Throughout my life (and I am now 71), humanity has always been facing some environmental catastrophe or the other. Each has been a “consensus position” of “scientists” primarily concerned with drumming up funding or earning brownie points or securing TV careers. Not a single one of the supposedly imminent catastrophes has ever come within light-years of ever occurring.
Nobody seems prepared to carry out sanity checks on the doomsday scenarios any longer. This is partly because the headlines and funding and fame that can be generated by alarmism is so lucrative. The key ingredients for any “successful” alarmist theme are:
- that the catastrophe should be at least one decade away,
- not more than 3 decades away, and
- that the onset of the catastrophe be either undetectable or not measurable.
The list of environmental catastrophes that humanity has faced just in my lifetime:
The k2p blog 