Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

Hot Air’s Allahpundit compares and contrasts two remarkably similar quotes. First up:

“Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of ‘climate change delusion.’”

I’d say there have been boatloads of earlier examples of “Climate Change Delusion” before this one, but it’s good to have it “officially” certified.

Allah follows it with another quote, this one from the Psychology Today Website:

“You think the economy is bad now – wait a few years… Wait until we’re almost completely out of oil and food and water and available land … we need to lose 4.4 billion people and we need to lose them fast.”

As Mark Steyn wrote a couple of years ago, “The ecochondriacs mean it: This’d be a pretty nice planet if we didn’t live here.” Here are two more examples of ecochondria in action, with an emphasis on back-end population reduction, unlike the above quoted “expert’s” method of thinning the herd.

Update: Related thoughts on “Malthusian gloom” from Robert Stacy McCain over at the American Spectator blog; and for some additional population-related gloom (though of a less misanthropic bent than the sort of stuff Psychology Today is currently ladling out), don’t miss Robert’s post on the intersection of demographics, economics and Obamanomics on his personal blog.