Why are we inclined to believe the catastrophic scenario even though we have long known most of these predictions come to be false? Why are we inclined to trust the institutions that keep publicizing these predictions and never apologize for being wrong or reflect on what led them to be wrong?

Why do catastrophic predictions often feel right? So much so that even if catastrophic predictions of climate change or resource depletion, or pollution have been false in the past, many of us feel they have to eventually come true sooner or later.

It is time to understand that the news media will always trade on bad news due to human inclinations. When faced with various solutions to a problem, the simplest will most often be correct. So much in life is terribly exaggerated. It brings to my mind a rule I live by called Occam’s Razor. A 14th-century philosopher coined the following rule.

An example is, “if walking in a pasture and hearing hoofbeats behind you, assume they are horses and not zebras. The term razor is used to indicate literally shaving off more complicated assumptions. Catastrophic scenarios are virtually never the simplest predictions and almost never the correct ones.

I am not sure if Alex Epstein, in his outstanding book Fossil Future coined the word “catastrophizing,” but it sure fits the world of alarmists using the human-caused climate change fraud not to take control of Earth’s climate but rather to take control of its human population. They are not doing a bad job of it. Of course, we know the leftists love it, and the conservatives reject it, but 40 percent of the population are worried about it, just like they allowed themselves to be locked in their houses over a now very uncertain pandemic solution.

Epstein collects all the accepted information being purveyed as our “knowledge system.” I prefer to call it the “massive delusion” created by those desiring to take over our lives. It has been going on for decades as one apocalyptic scenario after another was announced and failed to materialize but is soon forgotten.

No alarmist has been more wrong and more prominent than Paul Ehrlich, in whose book The Population Bomb, he predicted disaster after disaster all wrong. Yet, for his effort, he received award after award from duped or complicit organizations.

One such apocalypse was announced by John Holdren, a University of California physicist who was to become Obama’s Science Director. He predicted in the late 1980s that by the year 2020, as many as a billion people on Earth could die of climate-induced starvation. I guess that caught Obama’s attention as gloomy scenarios were his stock and trade.

Author Epstein, shocked by this number, did his own research going to the International Database, which keeps records of all reported such disasters, including drought, floods, storms, excessive temperatures, and so on. He learned that when carbon dioxide emissions increased rapidly in the past century, climate-related disaster deaths decreased by 98 percent. That, in fact, is what technology and preparation have produced, making life safer. Epstein puts it in one sentence in his book “ultra cost-effective fossil fuel energy powers the machines that produce unprecedented protection from climate.”

Sadly, the younger generation has been taught that whatever the benefits may be of fossil fuel, they are overcome by its environmental hazards, with climate change leading the way. Here is where he coins the term “catastrophizing” to mean grossly exaggerating the side effects of an activity and minimizing the more obvious benefits of the activity.

The movement’s primary argument was that humanity is consuming too much of the earth’s resources and that it is fossil fuels that are enabling this. Indeed it is true, which is why they are so essential to maintain our standard of living. The alarmists claim that using so many resources is unsustainable and that it will result in disastrous shortages leading to suffering and death. These people are truly crazy, with no data whatever to substantiate their gloomy predictions. So-called experts like Erhlich, Holdren, and NASA’s former scientist James Hansen are never seen to retract their never materializing catastrophes.

Portions of this essay were excerpted from the book FOSSIL FUTURE with permission of the author Alex Epstein and the publisher Portfolio/Penguin.

Dr. Jay Lehr

Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.