Australia’s Largest Christian News Site

I was shocked!

I had revisited some forgotten notes, and rediscovered that according to Business Insider, chocolate could be gone by 2057!

Yes, climate change will complete its strangulation of the chocolate industry by 2057. Such incredible scientific accuracy! (To be fair, they haven’t told us what day of what month, but it might be wise to stock up on chocolate in late 2056. Make a note.)

This prediction is all part of the climate mania that is the grand theme of today’s social anxiety.

Children are being terrified into thinking that the world is going to end. We hear them say, “We are all going to die” and “civilisation will end.” They are shown such things as the now iconic photo of a polar bear on a small piece of ice as evidence that climate death is stalking relentlessly. What they are not told is that polar bears have been tracked swimming 700 kilometres and more across the open ocean without touching land. No polar bear has ever been trapped on a tiny piece of ice!

Extinction Rebellion has told us that “Billions will die.” What will they die of? No one quite seems to know. Estimates indicate that all the famines, natural and man-made, during the twentieth century, brought death to around 70 million people died (an horrific figure!) So, what will happen to make several billions die, or as some children have been terrified into believing, the entire human race?

The madness of the crowds

It was the Scottish poet and writer Charles Mackay who coined the term “the madness of the crowds.”¹ It’s a phrase (and book) that begs a question: how does a whole community become terror-struck and irrational in their responses to certain issues? Climate change being the most glaring example of recent decades.

A story

As I try to understand the ‘why’ of human reactions, my mind is drawn to Hannah Kent’s masterful book, The Good People.² Based on a true incident, it’s a brutal window into the macabre world of early 19th-century Irish superstition.

The list of those early Irish superstitions is far too long to enumerate and utterly alien to us. But there is an underlying core belief from which theirs, and all superstitions, stem: there are unseen and uncontrollable powers at work in the world, powers from which people must protect themselves and their loved ones.

In Ireland’s case, the unseen powers were the Fairies. Sometimes called the Good People. These Fairies intersected with life at every conceivable level. They could prevent cows from giving milk and chickens laying eggs. They could bring disease, cause miscarriages, birth defects, disabilities, and early death. There is nothing in life that the Fairies’ malevolence could not touch and for which they were not responsible.

The narrative of Hannah Kent’s book is based around the arrival in the village of a small, mentally and physically disabled child. He cannot speak or walk; his limbs progressively atrophy. The people believe that the real child has been swept, that is, taken away to live with the Fairies and that these malevolent creatures have left a decrepit, “cretinous” child in his place. A changeling.

Because the people know the Fairies are at work, everything in village life is now seen through that lens. A sudden death, a cow that stops giving milk, chickens with heads ripped off by a fox, a stillbirth… everything is the work of the Fairies, the Fairies, the Fairies.

‘The madness of the crowds’

To our way of thinking, the actions and reactions of the village people are bereft of rationality. Their lives become an endless and fearful quest to see connections between events. Every connection they see proves that the Fairies are active, and the child is cursed. Every connection they see strengthens the walls of the prison of fear in which they live.

The plot is more intricate than what I have described, but my focus is (as is Kent’s) on the merciless reign of superstition. Once it takes hold, fear controls every life. No one is free from seeing any and every event, not in its own right, but as a consequence.

If this were just a work of fiction, you would think the author’s plotting had strayed into the ridiculous. But when you realise that the narrative is woven around the genuine worldview of those remote, 19^th century village people and a real historical event, it becomes disturbing.

A troublesome little figure

And it’s not all that far from home! There is a small figure creating superstition in Australia today. Not the figure of a child, as in Kent’s book, but a number. It is the number 0.0003 or 3/10,000s. It’s a number so small it’s hard to imagine. But that is the contribution Australia makes to the dark and terrifying forces of climate change, our proportion of total global emissions.

Global human carbon emissions are said to be three per cent of total carbon emissions. Our Australian emissions are one per cent of that. And one per cent of the three per cent is .0003.

And the Fairies set to work. If there is a drought, it is climate change. If there is too much rain, it is climate change. If there are bushfires, it is climate change. If there are no fires because it’s a wet summer, it is climate change. If there is too much snow, it is climate change. If the snow is late, or early, or thicker or thinner, it is climate change.

Superstition transforms the unknown into tangible fears, after which it creates cause-and-effect connections everywhere. Each connection is a harbinger of worse to come. It seems to me that’s what has been created.

In 2017, there were nine more shark attacks worldwide than in 2010 — that was climate change. When there were riots between teenage gangs in the western suburbs of Sydney a few decades back, it was climate change. Domestic violence, tribal wars, obesity in children, even a delayed train³… it is all climate change.

It’s the Fairies, those unseen powers that we must appease or die.

The ideal temperature?

I am not writing as a scientist. (I spend most of my days outside the science class in high school!) I am interested in human responses. The seat of communal fears.

What is the ideal temperature of the planet? At what temperature can we rest comfortably in our beds, knowing that all is well? In Roman times, it was a little warmer than today, probably between one and two degrees. Far from billions of people dying tortuous deaths, there were vineyards across England. As many as forty-six British vineyards were recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086. Was that the ideal climate? When there were conifers and yew trees in Greenland, was that the ideal climate?

Then the Little Ice Age that gripped Europe between 1300 and 1850 — was that the ideal temperature?

During the warming that has occurred since the Little Ice Age, at what point did we pass through the ideal temperature to reach the entrenched expectation of the end of civilisation and the extinction of humanity within, say, 5 to 20 years? Will this certain apocalypse occur before or after we get back to the temperatures of Roman times?

There’s an episode in Hannah Kent’s book in which a woman is held agonisingly over a fire in order to banish the Fairy from her. The medical profession in Australia has suggested that nitrous oxide (laughing gas) should no longer be given to women in labour because of the gas’s impact on climate change. Apparently, it is still preferable that women suffer than the Fairies be angered. Better one suffers than we all die!

Like me, you may have probably lived through the 70’s fear of a coming ice age, and later, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, and mercury in the oceans, each of which was the issue that would bring an end to us.

Now, the Extinction Rebellion co-founder tells us, “A genocide like the Holocaust is happening again on a far greater scale, and in plain sight.” (Emphasis mine) As you look around, can you see it? “Plain sight”… hmm.

So, how should we think?

Let the debate continue. In the meantime, let’s convey to the fearful and especially to young people near and dear to us, the foundation of our quietness and confidence,

God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore, we will not fear, though the earth gives way
and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea,
though its waters roar and foam,
and the mountains quake with their surging…

The Lord Almighty is with us;
the God of Jacob is our fortress.

~ Psalm 46

___

[1] Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of the Crowds, Martino Fine Books Edition, 2017. His intention was to show the way in which delusions become reality and infect major portions of society. Tulip mania, the South Sea bubble, and on and on.

[2] The Good People, Hannah Kent, 2016 Pan Macmillan. Well worth reading.

[3] Jon Snow of the UK’s Channel 4 blamed climate change for his train to COP26 being delayed. A tree had fallen across the line. Definitely climate change. It seems that in the history of railways, no tree has ever fallen across a line delaying a train — until now.

___

Image courtesy of Adobe.