It was reported this weekend that change in the Sun’s activity will plunge the earth into a mini ice age. New models of the Sun’s solar cycle is generating ‘unprecedentedly accurate predictions,’ suggesting that ‘solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s to conditions last seen during the “mini ice age” that began in 1645.’
If these predictions prove to be accurate, th
ey could be the knock-out blow for the ideology, movement and industry that is climate change/global warming.
Even before this announcement, the public was already tiring of the doomsday climate change predictions, many of which are now being shown to be false. Many of us were deeply concerned about whole suburbs disappearing under the sea after watching Al Gore’s Inconvenient truth – but nine years later his confidence-trickster predictions of impending doom are facing a patient and authoritative judge: Evidence.
Public surveys continue to confirm that climate change is not seen as top priority for most people, despite increasing hysterics and name calling from climate change activists, and despite President Obama’s statement earlier this year that climate change is the greatest existential threat facing humanity. That’s right kiddies – forget drugs, forget suicide and depression, and definitely forget militant Islam, the purported extinction of polar bears is our biggest existential threat.
Some of our younger viewers may think that climate change is the first cataclysmic prediction the world has faced. Unfortunately, this is not the case.
Climate change is well down the list of doomsday predictions we have seen, even just over the last couple of generations. Most notably was the ‘population bomb’ fear mongering of the 1960s which purported that by the 1970s half of the world’s population would be suffering from starvation. Not only did the ‘population bomb’ catastrophe not eventuate, in fact the exact opposite occurred with world hunger steadily decreasing. Like the population bomb, and other doomsday predictions, climate change (and ‘global warming’, from which the movement was conveniently rebranded) will be relegated to the scrap heap of history.
Perhaps every generation needs to have its own impending apocalypse.And in an age when so much is going right – there is a well evolved response of hesitation and inertia. It can’t be this good – this simply can’t last forever. Rather than gratitude, and responsibility for taking those gifts and running with them, this kind of ‘lizard-brain’ thinking breeds for many, unease and guilt.
Worse still, whilst the apocalyptic prophets of old sought to avert the destruction of civilisation, our current generation of doom-sayers seem intent on bringing on the diminution, if not the total destruction of modern civilisation.
As the climate change movement continues to wane and eventually die, what will the anti-civilisation movement latch onto next?
Photo by michael_swan 