Worth clicking over for the whole thing.
Joel Kotkin:
“…Whether it’s fires in California or Brazil, hurricanes like Dorian or your summer hot spell, it’s not just weather anymore but a sign of the impending apocalypse.
This specter of imminent demise tied to the everyday, notes one American Psychological Association study, has induced “stress, depression and anxiety” among a wide part of the population. The Congress’ leading green advocate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, admits her climate concerns often wake her up at 3:30 in the morning.
Of course, significant changes in the climate could well be afoot, but our “woke” media and its favored go-to expert class seem more prone to hysteric prophesizing than properly skeptical analysis.
After Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, some climatistas confidently predicted that it was harbinger of ever more powerful tropic storms, yet it was followed for 10 years by something of a “hurricane drought” that, sadly, may be at an end.
Little is said about anything that may alter the narrative, such as reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration statistics show at most only minimal warming in the United States since 2005.
Few have heard that despite the recent fires in the Amazon, widely portrayed as part of a relentless incendiary burning tied to climate, as Mike Shellenberger notes, there’s been a 25 percent drop in fires globally since 2003; rather than burning up the forest, we have been planting more trees than harvesting them for over three decades.
And remember the California drought that Gov. Jerry Brown and his acolytes linked to climate change? That prolonged dry spell ended in a series of downpours, as it has for much of past 150 years…
…The Catholic Church discovered millennia ago that the prospect of apocalypse provides a brilliant tool of propaganda. To people in the Middle Ages, observed historian Barbara Tuchman, “apocalypse was in the air,” the spawn of human sin. In much the same way the environmental movement links human material aspirations with impending disaster, citing manmade climate change as the singular explanation for everything from starvation, wars and crop failures to hurricanes, floods or any other unusual weather.
Unlike the medieval apocalypse, ours is cloaked in scientism, and is propelled to a certainty by computer models. Yet experience should engender some degree of skepticism — if history-challenged journalists knew different. One of the fundamental documents of modern environmentalism, the widely hailed 1972 Club of Rome report, predicted massive shortages of natural resources and the end of economic growth, claims generally accepted without skepticism in media, academic and political circles. Yet energy and food subsequently became more plentiful than ever as the world has experienced the largest growth in affluence in its history.
Never called to account, greens and their allies can still follow the same mantra with predictable reliability. Upon the election of President Barack Obama in 2009, NASA’s James Hansen, one of the icons of the climate change movement, announced that the new chief executive had a bare “four years to save the Earth.” A year earlier ABC in 2008 claimed that Manhattan would be “under water” by 2015. None of these predictions, at least so far, have come true…”