In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus says, “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who have no need of repentance.”
Bill Gates’s recent Damascene conversion after 20 years of climate alarmism brought this to mind. He wrote that Earth’s mildly heating atmosphere “will not lead to humanity’s demise.” He admitted that deaths due to weather disasters such as floods have fallen 90% in the past century, that economic growth powered by energy use improves and sustains life, and that climate freakouts cause harm — OK, he didn’t actually say “freakouts,” but he meant it.
Climate alarmism blocks loans for poor countries to build fossil-fuel power stations, so their people live shorter, more impoverished lives. Trillions of dollars of wealth creation and millions of people have been sacrificed to the grift and moral vanity of rich “progressives.”
A study from the University of Arizona debunks widespread alarm that climate change is accelerating animal and plant extinctions. The extinction rate has actually fallen in the past 100 years and is not due to climate but to lost habitat. In the preceding 400 years, when extinctions rose, it was due not to climate but to invasive species. That coincided with the sudden big increase in human travel and trade, not with more atmospheric carbon dioxide. Also, by the way, there’s more living coral on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef than ever recorded, so the sky-is-falling, or sky-is-heating, horror over its previous decline was wholly unnecessary.
We should be glad that facts are rolling back emotional environmentalism, glad that people are seeing the light, but it’s also frustrating for those who’ve been right all along. This is not just because no one likes being patronized and condescended to by smug ignoramuses. It’s also because freakouts do massive harm before people come to their senses.
Generations of children have been taught by ignorant and ideological grade-school teachers and libraries full of climate alarmist propaganda that they should be afraid for the planet, for themselves, for their families, and for every species. Instead of growing up delighting in the animal kingdom and the beauty of the flora around them, they’ve had it drummed into them that they should live in fear and aspire to attack great art with hammers and spray paint to, er, save the world.
Sadly, many young adults today think that they should not have children because there are too many humans already, and anyway, what kind of a life would their sons and daughters have amid increasing floods, droughts, and other calamities? This is the stuff of retreat, both by our civilization and by people denying their full humanity. And it’s due to unnecessary and ill-founded ideological fashions.
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR IN THE NEW YORK CITY MAYOR’S RACE
That climate alarmism, despite lasting decades, is a fashion or fad is abundantly clear. It was most recently demonstrated by Greta Thunberg going to bed one night as an obsessive climate activist and waking up the next morning as an obsessive Palestinian terrorism activist. The two are connected by their doctrinaire leftism.
Forgiveness is hard down here on Earth. We see things in human terms. Even though leftist fashions go out of style, it’s a big problem that they get a grip on our culture in the first place. For they do enormous damage while they last.