Global Warming Porn
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.
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