More Fun with Final Countdowns

“I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change,” Zombie wrote last year at PJM:

I learned this:

• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:

– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes.

You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.

In a new post at his Watts Up With That Blog, Anthony Watts notes that “The 1970′s Global Cooling Compilation – looks much like today.”  At Power Line Steve Hayward links to this video, which has some fun juxtaposing “then and now” doomsday scares from the same “scientist,” 30 years apart, in 1978 and 2008:

Of course, as we noted yesterday, sometimes the final countdowns can occur within the space of little more than a decade:

Click to enlarge.

One huge reason why “Green fatigue” is setting in, as the ironically-named Independent noted yesterday, is because so many final countdowns have come due with mankind none the worse for wear — in addition to the scare industry’s leading spokesman having cashed in his chips and declared Mission Accomplished.