Global Warming, Ozone Hole and Other Ends of the World
Every day and every hour we hear about horrors that are menacing our peaceful lives: the looming catastrophes that are going to eliminate the whole civilization just in a couple of years’ time, death and destruction this or that human’s enterprise will bring if these vicious scientists or businessmen are not stopped. The reasons why we hear all of these threats are simple: a) people like to be afraid, b) people like to blame everyone except for themselves. Mass media know these tendencies very well and provides for them.
It is actually fascinating to observe if you have a little bit of memory and an attention span longer than that of a mussel: about ten-twenty years ago they scared us by the ozone hole that was rapidly growing above the Antarctica and exposed the Earth to deadly radioactive emission of the Sun with the end of the world due in a couple of decades. Time went past, world didn’t seem to end, some scientists suddenly discovered that the ozone hole over the Antarctica is growing and shrinking periodically and human activity doesn’t seem to affect it all that much, and… everybody suddenly forgot all about it. Media stopped to talk about it and people without constant reminding soon had it completely removed from their collective memory.
No problem, catastrophists say, there are plenty of other things people may be scared of. Let us welcome global warming. The idea that the global temperature on the planet is gradually growing due to the anthropogenic reasons is not new, but only during the last decades we saw a real upsurge of belief in it, ecological lobbies limiting the activity of industries and so on. And it seems to be working for now, even a recent Climategate scandal involving some of the most prominent statisticians promoting the theory (it showed that they were almost certainly falsifying the data of their research) doesn’t seem to turn the tide of public opinion. The same goes for many other Apocalypse theories, none of which came true in the end.
What is the most interesting question here is “cui prodest?”, i.e. who is to profit from it? Anyone may answer this question for himself, the only thing I consider to be obvious is that all these ends of the world are promoted way too much and turn out to be way too less than they are suspected.
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