Global ‘boiling’ is bad for the planet’s sanity

For those not old enough to remember these things, climate scientists warned we were heading into another ice age back in 1971. Seriously. (See the video below from 1979.) By the 1990s, the story had changed: we faced an existential threat of global warming. When the data didn’t cooperate, the new threat was ‘climate change.’ Now UN chief Antonio Guterres has decreed that “the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Why is Pulse Life Advocates interested in this topic?

Because it has an impact on sanctity of life issues. When the Secretary-General of the United Nations makes such a provocative statement, it adds fuel to the hysteria that surrounds this contentious issue.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on July 30th, Allysia Finley reported:

“ … according to a World Health Organization report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behavior and alcohol and substance abuse.”

She recounts a study done in 2021 of 16 to 25 year olds in ten different countries, including the United States, measuring the impact of climate change on their mental health:

“59% were very or extremely worried about climate change, and 84% were at least moderately worried. Forty-five percent claimed they were so worried that they struggled to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder.”

The root cause?

Ultimately, what is the root cause of their anxiety? Too many people.

In the provocatively titled piece, “To breed or not to breed,” the New York Times talked to couples who chose not to start families because of anxiety over climate change reports and Arctic ice forums. They view the risk of expanding man’s carbon footprint as too risky.

Says the article:

In a note to investors this past summer, Morgan Stanley analysts concluded that the “movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline.”

Morning Consult polled young adults and learned that “one in four cited climate change as a factor in why they do not currently have children.”

In another poll by Morning Consult, one out of three U.S. adults named climate change as the main reason they wanted fewer children than what they had originally considered ideal. Twenty-seven percent said over-population was another concern.

Should abortion be the solution?

Tragically, when these young people unexpectedly conceive a child when contraception fails, they view abortion as the ‘solution’ for the sake of saving the planet.

For the record, the science isn’t settled on a wide-range of climate issues, and ‘global boiling rhetoric’ only fuels climate hysteria. Bjorn Lomborg is one such contrarian. As president of the climate think-tank, The Copenhagen Consensus, he uses a broader range of data points to see a larger picture on the issue. Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week, he said:

“One of the most common tropes in our increasingly alarmist climate debate is that global warming has set the world on fire. But it hasn’t. For more than two decades, satellites have recorded fires across the planet’s surface. The data are unequivocal: Since the early 2000s, when 3% of the world’s land caught fire, the area burned annually has trended downward.”

He says that last year enjoyed a record low for the world’s burned area at just 2.2%.

Sadly, data like that isn’t broadly reported while alarmist terms like “global boiling” is.

Climate predictions are often wrong

Just as the video above from the 1970s fretting about a coming ice age seems laughable today, Lomborg points out other failed climate scare tactics:

When reading headlines about fires, remember the other climate scare tactics that proved duds. Polar bears were once the poster cubs for climate action, yet are now estimated to be more populous than at any time in the past half-century. We were told climate change would produce more hurricanes, yet satellite data shows that the number of hurricanes globally since 1980 has trended slightly downward.

These climate scare tactics affect the willingness of young people to procreate. Certainly, it’s not the only reason birth rates are plummeting, but polling sheds light on their significance.

Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez amplify the media’s apocalyptic rhetoric with dire forecasts, like this claim made in 2019:

“The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?”

Although she later backtracked, claiming that only those with a “social intelligence of a sea sponge” would believe such a claim, the damage was done. A Rasmussen Poll showed that two-thirds of Democratic voters do believe the claim. 

Celebrities weigh in

Social influencers like actor Seth Rogen spread the gospel that babies are bad for Mother Earth:

“There’s enough kids out there. We need more people? Who looks at the planet right now and thinks, ‘You know what we need right now?”

He and his wife plan on remaining childless.

Poet and essayist, Katha Politt, built on Rogen’s gospel of climate apocalypse in The Nation:

“Does the world need more people? Not if you ask the glaciers, the rain forests, the air, or the more than 37,400 species on the verge of extinction thanks to the relentless expansion of human beings into every corner and cranny of our overheated planet.”

You get the idea.

Young people are terrified of babies, viewing them as a disease rather than a blessing (or as a resource for future innovation in solving our planet’s problems).

The impact of global boiling rhetoric

The impact is profound for practical and moral reasons.

Practically speaking, we need workers. The Wall Street Journal wrote last week that the U.S. may have 6 million fewer working age people by 2040. The reason? The falling birthrate.

Falling birthrates lead to labor shortages which leads to economic decline (see Japan and Italy) and more poverty and less creative thinkers to innovate us out of our problems.

But while climate alarmists proclaim global boiling and a climate apocalypse, they ignore the moral apocalypse which countenances abortion as the final solution for saving the planet.

Some on the pro-life side of the aisle suggest that more contraception is the key. Pulse has repeatedly written and spoken on this issue using data provided by Planned Parenthood’s research arm, the Guttmacher Institute: half of the woman who seek abortion were contracepting when they conceived.

Contraception fails. When it inevitably does, ‘global boiling’ rhetoric suggests that abortion is the best decision for the sake of Mother Earth.

That is why Pulse Life Advocates continues to write on this important subject.

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