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific
probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific
reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations
so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really
was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who
believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see
warming as a problem worth addressing; the way that climate denialism has made
scientists even more cautious in offering speculative warnings. . . .
So, scientists are holding back. They are not really
writing what they believe. How does the author know this? He does not say. He
is a mind-reader, perhaps.
The author, whoever he is, and whatever his
qualifications, says this:
In between scientific reticence and science
fiction is science itself. This article is the result of dozens of interviews
and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and
reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What
follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be
determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response.
Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is
heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming
scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way
will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate,
are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.
He invokes dozens of interviews. (With whom? Conducted
how? With notes available where?)
What are we facing? This:
The present tense of climate change — the
destruction we’ve already baked into our future — is horrifying enough.
Baked into our future. Get it? He's got a million of 'em!
Most people talk as if Miami and Bangladesh
still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I spoke with assume
we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop burning fossil fuel in the
next decade.
The world will lose Miami Beach. Where will retirees from
New York City move to then?
Not to Bangladesh, we are informed.
What are we facing? Here are the article's subheads: I.
Doomsday, II. Heat Death, III. The End of Food, IV. Climate Plagues, V.
Unbreathable air, VI. Perpetual War, VII. Permanent Economic Collapse, VIII.
Poisoned Oceans,
He asks:
So why can’t we see it? In his recent
book-length essay The Great Derangement, the Indian novelist Amitav
Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven’t become major
subjects of contemporary fiction — why we don’t seem able to imagine climate
catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he
basically imagines into half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.”
There is an obvious answer: the fiction is so
overwhelming in the official scenarios that there is no need for, or demand
for, novels.
Surely this blindness will not last — the
world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world,
the Earth’s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will
just start calling them “weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons
and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with
climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations.
Where is there hope?
The scientists know that to even meet the
Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are
still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use
(deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to
have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the
atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do.
The Paris goals are a United Nations public relations
stunt affirmed as meaningful by brief-term politicians who have already been
replaced. There are no sanctions attached to them. Now President Trump has put
them on hold. Once again, we were five minutes to midnight, but the global
warming agenda has been put into the freezer for four years.
But have no fear. Human creativity is here!
Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists
have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps
bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a
human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone
we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured
destruction. Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we
will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another.
CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!
In my youth, there were weekly low-budget serials at
movie theaters to get kids to return the following Saturday morning to buy more
popcorn and candy. There were Western heroes. There were crime-fighters. There
were science fiction heroes. Each week, the hero was trapped at the end of each
chapter -- yes, even Superman, who could not be harmed. (If Lois Lane might
bite the dust, who cared?) But the hero always got out of the deadly trap at
the beginning of the next chapter.
There was always hope. But we wanted to see how the hero
would face danger at the end of the chapter . . . even if the solution the next
week turned out to be an anticlimax.
That was popcorn porn. It started early.
It still sells.
CONCLUSION
This is a terrific article. I can imagine nothing that is
better calculated to paralyze the global warming fanatics. "All is lost!
It's too big for anybody to solve! Oh, woe!"
I hope it will mean dozens of articles that are published
to attempt to verify this lunatic assessment.
This is apocalyptic porn.
