Salon magazine has announced that it is now time to “start panicking” over climate change, which prompts the question of what we have been doing until now.
“It is time for us to panic about global warming,” wrote Salon contributor Matthew Rozsa this past weekend. “Indeed, a proper state of panic is long overdue.”
To most casual observers, the “climate change” rhetoric from global elites over the past few years has looked an awful lot like panic.
Former President Barack Obama famously told the U.S. Coast Guard in 2015 that his administration considered climate change to be a “serious threat to global security” and “an immediate risk to our national security.”
“I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country,” the president told graduates of the Coast Guard Academy.
The following year, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry compared the effects of climate change to Islamic terrorism, suggesting that the two pose an equivalent danger to the peoples of the world.
“Yesterday, I met in Washington with 45 nations – defense ministers and foreign ministers – as we were working together on the challenge of Daesh, ISIL, and terrorism,” Kerry said at the Vienna summit. “It’s hard for some people to grasp it, but what we – you – are doing here right now is of equal importance because it has the ability to literally save life on the planet itself.”
In May of this year, the United Nations went even further, declaring “climate change” to be the greatest global menace currently facing humanity.
“Climate Change is the single biggest threat to life, security and prosperity on Earth,” said UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa at the roll-out of their yearly report.
“This annual report shows how UN Climate Change is doing everything it can to support, encourage and build on the global response to climate change,” Espinosa said, adding that “UN Climate Change’s mandate is to lead and support the global community in this international response, with the Paris Agreement and the Convention being the long-term vehicles for united global climate action.”
Last month, the enlightened elders of the Berkeley City Council in California issued a resolution declaring a worldwide “climate emergency,” calling it “the greatest crisis in history” after evoking memories of World War II.
While World War II involved the slaughter of six million Jews as well as tens of millions of casualties, the Berkeley City Council believes it was a lesser evil than the overarching problem of climate change. After all, the earth is “already too hot for safety and justice,” they note.
Even the Vatican has jumped on the climate doomsday train, issuing a dramatic declaration that humanity has “less than a decade” to put in place a series of sweeping measures to counteract the effects of human-induced climate change. “The time to act is now,” their 2017 statement reads.
“With unchecked climate change and air pollution, the very fabric of life on Earth, including that of humans, is at grave risk,” the text from the Pontifical Academy of Sciences begins. “We propose scalable solutions to avoid such catastrophic changes. There is less than a decade to put these solutions in place to preserve our quality of life for generations to come.”
“With accelerating climate change, we put ourselves at grave risk of massive crop failures, new and re-emerging infectious diseases, heat extremes, droughts, mega-storms, floods and sharply rising sea levels,” the text ominously predicts.
Yet apparently for Salon magazine, none of this hyperbolic bombast constitutes “panic.”
It is “easy to lose sight of a crucial fact,” Rozsa warns in his article. “If we do not resolve the problem of man-made climate change, it could quite literally spell the end of human civilization.”
Rozsa’s panicky solution to climate change includes a carbon tax (to avoid a “catastrophic” warming of the planet), the implementation of “near-zero emission technologies,” and, of course, a new president who like Obama “will renew this country’s participation in the Paris climate accord.”
It may seem obvious but maybe a little less panic and a little more rational discourse could break climate alarmists out of the “sky is falling,” Chicken-Little mode into something approaching common sense.
Until then, gird your loins: it’s all panic, all the time.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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