“It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine” — so goes lyrics to the 1987 hit by R.E.M. That seemingly self-opposing statement sums the debate between today’s climate change doomsayers and doom deniers – with one side steadily upping the “end of the world” rhetoric while the other retorts, “I feel fine.”
Predictions of our demise due to radical changes in weather are nothing new. Many times we’ve been told by media, pundits and scientists alike the end is near. Announcements that we’re going to fry, freeze, be stricken with acid rain or worse have been around for decades. But today’s versions of climate change alarmists, culminating in young Greta Thunberg’s scolding of world leaders this week, have taken to selling such a dire, apocalyptic view of our future (in the absence of “drastic action”) that writers of Mad Max movies must wonder just what they’re talking about.
A few more recent examples:
In February 2018, while speaking to students at Georgetown University, Hillary Clinton had this to say, “I would say that, particularly for women, you’re absolutely right. They will bear the brunt of looking for the food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock, or your crops are no longer growing; they’re burning up in the intense heat … .”
How many women have livestock to move? Most women in America currently get their food from places like Safeway, Kroger, Publix, Walmart, Aldi and Cub Foods. Are Piggly Wiggly’s going to somehow cease to exist in the future? If so, what’s going to happen to them?
Not content with “in the future,” earlier this year everyone’s favorite nutso quote machine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) decided it’s time to put a(nother) time stamp on our demise, when in January she proclaimed, “… the world is gonna end in twelve years if we don’t address climate change.”
What does “the world is gonna end” actually mean? Apparently that twelve-year stake was a marker for others to best.
A few months later, in April, everyone’s second favorite nutso quote machine Beto O’Rourke lopped off a couple of years when he declared we actually only have ten years left. Appearing on MSNBC O’Rourke told interviewer Chris Hayes that he wants “… to make sure that those who work in the oil and gas industry — those who work in the fossil fuel industry — are brought along as partners to make sure that we make this transition in the ten years we have left to us, as the science and scientists tell us, to make the kind of bold change that we need.”
So, now we’re down to ten.
The DNC made the decision that its presidential primary debates would only be held on friendly networks. So, thus far in 2019, we’ve been treated to a bevy of softball questions asked by leftist moderators. NBC News hosted the June debate in Miami Florida. That night, rather than simply asking candidate Jay Inslee about his climate change plans, Rachel Maddow prefixed her question in this fashion, “We’re here in Miami, which is already experiencing serious flooding on sunny days, as a result of sea level rise. Parts of Miami Beach and the Keys could be underwater in our lifetimes. Does your plan save Miami?”
This serious sunny day flooding in Miami is one of the best-kept news secrets of the decade. Of course, Inslee answered “yes,” his plan will save Miami. Sadly for Miami’s residents, Inslee has dropped out of the race, thus potentially sealing their doom.
If this news wasn’t dire enough, along came AOC for round two. On September 12, she dropped the final bomb on poor Miami. Does it only has three years left? Speaking at an NAACP forum, the freshman legislator proclaimed, “When it comes to climate change, what is not realistic is not responding to the crisis, not responding with a solution on the scale of the crisis — because what’s not realistic, is Miami not existing in a few years.”
Apparently the NFL’s Miami Dolphins and MLB’s Florida Marlins are soon to literally become the NFL’s dolphins and MLB’s marlins.
Which brings us back to Greta Thunberg and the most recent calculations of world demise. How a 16-year-old gets on the stage at a United Nations summit and lectures heads of state is perplexing enough, but in her impassioned speech Thunberg stated, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood … We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.”
Second only to the vanishing of Miami, these mass extinctions are perhaps the second best-kept news secret of the decade. Not taking lessons from “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” today’s doomsayers seem determined to continually up the ante, and by Christmas they may be claiming we only have until New Year’s Day left.
Derrick Wilburn is the founder and Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives and a fellow at the Centennial Institute in Colorado.
