Limits to Growth – or We’re All Gonna Die

 

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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The Mask of The Green Cult

 

image credit: yuuuuup8000.blogspot

“The Mask of The Green Cult.”  Sounds like a science fiction movie.  Except that it’s all around us, for real.  Adam Vicari at American Thinker starts his essay:

For decades now, you have heard leftist ear sores bloviate endlessly about "climate change."  The world will end in a decade if we don't take action now! screams AOC.  However, the more skeptical and rational among us tend to question the true motivation of the environmentalist Green cult.

The best example of a real environmentalist was probably conservationist John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club.  Muir's work helped to establish a number of national parks throughout the country, an act that did not regress the progress of society for the sake of nature, but sought to preserve nature while simultaneously allowing industrial society to progress at a steady rate.  Thus, Muir sought to build something, while the modern environmentalist movement seeks only to destroy everything and anything that gets in the way of its climate crusade. 

Just take a look at the Sierra Club's website today, and see what its goals are for 2030.  Within the next seven years, the Sierra Club hopes to eliminate enough coal and gas in the energy sector to make for 80% carbon "pollution"–free electricity by that time, in addition to decreasing oil used in the transportation sector by 18%, ending the sale of gas appliances, and halting the fossil fuel market by banning oil and gas exports and petrochemical expansion at the same time.  This is an ambitious plan...and also a complete load of BS and magical thinking. 

Although it may not faze most people at first, notice how they call carbon a "pollutant" and claim they want to reduce it by 80% in electricity production.  Since when is carbon a pollutant?  Carbon is an element necessary to all life on earth. No organism can survive without it.  Indeed, the entire process on which all human life depends, photosynthesis, requires carbon dioxide.  In order for plants to produce oxygen for living beings to breathe, they must first collect carbon dioxide dispelled from the living being breathing the air they are producing.  Numerous studies have indicated that areas with higher carbon concentration are more green and more fertile, not less. 

So why would the Green cult want to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere? . . . .

Why indeed?  Mr. Vicari has some good guesses.  Read his column here.

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