The Left Is an Existential Threat

April 13, 2020 By Jeffrey Folks

The March 2020 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the "existential threat" to the Earth posed by global warming, despite the fact that no significant global warming seems to be taking place.  With its appealing cover art — an image of the Earth tied up in a plastic trash bag — this issue is just what I'd expect from a liberal outfit.

It's typical of climate alarmists to begin by assuming their premise: warming is an existential threat because, well, it is.  And anyone who questions that premise is a criminal.

Just what is meant by "existential threat" is a bit vague.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously announced that the Earth would come to an end by 2030.  No more life on the planet, no more planet.  That means that the planet somehow evaporates or shatters into a billion bits that go flying around in space.  Unless we give up everything to a totalitarian socialist government headed by Ocasio-Cortez and the like..........


It would have been more convincing if Fortune had painstakingly authenticated global warming, documenting just how much and when the Earth's climate has warmed, if it has, and showing the source of that warming.  It would also be more convincing if that analysis had stretched back over a reasonable period of geologic time — say 40,000 years — to demonstrate that current warming, if it exists, is not just a blip in Earth's history, but a significant departure, which it is not.  It was warmer than now, for example, in the Medieval Warm Period (900–1300 A.D.).  As the illustrious historian Norman Cantor has shown, that period coincided with great advances in human civilization in Europe — advances made possible by increased wealth and population resulting from warmer temperatures.

The Medieval Warm Period is estimated to have been one degree Celsius warmer than current temperatures, yet there was no "existential threat."  Far from it: 900 to 1300 A.D. was the period in which Europe's monumental cathedrals were built; its population expanded rapidly; and humans settled Iceland, Greenland, and, for a short time, North America.  Civilization flourished as a result of global warming.  (England's 11th-century population is estimated at 2 million, growing to "5 or 6 million by the end of the 13th century.")  If human beings prospered during the Medieval Warm Period, why not today?.......
 


The problem is that none of those doomsday predictions has worked out in the past.  In the 1970s, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which claimed that humans were on the verge of mass starvation...............Alvin Toffler's series of "future shock" books were taken seriously back in the 1970s   Toffler, by the way, was also an associate editor of Fortune............The solution, as always for such prognosticators, is strict regulation.  No more fossil fuels, no more plastic, no more big homes and big cars............... the Earth was warmer in the Medieval Warm Period than now, and it continued to exist and even thrive.  The false claim of an existential threat is in fact motivated by political considerations..............Political and economic control is the real goal of environmentalism.  In one sense, Fortune is right: we are facing an "existential crisis," but it is a political crisis, not an environmental one...........To Read More....