Over 50 predictions of "PROVEN DOOM"

Thursday, 6 December 2018

David Attenborough: 'The sky is falling'

David Attenborough has been widely lauded in headlines worldwide for his dramatic claim that is"civilisation" is to be saved then "we" have just thirty years in which to "take action" -- that action being in the main, as per his speech, government action to ban private actions. “The world’s people have spoken," claimed Attenborough. "Time is running out. They want you, the decision-makers, to act now." A strange claim indeed to make in a week in which many of France's people set fire to Paris to protest the decision-makers' new French carbon tax.

Stranger still to hear the great man sound so shrill. In the words of Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore,

It's a real shame, but Sir David has allowed himself to be used as a prophet of doom. Who knows what caused his mind to be sucked into this deviance from his once celebratory view of living creation? The demonisation of CO2 is an evil act against the most important food for life.

Even if the doom-mongers were correct about the science, of course, that would say nothing at all about the action to be taken. Bjorn Lomborg for example warns that "strong global climate action would cause far more hunger and food insecurity than climate change itself.” And civilisation itself demands in any case that we take the doom-mongering cautiously.

Before any implication for action can be present, additional information is required.
    One essential piece of information is the comparative valuation attached to retaining industrial civilisation versus avoiding global warming. If one values the benefits provided by industrial civilisation above the avoidance of the losses alleged to result from global warming, it follows that nothing should be done to stop global warming that destroys or undermines industrial civilisation. That is, it follows that global warming should simply be accepted as a byproduct of economic progress and that life should go on as normal in the face of it.
    Modern, industrial civilisation and its further development are values that we dare not sacrifice if we value our material well-being, our health, and our very lives. It is what has enabled billions more people to survive and to live longer and better. Here in the United States it has enabled the average person to live at a level far surpassing that of kings and emperors of a few generations ago.
    The foundation of this civilisation has been, and for the foreseeable future will continue to be, the use of fossil fuels.

Nevertheless, there is a reason most people sleep far more easily than they should given all the doom-mongering going around -- and there is a very good reason for that: which is the many, many years of  fatuous, fat-headed environmental predictions made by a litany of worry-worts and misanthropic headline-hunting doomsayers.

Predictions like these:

• Britain's industrial growth will come to a halt because its coal reserves are running out “… it is useless to think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal... some day our coal seams [may] be found emptied to the bottom, and swept clean like a coal-cellar. Our fires and furnaces ... suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness ... left to reign over a depopulated country."
  --Economist William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865
• Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.
  --Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University. Spring 1970 issue of ‘The Living Wilderness.’
• Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” 
  --‘Life’ Magazine, January 1970
• Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.--George Wald, Harvard Biologist, Earth Day, 1970
• It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.
  --Denis Hayes, chief organiser for Earth Day, 1970
• …some scientists estimate that the world's known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminium will be used up within your lifetime.
  --1990s school textbook The United States and Its People, quoted by Ronald Bailey in testimony to US House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Feb 4, 2004

[So many more further predictions of doom, from very important prophets of knowledge, :-) made in the past 50 years.

Are they seeking control and power over people?
Social legislation can NOT repeal physical Laws.
 So socialism is the governmental embodiment of the common good.