Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
What do Harold Camping and Paul Ehrlich have in common?
The two men are worlds apart; one a devout Christian, the other a secular biologist. Despite their divergent worldviews, both were prophets of doom with perfect records of always being wrong.
A civil engineer by trade, Camping predicted Judgement Day would be September 6, 1994. That didn’t happen so he changed it to September 29, then to October 2. Some years later, he predicted the second coming of Christ would occur on May 21, 2011, followed by the destruction of the planet by October 21.
Ehrlich’s skill at failing rivals that of Camping. In 1970, he predicted hundreds of millions of people would starve to death over the following decade. Shortly thereafter, he upped the ante by predicting four billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in “The Great Die-Off” in the 1980s. In 1975, Ehrlich predicted that 90% of Earth’s rainforests would disappear within 30 years.
Camping’s predictions ended with his death in 2013 but Ehrlich and a very large clown car of climate deists are continuing their dire predictions of global catastrophe. Ever since I was a kid reading about how global cooling would destroy Earth, those who worship at the altar of weather apocalypse have never been right.
Camping, Ehrlich, and others have consistently failed in their predictions for a multitude of reasons. But the simplest, most straightforward reason is found in Scripture.
The Gospels of Matthew and Mark point out, with nearly identical language, that “No one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father,” when the world will end.
Without speculating on the motives of Camping and Ehrlich, it’s clear that both men supposed they knew more about the end of the world than Jesus Christ himself. It’s hard to imagine a greater conceit than that of ordinary men who claim to be wiser than the Son of God. Yet it happens all the time.
The ideology of global cooling or global warming or, when all else fails, climate change, has long been more of a religion than a theory. Its followers are convicted and believe what they cannot see, apostates are excommunicated, its disciples are evangelical and non-believers are deniers.
I don’t know anybody stupid enough to deny climate change. Climate always changes. It is in a continual state of flux. It has never not been changing. But the issue becomes contentious when trying to ascertain why the climate changes.
It’s not as if the climate didn’t change before the 21st century or the industrial revolution. It’s been changing long before recorded history. But today, climate deists demand we believe that climate changes because of man. Forget the adage that ‘correlation does not equal causation,’ there isn’t even a correlation between climate change and the presence of humans. I await the publication of a scientific White Paper claiming mastodon flatulence caused the Ice Age.
Undaunted by logic, reason, or history, climate deists yell at us as they issue their latest prophecies of doom. They do this in the most heartless of ways knowing they are inciting fear and anxiety among kids naive enough to believe them. It takes a special kind of evil to do so much harm to children. It’s like some creepy guy driving a windowless van through your neighborhood with the word ‘CLIMATE’ written on the side with duct tape.
The religion of climate is not predicated on truth. Its worldview is centered on the individual, founded on fake science, with a vision as tiny as a single planet in a vast universe.
Biblical Christianity is different. It is centered on the Creator and Savior, based on the truth of Scripture, and is as expansive as the cosmos. Detractors claim biblical Christianity is mythology, and I am happy to remind them that not everything in the Bible has been empirically proved, but none of it has been disproved.
Climate deists, on the other hand, have been disproved at every turn. How anyone can believe an ideology with a win/loss record of 0 – All The Numbers escapes me. The best theory I can postulate is that these frauds spend less time studying science than the works of P.T. Barnum (or one of his competitors) who observed, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Ehrlich, Camping, and others are not new; they were warned of millennia ago. John’s First Epistle gave Christians a simple and enduring piece of advice: “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world.”
No kidding. But the false prophets of the second coming are pikers compared to climate deists whose cataclysmic divinations are uniformly garbage designed to subjugate people through the terror of impending doom. It’s a false religion and merits only our derision.
