'The End of the World' Keeps Happening

Climate change activists have been beating the same drum since at least 1978, the New York Post reports in “The Comic Cries of Climate Apocalypse — 50 Years of Spurious Scaremongering.”

Political leaders including U.S. climate envoy John Kerry, respected organizations such as the United Nations, and esteemed scientists have been warning us, for years now, that the world is about to end. Most recently, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, speakers said the world has reached its “last chance” to “save humanity” from the impending doom of the “climate catastrophe” barreling down the highway of life. At that meeting, Kerry proclaimed that we only have nine years left to curtail the worst of global warming.

Sound familiar? In 2009, former Vice President Al Gore said, “The North Pole will be ice-free in the summer by 2013 because of man-made global warming.” That’s from the Poynter Institute, a nonpartisan, educational institute for journalists.

In 2019, Britain’s Prince Charles weighed in, announcing that we had only 18 months to put an end to climate change.

The fearmongering goes back to 1972, 50 years ago next year, at the very first UN environment summit in Stockholm, Sweden. At that time, the world was going to end in 1982. The “Limits to Growth” report issued from that summit said that natural resources would run out in a few decades and that humanity would be overwhelmed by pollution.

No wonder these frightening prognostications led to Hollywood’s apocalypse genre of movies, including 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow," starring Dennia Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal and Sela Ward.

The New York Post article says it is shameful for leaders of our society to — time and time again across decades — paint such an abysmal view of the world’s end. It has succeeded in convincing governments, including our own, to pass expensive, hastily crafted laws on alternative energies. Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act of 2021 is the latest example of such laws. Importantly, hysterical claims that the world is on the edge of collapse ignore the fact that today, 78% of the world’s energy is supplied by traditional fossil fuels.

Likens Climate Change to Nuclear Holocaust

“These predictions have been failing for decades,” the New York Post says. “In 1989, the head of the UN’s Environment Program declared we had just three years to ‘win — or lose — the climate struggle.’

“In 1982, the UN was predicting planetary ‘devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust’ by the year 2000.”

The New York Post goes on to stress that just as mankind devised a way to fight fires, mankind will continue to find ways to lessen pollution’s harm to the environment. After all, pollution has been decreasing in developed nations in the past few decades, the article notes.

Not only do our fearless leaders and environmental groups ignore the adaptations and innovations that have been made in transportation and alternative energy, but so does the media, according to the New York Post: “Headlines telling you that sea-level rise could drown 187 million people by the end of the century are foolishly ignorant. They imagine that hundreds of millions of people will remain stationary while the waters lap over their calves, hips, chests and eventually mouths. More seriously, they absurdly assume that no nation will build any sea defenses.

“In the real world, ever-wealthier nations will adapt and protect their citizens ever better — leading to less flooding, while surprisingly spending an ever-lower share of their GDP on flood and protection costs.”

The article concludes by saying “panic is a terrible policy-adviser.” What is actually needed is a focus on “realistic solutions such as adaptation and innovation. Adaptation won’t make the entire cost of climate change vanish — but it will reduce it dramatically.”