The “Adults in the Room” of Climate Change are Freaking the Kids Out.
Posted by Ed Folsom, May 28, 2024.
According to a recent Portland Press Herald story, Colby College ran a survey of Maine Medical Association members in 2020 as to whether they think climate change affects their patients. The doctors attributed cases of “asthma, allergies, heatstroke and Lyme disease” to rising temperatures, and “reported an increase in climate-based anxiety and depression, especially among young patients.” One doctor is quoted saying: “I see many children who have a great deal of anxiety. In adolescents, they frequently verbalized worry specifically about climate change.” Gee, I wonder where that comes from.
Also, from the Press Herald article:
“In 2022, the American Medical Association adopted a policy calling upon its members to advocate for policies that limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, support rapid clean energy transition, and build climate resilience, especially among minorities.”
And you thought medicine was pure, apolitical science.
The climate change agenda is evidently racking children with fear of climate change. Should doctors respond with greater urgency; with increased warnings of existential doom for all who fail to follow the climate change expertocracy’s prescriptions? If not, how can they possibly be sure to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, ensure rapid clean energy transition, and build climate resilience, especially among minorities? Sorry kids, that’s just how it has to be if the adults in the room are going to effectively do their power-and-control thing.
Maybe it was the headline on the story immediately underneath the one about climate change doomsayers frightening the children into states of anxiety and neurosis – “COVID will still be here this summer. Will anyone be worried?”— that took me back to my blog post from 4 years ago: “COVID-19 facts you won’t get from Maine media (Why scare the children?).” Back when I wrote that post, the adults in the room were busy scaring the bejesus out of the children, and everyone else, over COVID-19, making it out to be an equal-opportunity killer of young and old. As it turns out, 88.8% of the people who died in Maine with COVID-19 over the past 4+ years were age 60 and over. 74% were age 70 and older. Only 5 people, representing about 0.1% of Maine’s deaths with COVID-19, were under age 20. Now, here we go again, this time with “climate change.”
According to a USA Today story from about a year ago, the U.S. is responsible for 14% of global Co2 emissions. The rest of the world is responsible for the other 86%. China and India are responsible for 40% of the total. China contributes 32%, while India contributes 8% and rising. China was also responsible for 95% of the world’s new coal-fired electricity plant construction in 2023. With roughly 3,100 coal-fired plants on line, China continues to build new ones at a brisk pace. Yet the Chinese don’t seem to believe they’re all going to die because of their actions. Maybe it’s just American/Western Co2 that poses the existential threat.
Maine holds less than 0.4% of the U.S. population. Sorry kids, but nothing anyone in Maine does is going to make the difference between life and death on the global warming front.
Wouldn’t it be much better for America’s children if the adults in the room would stop pumping them full of the irrational, exaggerated fear that makes up their actual phobias? If the kids only knew how many other times pseudo-scientific nut jobs have declared that the end of the world is nigh — As recounted in the articles here and here, back in the 1970’s we were told we were soon going to die from overpopulation, starvation, the total depletion of fossil fuels, and a coming ice age.
In 1970-71, my 9th grade French teacher, freshly minted from college, used to wear a ZPG button in class. As she explained to us, ZPG stood for Zero Population Growth. We needed to understand that the earth could not sustain a further increase in the population. We were going to starve. There would be no more petroleum. And the pollution… The numbers didn’t lie. It was ZPG or death!
In 1970, the earth’s population was just under 3.7 billion. It is now 8 billion.
In the 1980’s, we were told that our existence was threatened by acid rain. It was going to kill all the lakes, the ponds, and the trees. In the 1990’s, the hole in the ozone layer was going to get us. Yet, the lakes and ponds still bear life, the trees still grow green (thanks to Co2), and the ozone hole is nearly mended.
COVID policy provides a stark recent illustration of the technique. Every spike in cases was caused by people failing to follow the government’s rules: people not wearing masks; people gathering with family and friends for holidays, weddings, or church services; people failing to stay home; people who refused to take the vaccine and instead drank bleach and pool cleaner and took horse de-wormer. In case you have forgotten, the government’s rules also involved standing at least 6’ apart (distance-sensitive COVID); adhering to the direction of one-way aisles in stores (directional COVID); wearing a mask at all times when standing in a restaurant but being allowed to remove it when seated (height-sensitive COVID); and quarantining for 14 days after crossing state lines (state line-sensitive COVID).
Ultimately, the pandemic was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated:” those unclean, selfish rubes who threatened the enlightened good people with death, those who insisted on exercising what President Biden called “The freedom to kill you with my COVID.” Every time the cases trended down, the people who followed the rules made it happen. Every time the numbers rose, it was the fault of the unclean.
With climate change, every hotter-than-average day, every colder-than-average day, every dryer-than-average day, every wetter-than-average day, every hurricane, every snowstorm, every ice storm, every wind storm is caused by climate change, because the unenlightened are refusing to follow the rules that could save us all. It’s all the fault of those selfish, unenlightened rubes who insist on the freedom to kill you with their Co2 emissions. And the children scream, “Mommy, how do we make them stop killing us!”
Al Gore told us that climate change would cause the earth to reach its point of no return in 2016. Yet, despite Gore’s dire warnings, there’s still snow atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Manhattan remains above water.
Each passing year brings us closer to the day when AOC’s dire 2019 prediction that climate change will lead to earth’s end 7 years from now will go down in the same set of flames.
Eventually, the process of reality grinding away at the hype will rob global-warming-fear-mongering of its power to induce phobic neurosis in all but the most severely predisposed. But then, something else will take its place. And, once again, too few will remember the similar scams of the past.
“This time, if you don’t follow our rules, you’re all going to die.”
“Burn the heretics before they kill us!”
