Here’s an idea I got after reading some comments on my last post. Let’s play a little game. Since the manufactured crisis of Global Warming has now officially been debunked by The American Physical Society, the world’s largest and most prestigious professional association of Physicists, the political left will be scrambling to find that efficient replacement doomsday scenario. What will it be? While global warming itself was so laughably moronic on its face, you still have to admit that the political left scored a lot of points with it. It won them elections, was invaluable in the strengthening of the EPA, almost got Cap and Trade inflicted upon us, helped to convince 54 Million Americans to eschew free market economics in place of Marxism in order to help save the planet. It even managed to convince us to make the sale of 50 Cent incandescent light bulbs illegal, in deference to a $6 product that only works about 50% of the time. This bulb by the way gives off a crappy quality of light and requires a Hasmat team should one break in a populated homestead.
The real question is, what’ll be the next gimmick for Chicken Little to scare us with? I have some ideas, and hopefully others will be able to help me with more. The fun comes in when we wait to see who’s right and who’s wrong. By the way, what will not happen is that the scare mongering stops. So, we’ll get treated to some reason why we must kiss our individual property rights, free speech rights, right to keep and bear arms, right to be secure in our person and papers, right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, good bye.
Option 1: Global Cooling
Don’t laugh, after all, this is what global warming replaced. This theory was popular in the early 70’s, when smog was going to block out our friend Mr. Sun on a permanent basis. This theory even managed to make the cover of Time Magazine, (genuflect when you read that name to yourself.)
Pros: Now that the American Physical Society has pretty much spelled out that we are at some sort of temperature high point and that a global cooling period is as likely as any increase in temperatures, scaring people that things are going to reduce to zero and that Polar Bears will no longer have water to swim in may be a safer bet to hedge those previously failed predictions. People in general dislike snow much more than they do sunny days, and letting them know that fossil fuel burning snow removal devices are causing things to deep freeze rather than heating the planet up might be the all around smarter play. Quite frankly, they should have stuck with that meme to begin with.
Cons: While the concept of Americans in general possessing an adult memory has come into question recently, I would hope that they’ll be able to remember the great global warming hoax that they’d just been conned with. Scaring people with burn baby burn, and then flipping the 180 on them might raise some suspicions, even amongst the terminally gullible. I want that to be true anyhow.
Option 2: Ozone Depletion
This one was another favorite of the late 70’s and early 80’s. We even managed to see nightly Ozone reports on the national news for a few months time, and then something magical happened. Some bothersome scientist somewhere pointed out that Ozone, and a lot of it, is created every time lightning strikes. That smell you associate with rainfall, yep, that’s Ozone. Once airline pilots and astronauts told us of massive lightning strikes reaching upwards into the upper atmosphere, even more prevalent in thunderstorms than the ones that struck downward towards terra firma, the jig on that one ended pretty quickly. After some attempts to delineate between, “good,” Ozone and, “bad,” Ozone failed, the nightly reports on news casts as to how soon we’d all be dead due to radiation sickness subsided. (Yes, Earth lasted far longer already than the Ozone tales predicted we would.)
Pros: The Ozone layer is really far away from us, invisible, and yet scary to think of as being so delicate that it may one day disappear. This scare tactic from yore was so effective that it convinced every teen aged girl in America to stop using aerosol hair spray in deference to the more, “ecologically sound,” and far less convenient spray pump counter part. With no real noticeable effects to measure, we will be totally reliant on any data fed to us by the reporter types who appear on our televisions. They’ve already shown how much they like a good ghost story to scare the pajesus out of everyone. Something we can’t see, can’t verify, can’t refute, and can’t measure makes a grand one of those. It’s literally the perfect boogie man.
Cons: We’ve seen this one before. Add to that, the small fact that we already know how to manufacture as much Ozone as we would ever want, and in fact, Ozone itself is one of those gases that the EPA currently lists as a pollutant, and what you’re left with is a serious non threat. Besides, did anyone really ever believe that aerosol spray from canisters sold in drug stores actually floated all the way up to the very edge of our atmosphere? Talk about gullible, jeez Louise.
Option 3: Earth Quakes caused by Fracking
Even the word fracking sounds sinister. That by the way I believe must have been by design somehow. The industry term for Hydraulic Fracturing had historically been Fracing, and adding the k gives it a whole new connotation, as in, “we’re fracked.” Let’s face it, the whole Chicken Little scenario has been employed to halt economic prosperity through stopping all energy production anyhow, and what better way to do that than via the direct route. It is not the effects of using energy that is evil with this scenario, it is the act of actually producing it in the first place. This represents a subtle variation on an earlier line of attack, but it’s directness is beautiful in its simplicity.
Pros: As I stated before, it cuts out all of the middle men. It is also a brand new approach. With the advent of the 24 hour news cycle, any Earth Quake of any magnitude that previously went unreported, and mostly unnoticed, is now blared from every television with functioning sound. It will be easy to convince people who don’t bother to read any more that Earth Quakes are on the rise, or that they’re more severe than they were as compared to the paleolithic era for example. Within days of this meme receiving the go order from the political left, we’ll see the television news reporting on, “another fracking caused Earth Quake occurred in our nation’s heartland today.”
Cons: Fracing has been around and in practice since the 1940’s. There are about a Million or so Fracing operations already in place today, and have been for quite some time now. They have Earth Quakes in other nations which do not utilize the technology, and we’ve had them here, even before fossil fuels were burned or drilled for at all. All of this went on, unnoticed, and there was no agency, person, scientist, or scare monger who thought, gee, why are there suddenly more Earth Quakes today than before. That is because there aren’t more Earth Quakes today than before, and those that are happening are no more powerful or less powerful than those that happened before. We’ve known for a long time what does cause Earth Quakes, and it is not anything that we as human beings can do a darned thing about.
Option 4: Space Aliens
Yes this one was thrown in just to be silly, but before you laugh, hear me out. This very laughable, moronic theory was posited on CNN as a possible explanation for what may have happened to Malaysian Air Flight 370. Not only did the CNN host say it with a straight face, pose the question to the panel with the exact same gravity as every other possibility, but he even pressed a follow up question when the panelist shot him down. Also mentioned on the same segment was the specter of a Black Hole literally swallowing the airplane, (and I know that those of you with the slightest knowledge of science are laughing right now,) along with the involvement of the Bermuda Triangle. It is simply astounding how tolerant of nonsense we Americans truly are. What is even more astounding is how many of us actually believe that not only have space aliens visited Earth, but still live here among us today.
Pros: This one will require no proof, and will always be based upon the absurd. Paul Krugman, the favored economist of the political left has himself posited the theory in a serious manner that by convincing Americans that we needed to prepare for a pending, if false, invasion by space aliens, the resulting Keynesian stimulation of the economy would be a net positive for all of humanity. Meaning that his advice to any Democrat President to get us out of economic trouble was to lie to the American People and tell us that we were about to be invaded by space aliens. This was in an actual op-ed penned by Krugman and printed in the New York Times. The mere absurdity alone makes it impossible to prove the negative. It would be like me saying, prove your great grand parents were not born on Mars. Think about it. If you’re being intellectually honest with yourself, it’s tougher than you think.
Cons: Absurd is only going to last for so long. It’ll be a temporary fix at best. Besides that, who says the aliens are bad, don’t like us burning fossil fuels, aren’t coming here because we burn them and they want to live in a world with people smart enough to use the resources offered up by the home world? That’s the thing with imaginary aliens, their motivations need to be imagined up as well. For that nonsensical matter, how would we know that the imaginary aliens won’t take our attempts to limit our Carbon emissions as a personal insult? This option leaves too much open to turn the tide of the game. If they can make crap up, so can we.
You’ll notice that I have a poll on the top right of this blog, please vote, and let me know which one you feel most likely to the next Chicken Little doomsday scenario. Leave a comment if you have one that I’ve missed, (which is likely,) and I’ll try to add them to the poll.
Guys, I could not figure out how to embed the poll within the post itself, nor how to include it here at this site. If one of the smarter gurus of blogging would like to help me out with it, or if you just want to link back to my place to log a vote, please do so.
