William R. Forstchen had an excellent piece recently at American Thinker on today’s climate
crisis:
Oh my God -- we’re doomed.
The UN’s Panel on Climate Change came out with a frightening report earlier
this month that we are sitting on a global time bomb, and according
to CNN, “time is running out,” without immediate drastic action. The
UN report states that if global temperatures reach 1.5 C above the
pre-industrial temperature norm of 1850-1900, the resulting melting of the
polar ice caps, rising oceans, and unprecedented ecological disaster will
follow.
I read this a few days back on a
dark and stormy night while working on my own tome about disaster, the next
book in the One Second After series. One Second After examines what
would happen if we were ever hit by an enemy using an Electro-Magnetic Pulse
generated from detonating a nuclear weapon in space. But ecological
disaster, which is all but inevitable according to the highly respected UN
report, was far more frightening. Closing off working on my book, I
brewed yet another cup of coffee, sat back and pulled out a well-respected
study on this existential threat to all mankind.
I started to thumb through the
pages of a work that took a team of international experts years to research and
has sold well over 12 million copies since publication.
I turned to the chapter on fossil
fuels. The report states we have only about twenty more years of oil out
there, we are already at peak oil, which will then start to go downhill and the
wells will run dry no matter how much we scramble to get more. There will
be a final rush to pump one more drop of oil even if at the cost of twenty
dollars a gallon, but that in turn will accelerate the depletion into a death
spiral. Natural gas will not save us, as we turn to that source as oil
runs out, we’ll deplete that as well. Again, a death spiral.
Climate is the big one this
report. Despite our feeble efforts to address the radical changes already
taking place, the disaster will explode within ten to fifteen years, due in
large part to the depletion of farmlands worldwide from the use of toxic
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, soil exhaustion, and encroaching urban
population. The results: famine, disease, and mass starvation then
triggering political instability in which hundreds of millions will die.
The list went on and on, a list
that would render any sane reader numb with despair. But me? I could only smile at it
all. . .
The punchline:
You see, the book that I was
reading, Limits to
Growth, was published more than fifty years ago in 1972. . . .
And every predicted doomsday catastrophe has failed to
materialize. Read the rest here; Mr. Forstchen’s
column includes specific doomsday scenarios with all those missed “deadlines.”
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