Cthulhu and the Stewards of Creation
I am worried about when the stars correctly align, and mighty Cthulhu returns from his dreamless sleep of death in lost R’Lyeh.
He will then discover we demoted Pluto, also known as Yuggoth on the Rim, from a planet to a dwarf planet, and his rage will be incalculable!
Now, that is a planet-wide disaster I can understand being excercised about.
What is Global Warming, oops, Cooling, oops, Changing compared to that?
But what do the advocates of Global Climate Stasus say they fear? An average one half of one degree rise in ocean temperatures over the next century?
Who cares?
Even if their most fretful, fearful predictions come true, what is the predicted result? There will be longer growing season in our hemisphere, and the rise in sea levels may require the city fathers to build more levies in New Orleans and Venice.
Even at its worst, this is not even as big a trouble and hardship to our civilization as a power outage or a garbage truckdrivers strike. And it will happen a hundred years from now.
Since when can the weatherman predict the temperature to within a fraction of a degree decades and centuries in advance?
How can any sane person regard that as an immediate, existential threat, but regard worry over the spread of political Islam to be a mental disease?
I am still waiting for the Left to retract the predictions of overpopulation leading to worldwide mass starvation by 1990. Every science fiction story I stumbled across in my wide-read youth, from STAR TREK to SOYLENT GREEN to RINGWORLD to FARMER IN THE SKY predicted overpopulation.
The industrialized nations are suffering from crippling underpopulation in the current generation, and Western Civilization stands an even chance of being swept aside by demographic pressure from the third world.
It is not as if this is the first, or second, or fifth, or tenth scaremongering ecological fraud we have all seen publicized.
- DDT — Rachel Carson penned a famous book telling us DDT caused bird eggs to have thin shells. As it turned out, the chemical is not dangerous, but banning the chemical has led to countless deaths in Africa, since no other effective way was found to fight pestilential insects.
- Alar.
- Global Cooling.
- Shortages of Tin, Iron, Zinc, Coal, Oil, etc.–Julian Simon made a famous wager with enviro-scaremonger Paul Erlich about the decrease of certain unreplaceable natural resources. Simon won the bet.
- SST threat to ozone layer.
- Three Mile Island. The most famous disaster in history where no one died and no one got sick.
- Cellphones or powerlines causing cancer. A fraud.
- Irradiated foods. This method of preserving food, from all evidence, would have improved food safety, but it was scared off the market.
- Mercury in swordfish and tuna.
- Cyclamates banned for causing bladder cancer.
- Red dye #2.
- Pesticides aldrin and dieldrin, suspended in 1974. Chlordane and heptachlor. All banned in the 1970s because of belief that they cause tumors in mouse livers.
- Acid rain.
- Asbestos in schools and other buildings.
- Ethyl dibromide (EDB).
- Ozone hole. No connection found between thinner ozone layer and skin cancer.
- Nuclear Winter.
Have you ever heard even one retraction or apology for any of these false alarms, even long after the fraud was exposed?
If any environmentalist out there became convinced that the only way to save the Earth was to cut down trees in order to increase the albedo of the planet and reflect more heat out into space, I would listen with grave attention to his argument. That argument, at least, would have indicia of honesty: it would be a statement against interest. Likewise, I would listen with attention if the environmentalist suggested igniting a few atom bombs in forest to produce smoke clouds: surely the nuclear winter would stop the global warming trend?
Seriously: when is the last time you heard any Green advocating for an engineering solution to what is basically an engineering problem, namely, how to manipulate the environment to make it more to the liking of peoples living in the wealthy nations seated in the temperate climates?
As it is, the only solutions ever suggested by any environmentalist are those aimed at industry. Whether the problem is global warming or global cooling, two opposite problems, the solution is the same: mug the free market. Adopt Socialism.
Please note that in Representative Cortez’s science fiction cartoon ‘Message from the Future’ none of the radical changes, no, not one, was meant to change the environment. They were meant to introduce a socialist totalitarianism that replaced the labor market with government rationing.
Years of lies have raised the threshold of my skepticism above what it would be on other topics. Proof beyond reasonable doubt will be required to convince me. When a boy scout or a bowhunter tells me he wants to preserve wild areas for hunting or recreation, I do not suffer the same level of skepticism: these groups do not have histories of being carried away by fashionable hysteria.
I am a religoius man. I understand the appeal of following a prophet.
But when the prophecies of a prophet are intellentially vague and continually wrong, even I think some skepticism is warranted.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
