The End of the World and Other Non-Disasters

We have recently been treated to a media circus surrounding the doomsday predictions of an 89-year-old wacko preacher, Harold Camping.  Camping predicted that the world would end on May 21, 2011 at 6:00 PM...That's six o'clock in what ever time zone you happen to live...you see it was going to start in Fiji and work its way around the globe hour by hour.  The fact that he was wrong when he predicted the end of the world in 1994, or was wrong this time, doesn't seem to deter him from claiming that his math was just a little off.  The new doomsday is now set for October..mark your calendars.

All but a few of his faithful followers knew Camping was a crackpot.  I mean, come on...everyone knows the world is not going to explode until the end of 2012.  The Mayans told us that...geez.  But while we have all had fun at the expense of  the poor, deluded old preacher Camping...well, maybe not so poor since millions of dollars in donations poured in...we continue to give credence to other doomsday crackpots.  Take for example the horrible predictions surrounding last years Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Why this was to be the mother of all disasters.  Life as we know it in the whole Gulf region would be gravely changed for decades, and decades.  This was just the proof the environmentalists needed to show once-and-for-all that big oil meant big trouble for planet earth.  Why we may never recover from the tens-of-millions of barrels of crude oil spilled into the waters of the Gulf...we will be lucky if the whole ocean doesn't die from this.

Well, just as with crazy ol' Camping, these prophets of disaster were wrong...spectacularly wrong.  As Humberto Fontova reports in the Washington Times, the would-be devastation...never was.  Just a short three months after the spill, marine scientist Ivor van Heerden said, "There’s just no data to suggest this is an environmental disaster...we’re not seeing catastrophic impacts. There’s a lot of hype, but no evidence to justify it.”  Take the time to read the article, its worth it.

At the beginning of the spill, I tried to tell my Facebook friends that, while this was not a good thing, the earth has a tremendous ability to "heal itself" of these sorts of impacts.  The vastness of the oceans, I said, would disperse the oil.  I pointed out that oil is a natural product of the earth's processes and that it seeps out, unaided by man, all the time.  I reminded them of similar predictions in the past and how wrong they had been: 

• The Exxon Valdez site was almost as if nothing ever happened in a year or two.
• The Alaska pipeline not only didn't kill off the wildlife, but actually helped increase the caribou population.
• The late Carl Sagan's predictions in 1990 that if Saddam Hussein set the oil wells on fire we could see a miniature nuclear winter.  The oil wells burned and...well...Sagan was wrong.
• In the early 1970s the environmentalists were predicting a coming ice age...now "the planet has a fever."

And on, and on , and on.  I predicted that within a year, we wouldn't hardly be able to see the impact.  I was wrong...it was much quicker than that.

These prognosticators of peril never seem to be correct...and yet, we continue to listen to them.  We laugh at the followers of preacher Camping and castigate them as a bunch of rubes...but we allow the enviro-vangelists to set our national energy policies and determine allowable uses of our land.  Both Camping and the enviro-wackos have long track records of being wrong, which begs the question, who are the real rubes?

When will we see these charlatans for what they are?  When will we treat them with the same humorous disdain that we reserve for the likes of Camping?  Wrong is wrong.  At least Camping only had limited ability to bilk people of their money.  The environmental lobby has almost unlimited power through their hold on government.