These pictures are from 1970, the first Earth Day. As you can see, back then they were predicting that the Earth would be destroyed by 1990. That was 40 years ago. It's now 2010 and the Earth is still liveable enough that people can still attend "Earth Day", and they do. In fact it's even bigger now than it was back then. We now have "Earth Hour" where everybody is supposed to turn their lights off for an hour. Seriously, I'm not even joking.
So how is 1970 different to 2010? Is it a different crisis now or the same crisis just worse? Well, if you look at what was published in the early 1970s, the crisis is essentially the same but the problem seemed to be cooling not warming. In 1970 the SCEP published a report titled "Study of Critical Environmental Problems", which reported the possibility of global warming from increased carbon dioxide. The following year a paper was published in the journal 'Science' titled "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate", which was one of the first to suggest man-made contributions to climate change. It also however claimed that global cooling would be the result of man-made greenhouse gas pollution and carbon emissions because particulate pollution would block sunlight.
In the following years, the National Science Board, the National Academy of Science, as well as popular media like Time Magazine and Newsweek published reports on global cooling claiming that that there'd been half a degree (fahrenheit) drop in the Earth's average ground temperature. In fact, the Newsweek article suggested intentionally melting the Arctic ice cap as a solution. The picture painted by the mainstream media and the environmental movement back then was dramatic. People would starve because crops wouldn't grow, natural disasters would increase, and the world as we know it will be dead by 1990 (or 2000, according to some reports).
So what are we to conclude? That environmentalists were wrong back then or that they were kinda right but we know a lot more now? In either case I think recent history teaches us to exercise caution in regard to environmental hysteria. The media and environmentalists on the 1970s were urging government to do something about the climate crisis. The most they did was pass Clean Air and Water acts. But as a whole the 1970s left environmentalists feeling like the government failed to act. But what happened as a result of their failure to act? Did the world end in 1990? No, where still here and enjoying a better quality of life than we did in 1970. Which makes me believe that if we acted in 1970, we would have ruined our way of life for no reason. The world didn't end in 1990. It was a good thing that government failed to act for so long because the longer they waited, the more time we had to find the truth and discover that the claim of the early 1970s were inaccurate. If they acted early they would have acted on false claims.
So that makes me think, if we hold off climate change action for another few years, will we slowly discover that the claims of the late 1990s and early 2000s were also exaggerated and inaccurate? Is it worth destroying the economy and our way of life if global warming could turn out to be as phoney as global cooling? Well if you ask a Greenie they will say, "yes!". Because to them, moving to a "green economy", imposing heavier regulations and taxes on corporations, increasing government control, are the most important things. There proposed solution is more important to them than the problem, insofar as if the problem turns out not to be as big as previously thought, they would still want to implement their solution. That's because at their heart, they are really just anti-capitalists.
Here is a photo of some environmental activists protesting at last year's Copenhagen conference on climate change. "Corporations keep out"? "Planet over profit"? "Corporations" "corporations" "profit" "money" "greed" "greed" "greed", that's all I see and hear at these environmental protests. These people aren't environmentalists. They are anti-corporation, anti-globalisation and anti-capitalism. Socialism is a fine, debatable idea, but don't mask it as environmentalism. Green is the new red. I just wish they would embrace that and be honest about who they are and what they really stand for.
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