Climate Change Science and Politics: It’s All About Creating Fear
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

With the climate hysteria movement, fear is everything. How much fear can they ignite in the population is the key to their future governmental plans. Unfortunately for them, people like freedom, and it turns out and they have to be petrified in order to give it up.

On Monday, radio’s Rush Limbaugh spoke about a good example from the not-too-distant past that shows the depths to which the climate alarmist community is willing to go to instill fear in the public about climate change.

On his show, Limbaugh said, “it illustrates just how wrong and fearmongering the entire climate change, global warming (now ‘extreme weather’) crowd is.”

Back in 2015, the good folks at the Media Research Center uncovered an excellent example of the type of sky-is-falling propaganda and deceit that the climate alarmist community is capable of. In 2008, ABC News presented a documentary style program called Earth 2100, a feature that made several predictions about a dystopian future, in which mankind fails to act on global warming in time to forestall climate disaster.

The full film wasn’t actually broadcast until 2009, which makes its failed prognostications of 2015 one year more ridiculous. But in June of 2008, ABC’s Good Morning America aired a trailer of the film and interviewed reporter Bob Woodruff about the upcoming film. Woodruff narrated the film, telling then-GMA anchor Chris Cuomo that it “puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015.”

The film follows a fictional character known as Lucy through her life. In the beginning of the film, Woodruff is careful to say that events shown in the story are not “a prediction about what will happen, but what might happen.”

Lucy’s 2015 was a pretty awful place, with a gallon of milk costing just under $13.00. Gasoline was over $9.00 per gallon with lines stretching for blocks to get it. In fact, gas stations were forced to close due to lack of product. Miami, where Lucy lives, is wilting under the worst heatwave in history and then, on cue Miami is hit by the largest hurricane in history.

Interspersed throughout the film are “climate experts” such as Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and CNN’s Van Jones giving their “expert” opinions on the climate crisis. Though, technically a work of fiction, the show is presented in a dishonest documentary style.

And, of course, America is the villain in all of it. Led by America, the world doesn’t act to cut greenhouse emissions. In fact, in one of the more ridiculous prophecies contained in the film, America acts to build dozens of new coal-fired energy plants.

Had the show been promoted as a comedy with a laugh track, it would have made more sense. As some sort of prophecy based on climate science, it failed miserably, at least for its 2015 prognostications.

In the actual 2015, you could buy a gallon of milk for about $3.40. Gas at the time was selling at an average of $2.75 per gallon — no supply shortages noted. Today, in 2019, the average national price for a gallon of gasoline is only $2.72. 

And, of course, Miami and indeed all of Florida rode out what storms it did see, as the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico were in the middle of a 12-year-drought of serious hurricanes, which ended in 2017 when Hurricane Maria hit Texas.

Much like their failed climate models, the climate hysterics behind this show couldn’t get anything right. ABC’s Earth 2100 was nothing but fear-porn based on misunderstood science. Though it claimed not to make “predictions,” the scientists, politicians, and journalists involved with the show were clearly hinting that such things were going to happen.

Despite being continually wrong, the climate alarmist movement persists. Any extreme weather event is treated as “proof” that the climate is changing for the worse. And those claims are always anchored to calls for the governments of the world to “do something.”  It must be terrible being a part of a movement which has to root for disaster and death to occur in order to make their point.

And even if any of this were true, the governments of the world would be the last entities we should trust to do anything about it. Especially any corrupt “global” government based out of the United Nations.

Climate hysterics like to claim that their assertions are all about “science.” But the ironic reality shows us that it’s true scientific inquiry that the movement fears. When President Trump, an anthropogenic global warming skeptic, suggested a special White House panel to study the issue and determine if climate change (so-called) is truly an existential threat, climate hysterics went predictably bananas. NASA climate scientist Katie Marvel said such a panel was “like assembling a panel of gravity skeptics who insist it’s safe to jump off tall buildings.”

Marvel’s reaction is not that of a true scientist but more like a religious fanatic whose beliefs are challenged. Real scientists welcome review of their work, especially skeptical review. If the science is truly “settled” and conclusive, why the fear of another climate panel?

Photo: Meindert van der Haven/iStock/Getty Images Plus