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The weeping voice of misled youth

20 Oct 2021 | OP ED Watch

An especially odd feature in National Geographic begins “Not long ago Nature reported a disturbing study of the world’s youth – a survey of 10,000 people age 16 to 25, from 10 representative countries, for their feelings about climate change. Some 75 percent said the ‘future is frightening.’ Fear was more common in poorer, more vulnerable countries – but according to the study, 46 percent of young Americans, and 56 percent of youth worldwide, think that ‘humanity is doomed.’ Leave aside for now whether the forecast is accurate. Isn’t it heartbreaking that so many young people believe it?” Leave aside whether it’s accurate? No thanks. It’s the whole point. Jesting Pilate might shrug off the question. But we say if the forecast is inaccurate, as we believe it to be, it’s heartbreaking that so many young people have been force-fed it for so long they see no future. And National Geographic, who are climate panic peddlers of the first water, are implicated in the scandal.

So is NBC, for running articles like “The California Alisal Fire makes me ask whether I should have kids” by someone barely out of their internship with a BA in English and an “Extension” in creative writing they apparently employed to craft such sentences as “As I was growing up in California, the seasons ebbed and flowed with fires, droughts and mudslides, and the threat of extreme weather seemed to grow tenfold each year” and who admits to attending a Fourth of July celebration whose “invitation instructed us to ‘be hot in solidarity with our climate’” and who wants kids but “The choice of whether to have children is a deeply personal one that takes a hefty level of privilege just to ponder”. Which she apparently has, saying “it’s not about ‘the right time’ to add humans to the 8 billion or so already here or even about increasing our carbon footprint. It’s about whether I think it’s fair to raise children in a world becoming increasingly uninhabitable. In my hypothetical children’s or grandchildren’s lives, the planet might not actually become unlivable, but it certainly will become deadlier.”

The Spectator chimed in with a piece “Having a child is the grandest act of climate destruction” that started “About four years ago, my wife and I, who are both in our thirties, briefly thought we were having a baby. For the next few nights my dreams were of nuclear flashes lighting up the sky, of the earth cracking open and of waves lapping at the front door. Humans are swiftly making the planet uninhabitable. Why would we want to bring another human being into the world? I’ll admit that my climate anxiety is as melodramatic as it is severe. But polls show that I’m not alone and the figures of declining birth rates speak for themselves.”

As has been pointed out repeatedly, the planet is not becoming deadlier. On the contrary, deaths from natural disasters have plummeted even as population and atmospheric CO2 has risen. (In fact Willis Eschenbach just calculated that the “social cost of carbon” employed by the EU, US$68/tonne, relies on the idea that human CO2 has caused $97 trillion in natural disasters since 1950 even though the most comprehensive database he could find of all such disasters in that period totaled only $10 trillion.) If the youth of today believe otherwise, it is partly because the media is an echo chamber for them. To say nothing of social media.

Shame on them.

5 comments on “The weeping voice of misled youth”

  1. It appears to be only 'educated' westerners who have been frightened into not having children, or to be blunt about it, into becoming biological dead ends. As Mark Steyn said, the future belongs to those who show up for it, which the descendants of these childless worriers evidently will not. Irrational fear of climate change will thus hopefully burn itself out through lack of fuel, i.e. lack of worriers.
    By the way, anyone who has been 'educated' by spending any time at a modern university can hardly be said to be educated in an real sense of the word. They may have been stuffed full of woke propaganda as a Strasbourg goose is stuffed full of corn, which they then regurgitate until, or if, they come to their senses, but educated? I think not.

  2. I get the Spectator & in the issue in which the article you quote from appeared 'You must be kidding' by Tom woodman, another much better article on this subject appeared 'Baby Doomers' by Madeleine Kearns. I read this article but not Woodman's because I thought Woodman's would be stupid & apparently it was. Kearns article is quite good. She 'trained as a teacher in Scotland where until recently geography pupils were encouraged to examine the positive effects of climate change as an exercise in critical thinking'. However the article proceeds with a pessimistic comment on the IPCC AR6 report (which she has probably not read) that there is much to be concerned about 'potential famines, droughts etc.' all the usual guff, but, as an exercise in critical thinking, note the word 'potential'. this is another optative word like 'could, might' etc. which is really not very certain as it implies just as much that the opposite 'might' happen!

  3. In 1969, I commented to my Chemistry lab partner at the University of Calgary about his forearms as they were obviously peppered with needle tracks. His rationalization (for I.V. drug use) was that his Ecology professor had informed his class that at the current rate of pollution, the planet would be so degraded in another ten years that humans would all perish. At least in those days, "pollution" referred to such things as toxins and particulates rather than the compound forming the basis for life on the planet. That was during the first wave of environmental hysteria. Several generations and waves of continual hysteria later, the results are much more pernicious. Of all the institutions involved in civilizational decline, the modern university is likely most responsible. In addition to the rent seeking bounty exclusively available for all pursuit confirming CAGW, the modern university is central to the nurture and dissemination of cultural Marxism and its pathological offshoot of post modern nihilism .

  4. "Lack of worriers"

    Worldviews are not genetic -- I was an atheist and became a Christian --, and Steyn's quote is imbecilic. I am glad that I don't have children, like Kierkegaard, a deeply faithful Christian. My life has been horrible, and our sexual origins are a slap in the face, as Andy Nowicki rightly writes in "Considering Suicide". I would pay money not having to live my life. We need eugenics instead, to prevent genetic trash like my parents from breeding.

  5. "Lack of worriers"

    Worldviews are not genetic -- I was an atheist and became a Christian --, and Steyn's quote is imbecilic. I am glad that I don't have children, like Kierkegaard, a deeply faithful Christian. My life has been horrible, and our sexual origins are a slap in the face, as Andy Nowicki rightly writes in "Considering Suicide". I would pay money not having to live my life. We need eugenics instead, to prevent genetic trash like my parents from breeding.

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