All my life, one looming calamity after another has appeared on the human horizon — and then never bothered to move in for the kill.
If it wasn’t nuclear war (to be followed by nuclear winter), then it was overpopulation, or famine, or global cooling, or exposure to chemicals (leading to infertility!), or pandemic AIDS scything through us like the Black Death, or international terrorism, or the clash of civilizations, or predatory capitalism imploding from its own greed, or, of course, global warming.
And I’m just hitting the highlights.
Last week we were told that if world leaders failed to act decisively later this year in Copenhagen to limit climate change — the threat that overshadows all others in modern discourse — “we risk consigning future generations to an irreversible catastrophe,” putting the prosperity and health of “all peoples . . . in jeopardy.” Thus spoke President Barack Obama before an audience at the United Nations.
Never mind that future generations are likely to be wealthier and healthier than those of us alive today under any reasonable scenario that includes climate change. Never mind, too, that the president shamelessly oversells the very modest potential benefits of the regulations and agreements he favors, such as the “cap-and-trade” bill that passed the House this year — while ignoring the costs.
A fellow rarely goes broke selling doom — in politics, entertainment or religion — and I expect to hear similar code-red forecasts until the day I die.
To be sure, just because most doomsday scenarios have been wrong hardly means that all must be. And just because most planetary threats are over-hyped or imaginary doesn’t mean that some aren’t real. A nuclear war between the U.S. and Soviet Union was a genuine possibility once upon a time. AIDS did hit parts of Africa hard.
Still, shouldn’t decade after decade of the misdirected mutterings of doomsday prophets make us at least a little suspicious when someone resorts to end-of-times language to push a controversial plan?
Whatever policies are embraced (or rejected) in the next decade in response to climate change, humans almost certainly will have to handle whatever warming occurs as they’ve met most challenges in the past: through successful adaptation. Only this time, given our unprecedented knowledge and wealth, we’ll be far better equipped than humans were, say, when glaciers were crunching over their hunting grounds.
A few weeks ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that U.S. life expectancy had increased again, to 77.9 years. When I was born, life expectancy was a full 10 years less than that figure, people lived in homes only 40 percent as large as today’s average, and diseases such as polio still stalked the land.
It isn’t only Americans’ health, wealth and independence that have blossomed in the era since World War II. Mortality rates around the globe have plummeted; chronic hunger has been in retreat (outside of heart-rending exceptions such as Zimbabwe), and the middle class has exploded in size.
A few years ago, the late economist Julian Simon and Stephen Moore could credibly claim that “there has been more improvement in the human condition in the past 100 years than in all of the previous centuries combined.”
So, what’s on the horizon now: “irreversible catastrophe” or another extraordinary expansion of prosperity and opportunity? I’d bet on the latter — no matter what they do in Copenhagen.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
