Bay Area radio evangelist Harold Camping was properly excoriated throughout both the legacy media and the Blogosphere last year for his prediction that the world would end on May 21st, 2011. But not surprisingly, the MSM never mentioned their own obsession with doomsday predictions.
Ever since it debuted with “Earth Day” in 1970, spokesmen for the environmental movement, ranging from scientists to pop stars to journalists to politicians have made a series of ludicrous forecasts, usually along the lines of we only have X years to save the earth/the environment/the oceans, all mankind, etc.
The natural state of television news is what Mark Steyn has dubbed “present-tense culture,” particularly when it comes to advancing “liberalism,” so it’s not going to look back on any failure of its in-house ideology. And newspapers have a similar aversion to retrospection. So it’s only with the rise of talk radio and the conservative Blogosphere that any of environmentalism’s Chicken Littles have been called on their campy, Camping-esque sky-is-falling rhetoric.
Back in 2009, I Hate the Media rounded up a variety of crazy Earth Day quotes from 1970. And we’ve already had lots of fun with this headline in the March 20, 2000 edition of the London Independent:
But perhaps the all-time showstopper is a January 2007 headline from The Canadian, which dubs itself “Canada’s new socially progressive and cross-cultural national newspaper.” I’m kind of surprised the paper bothers to put out a new edition each day; I think I’d be tempted to recreate the last scene from On the Beach if I actually believed this headline (link safe; goes to Anthony Watts of the Watts Up With That, a rational environmental-themed blog):
And since we seem to have survived that eco-apocalypse (along with all of the ones that preceded it), I’m pretty sure we’ll survive the rest of 2012, not the least of which because we’ve invented…trousers:
(H/T: Rand Simberg.)
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