...The media has broadcast far and wide the latest primal scream by the federal government and hundreds of scientists that all life on earth by the end of the century could be severely threatened due to climate change....
...How could a government report prepared by hundreds of scientists and with the official imprimatur of the federal government be wrong? The obvious answer is that they have been consistently wrong for decades in predictions of environmental devastation. Anyone over the age of 50 knows that we have heard these sensational, false malthusian forecasts from the federal government, and that reality has contradicted them in almost every instance. Look at history and consider the track record.
In the 1960s, the world became captivated by the likes of media darling and Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, who warned of a population bomb as humans propagated like field mice....
In the 1970s, the infamous Club of Rome report on “limits to growth” in the world, which was sponsored and funded by the federal government, saw the planet not surviving much past the year 2000 due to poverty, pollution, starvation, overcrowding, climate change, and natural resource depletion. It was all so horrifying that people across the country started wearing lapel pins that said, “Stop the planet, I want to get off.”
In the 1980s, the Carter administration spent millions of dollars on the most comprehensive environmental report ever undertaken by the federal government, employing hundreds of top scientists from more than two dozen agencies. (Sound familiar?) The end product dismally concluded, “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now...."....
When skeptics raised the red flag on these forecasts, they were accused of questioning the “settled” science of the day....
In every one of these cases, the media uncritically splashed these spooky government forecasts on front pages of nearly every newspaper and on nightly broadcasts of every network across the globe. Environmental groups raised billions of dollars to amplify and combat these crises....
After every false prediction of doom, the left jumps seamlessly onto the next scare tactic. Think about the progression of false fears over the last several decades. It started with overpopulation, then DDT killing all the birds, then nuclear winter, then mass famine, then toxic air pollution levels that would require humans to wear gas masks, then low sperm counts, then peak oil, then a modern ice age, then earth running out of clean water, then species extinction, then loss of farmland, and on and on....
...Scientists should have the wisdom and the modesty to admit that we have no idea what will happen to our planet as climate change continues over the next century. There are too many variables to hazard a decent guess. But the one indomitable lesson of history is that giving the government more power is the most dangerous threat to the future of our planet.