I hadn’t visited Rush Limbaugh’s site (or listened to his show) yesterday when we explored “Apocalypse Now, in both Religious and Secular Flavors,” but as he says, today’s Rapture-ous announcement “is a dead ringer for the global warming movement:”
This is exactly how these people are portraying it, end of the world and we’re destroying the planet, sounds a lot like the global warming warnings that we’ve gotten over the last 20 years. The warmers believe that up to one-third of the species on earth are about to die. Michael Crichton had a great analogy once, a great comparison to the global warming crowd and religious believers. The similarities. There was a Garden of Eden. There is sin. There’s destruction. There’s a rapture. There’s all of this, even though the global warming people claim not to have a religion. But TIME Magazine is having a lot of fun here mocking these Christians. But are they any more deluded than the people who believe so devoutly in manmade global warming? [No — Ed] As I say, these comparisons are fascinating, global warming and these end of the earth guys, it’s almost identical.
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Speaking of global warming, the New York Daily News had a story, this is from last summer, and just surfacing here from our archives. Just to put some of this stuff in perspective. Last summer, “Documents released Friday by the Nixon Presidential Library show members of President Richard Nixon’s inner circle discussing the possibilities of global warming more than 30 years ago.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan walked into Nixon’s office and told him that we’re going nuts producing carbon dioxide, the world’s temperature the next 30 to 50 years could rise by seven degrees, we’re gonna have sea levels going nuts, parts of America in 30 years will be underwater. Nixon was told this, documents just released. Again, this story is from last summer, from the Nixon library.”Adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, notable as a Democrat in the administration, urged the administration to initiate a worldwide system of monitoring carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, decades before the issue of global warming came to the public’s attention. There is widespread agreement that carbon dioxide content will rise 25 percent by 2000, Moynihan wrote in a September 1969 memo.” This could increase the average temperature near the earth’s surface by seven degrees by the year 2000. This, in turn, could raise the level of the sea by ten feet. Good-bye New York. Good-bye Washington, for that matter. Nixon was warned that New York and Washington would be underwater because of carbon dioxide, in 1970. What a hoax. What a fraud. And look how it ensnared all kinds of people.
Five years later is when Newsweek is doing its cover on the coming ice age,1975. Moynihan was Nixon’s counselor for urban affairs from January of 1969 through December of 1970. I mean, if anything, we know that the earth’s temperature by 2000 had not risen seven degrees Fahrenheit and New York and Washington were not underwater and not even close. None of it was true.
But the Final Countdowns had only just begun.
Update: Slate asks, “What happens to a doomsday cult when the world doesn’t end?”
I’d say it looks something like this:
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