Is there anything climate change can’t do?

our own house cat :-)

We’re emotionally attached to our pets. Which is why activists, whose stock-in-trade is emotional manipulation, like to drag them into the conversation.

Last week, UK actress Emma Thompson added her star power to an event organized by the extremist group, Extinction Rebellion. Standing outside BBC headquarters, she delivered a mock weather forecast full of doom and gloom.

Bona fide US climate scientist Judith Curry can shout from the rooftops that we don’t really understand the climate, and have no reliable way of predicting the future. She can declare that global warming poses no threat to humanity’s existence. But what would she know?

Let’s pay attention, instead, to the actress who, reading from a script, declares that an imminent climate crisis will compel us to eat our pets. In a video on the Daily Mail website, you can watch Thompson proclaim:

Better wrap up warm, stockpile food and remember there is a surprising amount of protein in the average household pet.

Emma, darling, we’ve been here before. Fifty years ago, when you were just 10 years old, an activist biologist named Paul Ehrlich was also predicting the apocalypse. Back then the villain wasn’t climate change, but overpopulation. Natural resources were depleted, he said. Civilization was on the verge of collapse, he said. The “time of famines” had arrived.

Ehrlich was so convinced his prognostications were correct, he advocated the forcible sterilization of India’s poor. “Coercion in a good cause,” he called it.

His book, The Population Bomb, appeared in 1968. On page 129 of the paperback edition, his imaginary future (which never actually materialized) was grim:

We are going to face some extremely difficult but unavoidable decisions…Will we be willing to slaughter our dogs and cats in order to divert pet food protein to the starving masses in Asia?

Eat your pets. Slaughter your pets. Disturbing ideas tossed around by disturbingly self-righteous individuals.

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LINKS:

• my previous commentary: Why Paul Ehrlich Matters
• Ehrlich’s Guide to Being an Intrusive A**hole
• Anything Goes When You’re Saving the World
• The Fanatical Paul Ehrlich
• How They Sold ‘The Population Bomb’
• Experts Suck at Predicting the Future