Don’t miss the Wired magazine cover story by Matt Ridley titled Apocalypse Not.

I am traveling unexpectedly this week due to a relative’s medical condition, so my return to full time blogging is a little delayed.

In case you missed it, the cover story of the September issue of Wired magazine was written by Matt Ridley and is titled Apocalypse Not. It surveys a rather long list of dire predictions that turned out to be mostly hype.

I’ve long been puzzled by why we’re so quick to believe the climate change doom-and-gloom narrative. Why don’t we demand an explanation of how this apparent crisis is qualitatively different from all those others? You’d think that would be the first question we – and the media – would ask.

In the 21st century, with all our education and all our technology, are we really just children who get a perverse thrill from telling ourselves scary stories around campfires? Are we really so emotionally and spiritually immature that we need to invent one crisis after another in order to imbue our lives with meaning and purpose?

Here’s my favourite quote from Ridley’s piece:

we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize.

Read the whole thing here.

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