Choose And Perish

In Ghostbusters, Dan Aykroyd (as Dr. Raymond Stantz) and Ernie Hudson (Winston Zeddmore) had this exchange while riding in the Ectomobile on the way to incarcerating various Focused Non-Terminal Repeating Phantasms, and Class Five Full-Roaming Vapors:

Winston: Hey, Ray. Do you remember something in the Bible about the last days, when the dead would rise from the grave?
Ray: I remember Revelation 7:12. And I looked, as he opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became as black as sackcloth. And the moon became as blood.
Winston: And the seas boiled and the skies fell.
Ray: Judgment Day.
Winston: Judgment Day.

Scott Burgess notes a similarly gloomy prognostication from a psychedelically-coiffed blogger at the Grauniad:

Guardian blog contributor Susan Blackmore – whose website proudly describes her as “Dr.” (the honorific having been earned with her acquisition of a PhD in parapsychology, a field since abandoned in favour of the equally relevant “memetics”) – has, seemingly unwittingly, solved one of the thorniest moral dilemmas surrounding the inevitable human suffering resulting from climate change: How should residents of Great Britain respond?

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Dr. Blackmore (pictured), proud winner of the prestigious 2005 Spirit and Sky “Best Spiritual Site” award, gets right to the point – immediately establishing credibility by citing an equally qualified commentator on climate change:

“The archbishop was right about climate change on the Today programme this morning. In all probability billions of people are going to die in the next few decades.”

At which point an unkind reader is tempted to point out that this is no doubt true – billions will certainly die in the next few decades. Over the next five of them, for example, we’d expect no less than 3 billion to die if things stay pretty much as they are now.

Such an objection would be unfair, of course – what Dr. Blackmore really intended to say is that billions more than that three billion will die. She knows this:

“I know this. The science has been building up for years and is now clear. When sea levels rise further millions will drown, when the deserts grow bigger millions will starve, when the glaciers end their present flood of excess melt water vast cities will become uninhabitable almost overnight.”