Looking at a Bigger Picture

Anybody remember Paul “Population Bomb” Ehrlich?
This is the guy who predicted that megadeaths
from global famine would be the defining feature
of the 1970s. Or Jeremy Rifkin, the guy who told
us all in 1986 that the Frostban bacterium
engineered to protect plants against cold snaps
would mess up the Earth’s climate? Or the brigade
of self-panickers (Carl Sagan was briefly one of
them) who warned us all back around 1980 that an
impending Ice Age was about to destroy
civilization? Or, hey — how about the ozone hole;
remember when we were all going to die of UV-B-
induced skin cancer?

It’s easy to laugh at those particular doom-
mongers now; there has been plenty of time for
their predictions to fail. But we have plenty of
apocalypse merchants peddling equally silly
scenarios, on equally thin evidence and bogus
reasoning, today. And the same ’sophisticated’
secularists who lapped up Paul Ehrlich’s nonsense
are swaying to the Gospel shout of global warming
and “peak oil” — just as self-hypnotized, and
just as stone-stupid, as an Ozark Mountains
cracker at a tent-revival meeting.

What's left out of this rant is that these doom-
sayers prompt the Power Freaks to fix that which
appears broken creating unending, unintended
consequences to ensure [for a while] that it
does break.

Full article.