Everybody loves a good scare, especially this time of the year. But for the climate-change movement, it seems every day is Halloween. And it’s distorting views, especially among our kids.
Since the 2016 Paris Agreement, the scaremongering around climate change has ratcheted up, fueled in large part by the United Nations. On a regular basis, new and frightening factoids are rolled out to scare the public into draconian action against this “global emergency,” the subject of this year’s all-important Conference of the Parties, or COP26, UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (which kicks off, appropriately, Oct. 31).
It feels like we’ve seen this horror film before. Actually, for those of us old enough, we’ve seen them all before. Many of the increasingly dire claims now being made about the impending climate crisis are actual plot lines taken directly from some of the best (and worst) science-fiction movies of the 1960s and 1970s.
Consider the organizing principle of the movement: Fossil-fuel use is raising atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels and global temperatures, shifting climate systems, as demonstrated by extreme weather events such as hurricasoylentnes and droughts. While the trigger was different — nuclear explosion rather than hydrocarbon combustion — this was basically the plot of “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” a 1961 sci-fi disaster film about man-made climate apocalypse.
Or take the latest UN special report on climate change and food security released two years ago, which warned that increased atmospheric CO2 levels will lower the nutritional quality of crops, while water stress and wildfire risk due to higher surface air temperatures will lead to decreased agricultural output. This was essentially the story line of “No Blade of Grass,” a 1970 doomsday movie about pollution-driven crop failure and world famine — and the starvation, food riots and cannibalism that follows.
Sticking with this cannibalism theme, Swedish scientist Magnus Soderlund opined publicly in 2019 about the possibility of eating human flesh as a means to the end of food sustainability in these current climate-challenged times. Such a conversation should not be that shocking to fans of “Soylent Green,” the 1973 dystopian thriller starring Charlton Heston, which takes place in an imaginary 2022 when food is scarce due to the greenhouse effect and people need to eat each other to survive.
Global warming itself has been a shape-shifting theory for more than 50 years, even making an appearance as far back as 1965 in a White House report. Though the greenhouse effect has been the dominant theme, we’ve also heard predictions of cooling. Even the term “global warming” gave way to “climate change” when temperatures failed to rise as quickly as forecast. So, at a certain level, it is not surprising that life is imitating cinematic art in the search for a compelling argument around climate change.
And while evidence of warming is abundant, many of the most dire predictions are wildly overstated — which might be merely humorous were it not for the fact that today’s young people are being taught to accept all such cli-fi futurism as scientific fact. Without the healthy perspective provided by bad film special effects, impressionable youth are now believing everything the doomsday merchants are telling them.
Worse, scared children of every age are being organized and mobilized as youth climate protesters, skipping school and turning up at UN-sponsored conferences. The warm-up event for COP26 was a three-day Youth4Climate gathering held in Milan in late September.
Yes, climate change is a serious issue but also a largely manageable problem, with human adaptation a key part of the solution. The pessimism about humanity’s prospects of the 1960s and 1970s is simply out of place in today’s technology-blessed world. Baby Boomers should not be engaging in an intergenerational transfer of environmental fear.
It’s time to stop spooking our kids into thinking the world will end or pass a climatic point of no return in, say, the year 2030. And using young people to move public opinion and control the minds of adults. Oh, yes: That was the plot of the 1964 sci-fi horror film, “Children of the Damned.”
Paul Tice works in investment management and is an adjunct professor of finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business.