In Book 21 of the Iliad, Homer sings to us of the battle between noble Achilles and the mighty river Xanthus. Hundreds of warriors are swirled away to their death by the flood. Yet, in the end, the raging water of Xanthus is brought low by the heroic Achilles. Man has subdued nature.
This is one of the earliest of such tales.
Sometime around 1016, King Canute sat on the shoreline of the Atlantic and forbade the tide to come in. He did this to illustrate to his many sycophantic followers that there are limits to what even the greatest among us can do.
Apparently, the lesson didn’t take.
Barack Obama, while campaigning for President, said that his administration would lower the level of the oceans, and cool the planet.
The dream of ever-expanding human potency is enduring. This is probably because so many of us long for it to be possible. The longing fuels progress of all sorts. That much is good. It goes wrong when dream becomes nightmare.
Did the Aryan Race turn out to be superior? Did the Aryan Race ever even exist? Should everyone who denies Allah be reduced to second class status - or executed? Are children in the womb not, “really”, children, but only biological tissue?
Millions of people have been killed by false ideas. More millions have been ruined. Most of these false ideas are created by manipulative leaders who fully understand what they are doing. Their unquestioning believers march blindly behind.
The modern hysterics over man-made global climate change is a current example. Is it a myth, a scam, or a religion? All three terms apply.
The underlying assumptions didn’t come from nowhere.
It takes years to get folks comfortable with impossible ideas.
In 1798, an Englishman, Thomas Robert Malthus published dire warnings about the coming horrors of overpopulation. Others followed. It was a captivating notion.
The modern prophet was Paul Ehrlich. He wrote a very popular 1968 book titled, The Population Bomb. It was warmly embraced by left-wing activists of every spot and stripe. What a wonderful scary tool it would become to control the masses. They lost no time in putting it to work. By the mid-70’s, overpopulation was accepted dogma from K-12 to graduate school. If you refuted it, you did so at your own peril. This is the model that has always worked.
1. State the preposterous;
2. Make sure it’s included in the standard curriculum;
3. Declare educators who disagree as deniers;
4. Punish these deniers with loss of funding, and professional ostracism;
5. Dominate the argument by frequent appearances on friendly media outlets;
6. Never, never, actually debate the factual plausibility of the preposterous idea;
7. Always look for opportunities to build upon the deceit;
8. Recognize any additional claims, so long as they are not true.)
The current population of the Earth is 7 billion souls. If all of them were relocated to Texas, with equal space for everyone. They would each have 1,070 sq. ft. to call their own. That’s more walking around room than most people ever hoped they could have. Most people live in large crowded cities, packed snugly together, both vertically, and horizontally.
Maybe 1,070 sq. ft. is too much room for a city dweller used to chummy proximity to the neighbors. Let’s say that they each must share their space with three others; something like a typical family of four. That would leave a largish chunk of Texas completely uninhabited - along with the rest of the planet.
Real-estate professionals say it’s all about location, location, location.
How many locations are there on Planet Earth?
Nearly three quarters of the globe is ocean. The remaining 25% is dry land, but only about 25% of that 25% is habitable. There are many millions of square miles of desert, frozen tundra, tangled jungle and inaccessible mountains. The great bulk of humanity lives on narrow strips of land, near coastlines.
Well, even if the overpopulation threat is overblown, and even if people don’t occupy all that much of Mother Earth, aren’t we still spewing out enormous quantities of toxic chemicals, and leaving a massive deadly carbon footprint?
Not by Earth standards.
Every day, volcanoes around the word, pump more “toxins”, including carbon, into the atmosphere than humans can manage with years of effort. Earthquakes, forest fires, solar ejections, and floods make regular contributions to the damage. Undersea volcanoes create heat disruptions large enough to alter ocean currents. These redirected currents change weather patterns worldwide - often for decades.
The 1850 Carrington event - a massive solar storm - took out much of the then newly installed telegraph service in both America and Europe. It also damaged the partially built Trans-Atlantic cable. Today, when electricity is necessary for very nearly everything, a similar storm would destroy civilization as we know it for many, many years.
Such a storm will come again. It’s not just possible; it is inevitable.
Meanwhile, we trouble our sleep with fantastic fears of man-made climate change.
Rest easy.
There are not enough people on our very large planet to change anything – except locally, and briefly. We do not occupy a large enough percentage of the Earth to create more than a local mess. Earth pulsates with volatile, everchanging, powerful forces that are beyond our ability to control, and mostly beyond our ability to understand. The Earth will do as it will. There is nothing we can do about it.
People cannot change the climate.
People cannot destroy the world.
People can be misled.