In 1843, well-educated people thought the Millerites were crackpots. In 2020, the consensus of the supposedly well-educated is the equivalent of Millerism.
Roy Scranton is a professor of English at Notre Dame. His discussion of his feelings of guilt over having brought a child into this doomed world appeared in the New York Times.
Anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted. And anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume we’re almost certainly going to botch it. To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next five or 10 years, we would need to radically reorient almost all human economic and social production, a task that’s scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, enormous state investment in carbon capture and sequestration and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very time when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are breaking apart. The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy.
And even if world leaders somehow got their act together, significant and dangerous levels of warming are still inevitable, baked into the system from all the carbon dioxide that has already been dumped. There’s a time lag between carbon dioxide increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. Our lives are lived in that gap. My daughter was born there.
Barring a miracle, the next 20 years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation and a wild spectrum of human political and economic responses, including scapegoating and war. After that, things will get worse. The middle and later decades of the 21st century — my daughter’s adult life — promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror.
The irony here is that he may be right: civilization as we know it may be doomed. But the cause of doom is going to be the ineffable stupidity of the morons who took over our establishment institutions, not the junk science theory of Global Warming Catastrophism.
OneGuy
It reminds me of that expression; ” It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you”. He is a true believer, based more on faith than on fact, he is vested in this global warming “theory” and thus IT will be what ends life as we know it. IF this were all true, then he is right. But at this point about the only honest thing we could say about the global warming theory is we don’t know if it’s right. But to someone who believes something based on blind faith it is real and anyone disagreeing with it is the enemy of the truth.
IMHO what we are seeing over the last 150 years or so is the inevitable result of the end of the mini ice age; it got warmer. Thank god it got warmer. We have 7.5 billion or so people on earth and all of them are eating but they would not be eating if it had not gotten warmer. Some scientists predict that the cycle will turn (as cycles do) and we will get global cooling. If we do it will be a human disaster way past any biblical disaster. Even a return of a mini ice age (which is on average only a few degrees colder) would result in massive starvation and death, perhaps billions would die. So I repeat thank god for global warming.
Steverino
What would prove anthropogenic global warming false? If nothing, then AGW is not a rational belief and certainly not science. Consequently, educated people should reject it.
If there are things that would prove AGW false, what science calls a falsifiable proposition, what are they, where have they been tested, and what were the results? I can’t find any, unlike the falsifiable propositions for real science.
AGW is junk science, a doomsday cult, that satisfies the dark emotional needs of a certain kind of damaged person. It also serves the needs of socialists who have learned that a crisis is the best way to implement their political program. In the case of AGW, they rage that the crisis demands we grant the government trillions of dollars and vast, unaccountable political power.
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