Well, we’re doomed. Again.
How many times does this make? I’ve lost count. Hysteria over our impending doom due to some impending environmental disaster has been an establishment media staple for decades. Apparently, it not only sells papers (okay, generates clicks), but it bamboozles the rubes into thinking that higher taxes are just fine, so that the intrepid servants of the people can have all the funding they need to save the world. Once a craven corruptocrat or two sees how the machine works, doomsaying can start to look like a mighty attractive occupation.
And so it never ends. It doesn’t matter if the doomsday claims contradict each other. The doomsayers know that the public has a short attention span, and the establishment media has no interest in pointing out failed prophecies of doom: Doing so will only make people more skeptical the next time around. Now, as our own Stephen Kruiser noted Thursday, lo, a decades-old climate hoax is new again. “When I was a kid,” Stephen wrote, “global cooling and a new ice age were going to bring down the curtain on Mother Earth within 40 years.”
I remember that. And it started even before Stephen and I were kids. Back in September 1958, Betty Friedan, who later became a feminist heroine, published an article in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Coming Ice Age.” Friedan predicted that this new deep freeze would arise, believe it or not (“not” is the wiser choice), from global warming. She said that according to the “scientists” she had consulted, “an Ice Age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place.” Friedan didn’t say anything about getting rid of internal combustion engines; she seemed to regard the warming of the earth at that time as a natural phenomenon, which it was.
However, she warned that the resulting “ocean flood — which may submerge large coastal areas of the eastern United States and western Europe — is going to melt the ice sheet which has covered the Arctic Ocean through all recorded history.” Friedan was no Al Gore or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, screaming about a looming climate apocalypse: She said that “this melting could begin… within roughly one hundred years.”
Thus, the world still existed in April 1975, when it was time for another round of doomsaying. Newsweek published an article entitled “The Cooling World,” which lamented the general inaction in the face of this alleged crisis in terms that will sound familiar to those who are familiar with our current global warming climate alarmism: “Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.” That’s right: They wanted to melt the Arctic ice cap. Since then, it has become far more fashionable to claim that the Arctic ice cap is already melting because we bought a new Toyota, and we’re all gonna die in five or ten years as a result.
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By 1989, the ice age scare was over (yeah, with no ice age), and the warnings were all about global warming. On June 29, 1989, the Associated Press (AP), which even then was one of the leading leftist propaganda outfits masquerading as a news agency, published an article stating, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” And here it is 2025, and rising sea levels have wiped nary a single nation off the face of the earth, so apparently, whoever profits from this alarmism has made the decision to go back to the ice age.
It is, however, too soon. The global warming hoax is on the wane, but it is still getting massive amounts of backing (and funding) from governments all over the world. The UN’s annual climate conference is going on now in Brazil, and the leaders of only 53 countries are attending, down from 80 last year and 150 in 2023. Still, 53 nations are still all in on this nonsense, and so we’re not out of the global warming woods yet, even as the ice age returns to haunt us again. It would be refreshing if Al Gore or Greta Thunberg or some other alarmist could tell us whether to invest in Bermuda shorts or parkas, but apparently they haven’t made up their minds yet.
