"Apocalypses don't happen very often.
They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years."
— Dale Jamieson
PART
ONE
Forecasting a very bad time for humanity is a
very old game, beginning in the European world at least as early as the coming
of Christ and quite likely long before.
Prior to the 19th century these nasty events
were generally attributed to God, who would become fed up with His creation and
knock us all about in retribution for sin, although shortly after the
Enlightenment, end-time stories began to include natural perpetrators like
sunshine and asteroids.
In the 19th century, as technology and
science and the industrial revolution made Man the central actor in his own
drama, human-caused disasters became the rage.
The first global warming scare came in 1858
after the first trans-Atlantic cables were laid and a scientist named Giovanni
Donati supposedly discovered that the cables were acting as enormous
electromagnets, pulling the earth into the sun. At the current rate of
acceleration, he surmised, Europe would become tropical in 12 years, the entire
earth would be dead soon after, and the whole man-made mess would be punctuated
by the earth falling into the sun.
The story turned out to be a hoax, but it
caught the attention of many and dominated the headlines for weeks. Man's
activities could be dangerous indeed.
The ‘Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894’ struck later in the century, involving the mathematically precise discovery that using the current mode of transportation, at the current rate of production, the streets of London would be under nine feet of horse manure within 50 years. This was no hoax, occupying as it did centre stage in 1898 at the world’s first international urban planning conference in New York and leading urban planners to believe that cities would eventually become uninhabitable.
Apparently, the internal combustion engine
came along just in time to save doomed urbania.
It was only in the late 20th and early 21st
centuries that more seriously existential predictions, allegedly backed by
“science,” grew in scope to become terminal to humankind, firing the
imagination of both politicians and the public.
There are of course periodic lesser apocalii
hovering around the mediasphere vying for attention from time to time.
For example, peak oil, popular around the
turn of the millennium just before the world became awash in new discoveries of
oil ... depletion of resources, made
famous in the 1972 Club of Rome report that breathlessly announced resource
depletion and associated economic collapse by the end of the 20th century ...
and the ozone hole, the scare de jour of the 90s that, at least according to
futuristic Hollywood movies of the day, would force us to slather on blue
sunscreen if we were foolish enough to venture outside.
And of course, Y2K, in which technology
developed for the wrong century would do us in if we were in an elevator or
airplane at midnight on December 31, 1999. But other than outliers like an
arbitrary asteroid strike, they are generally second tier apocalii, bad enough
to make life miserable for sure, but not enough to cause extinction.
Nuclear winter, the population bomb, and
climate change are the great man made apocalyptic scares of our era, even
though two of them have receded into background noise at the moment in favour
of the more malleable and comprehensive “climate change,” a phenomenon in which
causation of human agency is not only an unfalsifiable thesis (meaning it can
be neither proven false nor proven correct), but fits every conceivable
narrative.
If there’s floods, it’s climate change. If there’s
droughts, it's climate change. Rain, snow, sunny days, hurricanes, annually
calving ice caps, forest fires, pine beetles, the inconveniently non-existent
extinction of polar bears, and even the Syrian civil war have variously been
blamed on the effects of climate change. Everything proves it and it's all
very, very bad.
To make it even more thrilling, its own
extremists can fairly easily turn it into the end times by means of
pseudo-scientific-sounding babble, with such horridly Brobdingnagian
consequences as “cascading tipping points” and “climate feedbacks” leading to a
“runaway greenhouse effect” and “hothouse climate state” which will turn earth
into a Venus-like planet, stripped of its atmosphere, swirling with ghastly
nastiness in a fiery Danse Macabre.
It's the perfect apocalypse!
— Scott Anderson, resides in Vernon, and provides comments and analysis from a
bluntly conservative point of view.
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