It is now a joke, really. But now the warnings of increasingly dire soon-to-be calamities caused by global warming have reached the ultimate end—human extinction. From the column by Andrew Bolt:
WE humans are about to be wiped out in a few decades. The grandchildren of many of us will not live to old age. Hear it from Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University and the man who helped eradicate smallpox. “Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years,” he told The Australian this week. “It’s an irreversible situation.” Blame global warming.
It’s hard to take these end of the world prophesies seriously, and indeed, Bolt notes that even the most seriously hysterical don’t act as if they really believe it:
Now, you’d think when a reporter had just been told that thousands of years of human history were about to come to a screaming halt - with their own loved ones among the dead - that rabbits and recollections of Norm would be the last thing they’d want to discuss. Back up a bit, they’d cry. Run that by me again: you mean, all human life on this planet is going to be exterminated? But, no. So used are we to sandwich-board doom-mongering from global warmists that we hurry them on to cheerier topics, like tales of old Norm and his skulls.
It’s not that Fenner is a joke. He may now be 95, but he’s a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Royal Society. And his views on the end of the world, however boring, were still deemed serious enough to publish in The Australian’s prestigious Higher Education supplement. This curious disconnect between prediction and reception happens relatively often now. Four years ago another warmist, Prof James Lovelock, creator of the influential Gaia theory of an interconnected Earth, was every bit as apocalyptic as Fenner. We’d passed the point of no return, he groaned. The world was heating catastrophically. “Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”..Yet when ABC warmist Phillip Adams soon afterwards interviewed Lovelock for Late Night Live, they first talked of walks in the country, horses, the absence of TVs back when they were lads and how people used to believe in ghosts.
That’s because the apocalyptic hysteria is understood to be just that—even by its most dedicated purveyors who don’t lead by example—and by the journalists who happily tout the party line. Take Al Gore and his, how many is it now, 5 houses and his constant flying on private jets all over the world, perhaps adding up one of the single highest individual carbon footprints on the planet as he laughs all the way to the bank.
Bolt nails the disconnect between words and deeds quite well. And I think the people get it. Which is why the issue of ACW has fallen to the bottom of our public policy priority list.
