"Hot Air"

Thanks to Margaret for calling our attention to this article at The American Thinker, today:

Back in the days of Jimmy Carter and killer rabbits, doomsayers were telling us that the Earth was slipping into new ice age, and that we were all going to die. Survivalists ran for the hills while stuffed-shirt academics ordered extra elbow patches for their sweaters and tut-tutted about the foolishness of the American people. This particular hysteria was fueled by a couple of cooler-than-normal winters, and the doomsday prophets gleefully told us to prepare for the end. By the beginning of the 1980`s the temperature trends had changed and global cooling went out of fashion, replaced by a trendier doomsday scenario: global warming.

Once again, the sky is falling and we are all going to die. We have heard this mantra repeatedly for the last twenty years, and from some of the same people who promised us igloos and a twelve-month skiing season. Those same academics are removing their sweaters, cranking down the AC, and tut-tutting about the foolishness of the American people. We have been treated to a smorgasbord of half-baked ideas; the oceans will overflow, the ice will all melt and we’ll have no more snow, tropical diseases will run rampant. Our only slim hope for survival lies in adopting the Kyoto Protocols. We simply must live poorer — cut back, sacrifice, use less. This sounds remarkably like what we heard in the 1970's from the Club of Rome study on the limits to growth, driven by the supposed imminent exhaustion of most major raw materials. The disease diagnosis changes, but the cure is always the same....

See also my Tale of Three Doctors: And What it Tells Us About the Environmental Movement.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 12/21/04 08:14:20 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.