Paul Erlich is Dead, his Environmentalism is (still) refuted

Environmentalist Paul Erlich alarmed the world back in 1968 predicting a "population explosion" which forecast “the greatest cataclysm in the history of man” -- food shortages escalating hunger and starvation “into famines of unbelievable proportions.”

In the obituary for the 93-year-old doom-monger, who died this week, the New York Times called his predictions "premature." But they weren't even wrong. They didn't happen, and they never will. (See above for how cataclysmically wrong the catastrophiser really was.)

Some of his other failed and frankly nasty predictions:

• "In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."
• "In ten years [this was 1970] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish."
• "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."
• “Sometime in the next 15 years the end will come, and by ‘the end’ I mean an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”
• “Giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun."
• “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”
• "We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail."

Yet despite being wrong about everything, the failed forecaster made a million and was showered with awards.

He never recanted.

Doom sells. Sadly. Still.

He was a gambler. A few years back, I wrote about a famous bet, for which this is the winning cheque:

Several decades ago, gloom-monger Paul Erlich and techno-optimist Julian Simon had a bet.

Erlich was certain resources were running out and humanity was doomed. Simon asserted they weren't and wouldn't be. The bet was that, by the end of that decade, a basket of resources chosen by Erlich would cost more to buy — more, said Erlich, because by then those resources would be running out. Less, said Simon in reponse. (Simon, you see, was confident that the ultimate resource, from which all others derive, is the human mind — a machine for turning shit into useful stuff.) 

Simon won. 

Resources weren't running out. 

They still aren't.

The "Simon Abundance Index" (SAI, below),which measures the relative abundance of resources since that bet, now stands at 609.4. Meaning that in 2023, the Earth was 509.4 percent more abundant in 2023 than it was in 1980!

How astonishing is that! World population since 1980 has almost doubled; while resources produced by human beings have multiplied by more than five times!! 

Turns out that as global population increases, that "virtually all resources became more abundant. How on earth (literally) is that possible?"

Unlike Erlich and the sundry other doom-sayers who litter the planet today, Simon recognised that without the knowledge of how to use them, raw materials have no economic value whatsoever. They are just so much stuff. What transforms a raw material into a resource is knowledge — knowledge of how that stuff might satisfy a human need, and how to place it in a causal connection to satisfy that need. (The great Carl Menger explained this process way back in 1870!) And since new knowledge is potentially limitless, so too are resources.

 Infinite, because the ultimate resource is the human mind.

In this sense, as George Reisman puts it, environmentalism is refuted.

The Simon Abundance Index: 1980-2023 (1980=100)

Marian Tupy points out some interesting parallels with other catastrophisers:

1. Malthus published his book on English overpopulation and overconsumption in 1798. Thereafter, the population of England rose, and the prices of wheat fell relative to wages.
2. Marx published 'Das Kapital' in 1867, arguing that workers' wages would be squeezed to zero by capitalist competition (based on a much-debated and probably incorrect "Engels' Pause"). Thereafter, English wages skyrocketed.
3. Ehrlich published his book about coming global famines in 1968. Thereafter, global famines collapsed, and standards of living across much of the world rose.

Forget these failed forecasters. Sign up to Tupy's Human Progress agenda instead.

RELATED:

Checking in on human progress

 The start of a year is a good time to do a stocktake. An update. A check-in on how well we're all getting on. Energy maven Alex Epstein offers an important data point...

Anti-growth (and anti-energy) catastrophists like Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were wrong. Today's humans are the best-fed humans in history.

And things will keep improving—unless we fall for new catastrophist propaganda like civilisation-crippling “net zero” plans.

 

"The UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe" [updated]

"A recent story on PBS NewsHour, 'UN says world must jointly tackle issues of climate change, pollution, biodiversity and land loss,' by Tammy Webber of the Associated Press (AP), reports on a new UN 'Global Environment Outlook' that repeats the false assertion that the Earth is nearing a global tipping point that can only be avoided through “unprecedented change” and trillions of dollars in new spending to phase out fossil fuels. These assertions are bogus, lacking any basis in data or observable evidence. In fact, the UN has a long track record of failed disaster predictions tied to climate change, going all the way back to 1989 ...

"A history lesson is in order. This is not the first time the UN has announced that 'we’re running out of time.' In 1989, 36 years of global warming ago, the UN Environment Programme’s Noel Brown told the Associated Press that 'entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels' if global warming was not reversed by the year 2000, predicting up to three feet of sea-level rise by then, massive coastal inundation of Bangladesh and Egypt, and a wave of 'eco-refugees.'

"More than three decades later, each of these predictions have proven, not just false, but wildly inaccurate. The 'Climate at a Glance' website’s 'Sea Level Rise' page documents long-term tide-gauge records and NASA satellite data showing global sea level rising at about 1.2 inches per decade, with, at best, a modest acceleration since the nineteenth century. Nor have we seen the millions of 'climate refugees' that the UN forecast. The Maldives are still above water, Bangladesh has more people than ever, and the “10-year window” to avert disaster has been rolled over so many times it could qualify as a wrecked vehicle.

"PBS/AP never mentions this failed track record. Nor does it acknowledge that the UN has now presided over 30 Conferences of the Parties (COPs) without changing the basic trajectory of global emissions or global temperature ...

"The entries at 'Climate at a Glance'’s on 'Deaths from Extreme Weather' and 'Temperature-Related Deaths' highlight a crucial fact PBS never mentions: over the past century, climate-related deaths have plummeted by more than 95 percent, even as global population has quadrupled and temperatures have risen. Independent analyses, such as HumanProgress’ review of disaster mortality, show climate-related deaths falling from about 485,000 per year in the 1920s to fewer than 20,000 per year in the 2010s, a drop of more than 99 percent on a per-capita basis, as seen in their graph below.

"Th[is] is not what 'running out of time' looks like.

"What the article and the UN report completely ignore is the role that affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly fossil fuels, has played in making human societies more resilient to environmental hazards. Mechanised agriculture, synthetic fertilisers, modern flood defences, air conditioning, and rapid disaster response all depend on dense, on-demand energy. That is why climate-related deaths as documented by 'Climate at a Glance' have collapsed over the past century. Yet the UN prescription, uncritically endorsed by PBS/AP, is to rapidly phase out the very energy sources that lifted billions from abject poverty, based on a track record of predictions that have repeatedly failed to materialize.

"'Climate Realism' has chronicled this pattern for years. 'UNFCCC Climate Report Lies About Its Own Science' points out how UN political bodies routinely make sweeping claims about 'intensifying destruction' that are not supported by the UN’s own scientific assessments, which identify little or no change in most types of extreme weather events and trends in natural disasters. In 'The IPCC’s 1990 Predictions Were Even Worse Than We Thought,' 'Climate Realism' reviews the early IPCC forecasts of rapid warming and sea-level rise and shows how they overshot reality. Despite this, every new report is marketed as the 'most comprehensive ever' and used to justify more urgent demands for unprecedented, wrenching, transformational remaking of the world’s economy and governing institutions.

"PBS/AP could have told its audience that the UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe ...

"By omitting the long trail of failed UN climate pronouncements, ignoring the dramatic decline in climate-related deaths, and treating speculative model outputs as inevitable futures, PBS and the Associated Press badly mislead their audience concerning the true state of the Earth. A truly public-minded broadcaster would carefully scrutinise the UN’s record and available data rather than uncritically regurgitate its latest false alarm report."

~ Anthony Watts from his post 'Wrong Again PBS, UN Is Pushing Another False Climate Crisis Report'

UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg writes in the New York Post:

"The main UN model shows that even if all rich countries were to cut their carbon emissions to zero, it would avert less than 0.2°F of projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing massive hits of up to 18% on rich-world GDP by 2050.

"The ever-increasing cost of climate policy is one reason the rich world is cutting back in many other areas, including aid to the world's poorest.

"That, in part, is why philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a strategic pivot on climate.

"He has laid out three tough truths: Climate change is serious but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'; temperature is not the best progress metric; and we should instead focus on boosting human welfare. [bold added; hat tip Gus Van Horn]

"The apocalypse was always a decade away. ."

"In 2006, Al Gore’s 'An Inconvenient Truth' was peak climate fear-mongering.

"He showed maps of cities underwater, claiming melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica would displace hundreds of millions. He said our maps 'would have to be redrawn.'

[He brought his map porn to New Zealand in 2006,  John Key confessing afterwards "all his buttons had been pushed" having undergone a Damascene conversion at the feet of Al Gore's slides.]

"18 years later, none of it has happened. Not even close. The apocalypse was always a decade away. 

"Meanwhile, the man selling the panic got rich. Very rich. 

"While you were told to feel guilty and lower your standard of living, Al Gore built a $300+ million personal fortune from the climate industrial complex. 

"He became the first 'climate billionaire.' 

"He made his money from: 

• Green investment funds (Generation Investment Management) 
• Board seats & advisory roles 
• Massive speaking fees ($200k+ per speech) 
• Carbon credit trading 

"He didn't save the planet. He monetised your anxiety. 

"The truth is, the predictions were always more profitable than they were accurate."

~ Camus

"The doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people

"Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth.' ...

"Even popular culture sometimes promotes this apocalyptic degrowth mindset to children. ...

"Not only is the embrace of degrowth misguided, but research suggests that this doomsday mindset is causing widespread anxiety in young people. ... [T]hat anxiety is international: A study from 2021, surveying 10,000 children and young people aged 16–25 in 10 countries, found that 59 percent of respondents were very or extremely worried about climate change, and more than 45 percent of respondents said those feelings negatively affected daily life and basic functioning.

Human beings have the unique ability to innovate their way out of problems, creating technological solutions that benefit both people and the planet. Unfortunately, children today are often bombarded with messages of an impending apocalypse that can only be warded off by lowering living standards and embracing 'degrowth'...

"Instead of rushing to solutions that require lowering living standards via coercive government mandates or expensive taxpayer-funded subsidies, we should focus on the freedom to make technological advances that raise our standard of living while also mitigating environmental harm. An advantage of that approach is that it may also improve the mental health of young people..."

~ Chelsea Follett from her post 'The Kids Need Optimism, Not Doom and Degrowth'

FACTCHECK: Climate Version

The Climate Realism site fact-checks February's climate stories. These are their top five corrections:

They suggest that "what’s disappearing faster than glaciers is US participation in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

Our prediction is that the glaciers will outlast the climate hoax.

I reckon they'll be right about that too.

PS: Other notable February climate fact-checks:

• The Guardian says, "There Are Identifiable 'Climate Tipping Points' for 'Climate Catastrophes: 
WRONG:"The premise that we are approaching dangerous and unprecedented climate tipping points is unsupported by history or present data."
• Earth.Com says, "climate change is causing cocoa production to fall in West and Central Africa." 
THIS IS FALSE: "Data show that cocoa production has increased during the last few decades of modest warming, rather than falling. Part of the reason for this is improved growing conditions in those regions and carbon dioxide fertilisation."
• The Washington Post says, "Rats Are Thriving in Cities—And Climate Change Is Helping Them.” 
THIS IS FALSE: "Rats have always lived among and thrived with human populations. As cities have grown, so have urban rat populations, benefitting from mismanaged waste, ineffective pest control policies, and urban decay, none of which have anything to do with CO₂ levels."
• The New York Times says that "Climate Change is Causing High Coffee Prices." 
THIS IS NOT BORNE OUT IN THE DATA. "Coffee production data show that there has been a steady increase over time, despite—and perhaps due in part to—increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and the slight warming of recent decades."
• A recently published (and trumpeted) paper identifies a catastrophic "tipping point" for the Greenland ice sheet. 
BUT HERE'S THE PROBLEM: "This scenario is entirely model-driven, with little to no real-world validation. And, more importantly, it hinges on assumptions that stretch the limits of scientific credibility."
• And finally, "for years, climate scientists have assured us that NOAA’s homogenised temperature datasets—particularly the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)—are the gold standard for tracking global warming."
HOWEVER: "A recent study published in Atmosphere has uncovered shocking inconsistencies in NOAA’s adjustments, raising serious concerns about the reliability of homogenised temperature records. ... [The] findings reveal a deeply concerning pattern of inconsistencies and unexplained changes in temperature adjustments, prompting renewed scrutiny of how NOAA processes climate data."

"...climate realism is slowly starting to take hold."

"After more than two decades of unyielding climate alarmism, climate realism is slowly starting to take hold.
    "How do I know this? Because ordinary, hard-working [folk] are no longer buying into climate alarmism hook, line, and sinker.
    "According to multiple polls, climate change is no longer a top concern for the vast majority of Americans. [And down as a concern by almost a quarter for NZers over the last five years from 2019 to 2024.]
    "They are finally starting to understand the truth about climate change, while simultaneously becoming aware that climate alarmists have ulterior motives at hand, many of which are in direct opposition to their fundamental best interests ....
    "Thanks to ... many allied organisations, [everyone everywhere is] more able than ever to receive accurate information dispelling common myths and lies pushed by climate alarmists. As anyone can read at ClimateRealism.com, the seas are not rising and weather events like hurricanes, heatwaves, droughts, etc. are not becoming more frequent nor deadlier. In fact, in many cases, the exact opposite is occurring.

"Another huge factor that helped [is] the dubiousness of the climate alarmist narrative is that their solutions make no sense, do not address the so-called problems, and all too often end with less liberty and more government. [Many] are beginning to understand that 'climate justice,' for instance, is mostly about wealth redistribution and has little to do with a cleaner environment. ...
    "To be clear, [most people] want to protect the environment and desire clean air and water.
    "They just don’t want their lives upended and their bank accounts drained under the phoney guise of saving the planet."

~ Chris Talgo from his post 'Dear Climate Alarmists, Welcome to Your Worst Nightmare'

'Why Rising Disaster Costs Aren’t Proof of Climate Chaos'

"Following the news, one might get the impression that the increase in extreme weather events is an undeniable fact. The fact that the damage caused by natural disasters, measured in monetary terms, has increased significantly is often offered as proof of this. ...
    "However ... this is a little misleading. Of course, weather events such as hurricanes or floods caused by heavy precipitation are a major problem for a society experiencing them. However, it is misleading to attribute the associated material losses, which have increased over time, necessarily to climate change. 'There’s two separate issues in that. There’s the geophysical event, and then there’s the social impact ..., or the financial damage associated with these events, which increases over time. [This] is importantly linked to the state of the society as a whole ... how many houses are there ... or how many cars would be damaged by extreme weather conditions? What kind of property is there in those houses and cars that could potentially be destroyed? It is logical that if extreme weather destroys property in, say, the United States, the amount of property destroyed and hence the financial cost of the event would be significantly greater than in a poorer country. ...
    "If we ... take these things into account, can we say that extreme weather events have become more frequent, and more powerful and that the associated losses are increasing? 'If you adjust disaster losses or economic losses from these events for changes in inflation over time, changes in population and changes in wealth, the trend is minimised. There’s no trend afterwards,' [says Jessica Weinkle, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington]. In fact, she adds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not detect increasing trends in the types of extreme weather events that are the leading causes of disaster losses. 
    "But at the same time, Weinkle argues, it doesn’t even matter if climate change is causing slightly more heatwaves in some regions and a bit more rainfall in others. She says that linking problems to climate change does not help to create any practical solutions needed to deal with extreme weather events. [When we have flooding, for instance, ... it can be very bad. Very big. But there are all sorts of reasons for them because of the policy choices that we’ve had in the past ... So climate change makes it perhaps a bit wettter here, perhaps a bit hotter there. But the floods would be an issue still. They're not necessarily more of an issue because of the overall warming.] What would probably help best are practical steps, and the wealthier the society is, the easier it would be to take them."

~ Hannes Sarv from his article 'Why Rising Disaster Costs Aren’t Proof of Climate Chaos'

Great Barrier Reef is "doomed"?

 

"The Great Barrier Reef is doomed by 2030 without immediate action," said Time magazine in 2013.

"Great Barrier Reef damage is ‘irreversible’ unless radical action taken," said the Guardian in 2014.

"The Great Barrier Reef is a victim of climate change," the Guardian declared in 2021, doubling down on the catastrophising.

And now, in 2024? Well, check it out:

Moral of the story?

The story of the Great Barrier Reef’s recovery challenges the dominant climate change narrative. While it’s crucial to remain vigilant about environmental protection, it’s equally important to base our policies and perceptions on accurate, comprehensive data. The resilience of the Great Barrier Reef serves as a reminder that nature can be more adaptable and robust than we often assume.

Only a decade left to save the planet ...

 ... they said in 2006.

Only twenty years left to save the planet, said the Pentagon ...

... back in 2004.

No, no, we only have five years left Greta Thunberg and friends told us...

...  six  years ago.

Sadly (happily), doomism isn't what it was.

Here's David Bowie.

[Hat tips to Alex Epstein, Tony Heller and DawnTJ90]

"We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement"

 

"The lead-up to the COP 28 climate conference ... had a consistent theme: previous COPs have done an okay job of restricting fossil fuels in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but this one needs to restrict fossil fuel use far faster so as to reach net-zero by 2050.
    "This is 180° wrong.
    "COP 28’s net-zero agenda—i.e., rapid elimination of fossil fuels—is unnecessary, and pursuing it faster would be catastrophic because ...
"1. Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate.

"One huge benefit we get from fossil fuels is the ability to master climate danger—e.g., fossil-fuelled cooling, heating, irrigation—which can potentially neutralise fossil fuels’ negative climate impacts. ...
    "Even though we obviously need to factor in both negative and positive impacts of rising CO2 with precision, most designated experts ignore big positives (e.g., global greening) while catastrophizing negatives (e.g., Gore portrays 20 feet sea level rise as imminent when extreme UN projections are 3 feet/100years)
    "Every report you hear about fossil fuels having made climate more dangerous commits at least one of 2 fallacies: ignoring the enormous climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels or wildly exaggerating negative climate side-effects of fossil fuels. ...
    "If we do factor in fossil fuels' enormous climate mastery benefits and carefully weigh their climate side-effects, we find that fossil fuels are a tremendous climate net-positive and will remain so in the future....

"2. Even barely implementing COP’s net-zero agenda has been disastrous. ...

"Net-zero policies have caused catastrophic energy shortages even with minuscule implementation. Just by slowing the growth of fossil fuel use, not even reducing it, they have caused global energy shortages advocates didn't warn us of....
    "The 'net-zero' movement, led by UN COPs, is the root cause of today's energy crisis because it has restricted
     1. fossil fuel investment
     2. fossil fuel production
     3. fossil fuel transport
    "This has artificially suppressed fossil fuel supply, leading to high prices and shortages. ... the “net-zero” movement has caused an energy crisis just by achieving a tiny fraction of its goals. While it has advocated rapidly reducing fossil fuel use, it has only succeeded globally at slowing the growth of fossil fuel use. And even that is catastrophic....

"Instead of focusing on rapidly eliminating fossil fuel use, we should focus on rapidly liberating energy production and use of all kinds of energy via energy freedom policies ... [that] protect the ability of producers to produce all forms of energy and consumers to use all forms of energy, so long as they don’t engage in reasonably preventable pollution or endangerment of others....
    "The obvious path forward for the world is energy freedom: the freedom to produce and use all cost-effective sources of energy—including, essentially, fossil fuels—which means rejecting all net-zero targets.
    "We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement."

~ Alex Epstein, from his post 'COP28 should be the last COP' [emphasis in the original]

 

"Last Week’s Climate Report 'landed … with a gentle plop'"

"[American climate activist Bill] McKibben believes the reason the IPCC’s increasingly frantic climate warnings are being ignored is people don’t believe they can make a difference.

'The brutal truth [he claims] is that last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report didn’t have the effect it should have had, or that its authors clearly intended.... [I]t landed in the world with a gentle plop, not the resounding thud that’s required.
    'In China, the world’s biggest emitter, official attention was focused instead on Moscow, where Xi Jinping was off to do a little male bonding with fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin, incidentally the world’s second largest producer of hydrocarbons. In America, the historical emissions champ, we were riveted by the possibility that would-be autocrat Donald Trump might be indicted. In the New York Times, our planet’s closest thing to a paper of record, the IPCC report was the fourth story on the website.
    'The reason, [he concludes] is a disconnection between the dire words of the report and the actions most people feel they can effectively take.

"The problem is not the 'disconnection between the words of the report and the actions people feel they can take'. The problem is the disconnection between the IPCC and their credibility.
    "For more than 30 years we’ve been listening to the United Nations and other tax money guzzling organisations try to scare us with imaginary climate hobgoblins, ozone holes, acid rain, it’s a long list of utter nonsense."

~ Eric Worrall, from his post 'McKibben: Last Week’s Climate Report “landed … with a gentle plop”'

Scientists deliver final ‘final warning’ on 'climate crisis'

"UN climate warnings are like the village communist predicting the imminent demise of capitalism every week – and about as likely to happen.... 

    "In 2021 it was a 'Code Red for Humanity'...
    "2020 it was Yale’s turn to issue the ... ‘final warning’ on climate: ‘It’s all on us, here, now,’ says reviewer....
    "You can find final warnings and last chances stretching all the way back to 1989 if you can find them using one of our woke search engines:

U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 30, 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000....

"Before anyone tries to claim the 1989 claim was not a real UN warning, even Snopes's fact checkers admit this was a real UN warning;...
    "My only concern in this ridiculous charade, is for the naive younger people who take these warnings seriously, and feel distressed that older people are not acting, are not showing any sense of urgency about preventing the imminent end of the world.
    "But for some people at least, that distress doesn’t last forever. As you get older, you get wiser, at least in terms of learning how to judge the credibility of others. How many times can a rational person watch the UN and other alleged authority figures get it dead wrong, and still give unquestioning acceptance to their latest wild predictions of imminent disaster."

~ Eric Worrall, from his post 'IPCC Issues their Annual Final Climate Warning'

"Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths"

"There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group.... But I think there’s more going on here ... there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups.
 

   ""[T]een mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue... [but we can't ignore that] 'progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophising is a good way to get what they want'.... on the other side of the political spectrum, there was 'the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.' The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men ... The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred ...
    "The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy..

 

   "... I think the messages young, liberal women are hearing (every day, around the clock) are doing them no good.
    "Seemingly learning to view every single interaction through an intersectionalist lens, while searching for the ways in which you're being victimised by everyone on the planet who disagrees with you, makes you depressed. Crazy.
    "The 4Chan backlash was always inevitable (and is equally self-pitying and responsibility-denying).
I really feel for kids today. Instinctively I know the answer is to retreat from it all and engage with the world in a more physical, productive way, but opportunities to do that are dwindling'....

    "Thinking of ourselves as oppressed or infirm may inadvertently cultivate what psychologists call an external locus of control. Locus of control is a psychological concept articulated in the 1950s by Julian Rotter. Those with an internal locus of control experience themselves as able to influence outcomes that affect them. Those with an external locus of control feel that most of what happens to them is beyond their ability to affect.

    "Though both external and internal loci of control confer advantages and disadvantages, research has shown that having an internal locus of control is associated with less stress and better health, whereas having an external locus of control is correlated with anxiety disorders. Importantly, an internal locus of control appears to be a decisive factor in determining whether one will be psychologically resilient. As a society, therefore, it is in our interest to cultivate an internal locus of control, and indeed, the popular notions of grit and mindset are undergirded by locus of control theory. However, some [online and educational] environments [have been] fostering its opposite.....

    "In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:
    "They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
    "They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
    "They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3)....

     "[And yet c]reating a society in which we are encouraged to confront anxiety and face difficult realities matters not just for the mental health of individuals, but also for our collective well-being. In the world that soon awaits us, humankind will desperately need those individuals willing to rise from their beds. The challenges that loom ahead will require us to set aside timidity, weakness, and victimhood and claim instead agency and boldness, no matter how grim the odds."

~ composite quote from Lisa Marchiano and her article 'Collision with Reality: What Depth Psychology Can Tell us About Victimhood Culture,' Jonathan Haidt, from his article 'Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest,' and comment by Ria Parkinson [hat tip Paul Litterick and Ria Parkinson]

"Just a few years left until catastrophe..." #Catastrophizing

 

"UN routinely warns us that we have just a few years left until catastrophe:
In 1989, a senior UN official warns Associated Press that we have to fix climate change by 1999 or climate change goes beyond human control."

~ Bjorn Lomborg [hat tip Homepaddock]

 

 [Tweets from Pierre Gosselin, Seamutt, Liam Dillon, Willis Eschenbach, Wittgenstein, Daryl Vogel, Alex Epstein from the #catastrophizing thread]