Or so says the ABC – it’s for the climate, darling. Personally, I should’ve died at age 5.4. Great.
Found this through Watts Up With That? and must admit he says pretty much everything there is to say.
Anyway, here‘s the link to calculate your own approriate age to die.
So reports Cato’s Jerry Taylor. And here are the reasons he comes up with:
The public has only limited patience for “end of the world” prognostications. If the world isn’t visibly ending from whatever boogey man is said to menace said world, most of us begin to lose interest. We’re all well aware that Earth has been sentenced to doom hundreds of times over by activists of various stripes but has somehow gained a reprieve time and time again.
I finds this one fairly plausible. The sky isn’t falling and warmer weather isn’t all that bad – and the alternatives that are being presented still look awful. Also, there’s bigger fish out there – terrorism, weakening economy (especially this one – it usually is the economy, stupid), you name it. Global warming just doesn’t rank that highly.
The time horizon of most voters is very, very short. Getting people to voluntarily sacrifice for “the grandkids” or whomever is a near-impossible task. It would probably take a Katrina-a-year … and even then, that might not be enough.
Only partly true, in my opinion. There’s certainly far more than a 0% discount rate at work here but I think the main reason why people don’t think the way they are “supposed to” is more based in the fact that predictions just aren’t very accurate. Who knows what’s going to happen, what technologies scientists will come up with, what wars will be fought, how many recessions, who’ll be president – just too many variables included to fully trust the predictions made by the alarmists and therefore embrace their solutions. And yeah, that discount rate really is at work.
Global warming, if it plays out as the IPCC suspects, will be a slow-moving event. Panic over climate change has to compete with panic over Islamic terrorism, panic over housing markets, panic over globalization, panic over energy prices, panic over immigration, and episodic panic over dozens of other (usually dubious) worries. Simply put, global warming has a hard time competing with all of the other items on the policy agenda.
Kinda related to number one and again, good point.
This is why I’m not that terribly worried – I’m not worried about global warming, as I’ve already mentioned, as I don’t think it’s going to work out the way it’s being predicted and even if it does to some extent, we can handle it. The “solutions” proposed, however, could do real damage. But seeing how they are fairly unpopular I can’t see them getting their way in a way that truly hurts. Hopefully.
I’m torn on whether or not to believe that the environmentalists actually understand what kind of message they are sending with these “actions”…
What they are basically telling us is that, if we want to “save the planet” and/or “stop climate change” (which is extremely stupid in a “I-don’t-know-whether-to-laugh-or-to-cry” way), is that we’ll have to give up all that technology we’ve acquired over the last few centuries. I don’t think there’s anything that symbolises this as well as “electricity” does – and what better way than “artificial light” to highlight that. Make an entire city go dark.
Read that last sentence again. Make an entire city go dark. To me, that doesn’t sound like something we’d want to achieve – that sounds like a horrible threat, the consequence of something going terribly wrong – not something that we’d want for pretty much any reason.
On the one hand, this is reassuring – as it means there won’t really be any terribly damaging measures in the name of fighting global warming because as soon as you start really inconveniencing people, they’ll start pushing back. Sure, “let’s fight global warming” but don’t you dare take away my American Idol!
On the other hand, it’s terribly frightning. I don’t belive that a majority of people understands the underlying message they are sending – the end of civilisation and progress as we know it. But I’m sure there’s a minority who do. These people aren’t worried about climate change or about the environment in any way, shape or form – they simply see it as the newest fad to use in trying to (re-)introduce their collectivist ideas. For now, they probably have the upper hand – with no way of ever winning a decisive victory, mind you – but I’m sure this’ll change over time. After it becomes more clear what exactly it is they are trying to achieve, “the public” will be less quick to embrace their messages.
I don’t really want to venture an opinion on climate change as I don’t feel sufficiently informed. To put this post into context I will say where my head’s at in terms of anthropogenic global warming nonetheless (and, rest assured, many other people have no such a doubts when spewing their uninformed BS):
I think it is probably real and there will be some consequences from it. I don’t think these consequences are as grave as they are made out to be by some people and by most major mainstream media outlets. I do belive that some scientists and most politicians are following a “hidden” agenda when talking about climate change and see it as more of a tool than a real problem.
With my – albeit fairly limited – economics background and some reading on the possible solutions, I can say that quite a few measures certainly won’t work and even some of the more convincing ones probably won’t be enough or even help significantly. In general though, I consider the costs of doing something drastic about climate change (and anything else wouldn’t be enough, right?) far too high. The costs of dealing with problems as we go along (and especially if I’m right and sea levels don’t rise 20 feet, for example) and bump into them seem far more reasonable. That solution would also make it possible to ensure continued economic growth and technological progress – but then again we’ve now come full circle. That’s probably more important to the people with the agenda: no more growth, no more progress – we already have “enough”, don’t we?
