At the end of January, in its annual assessment the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists set its doomsday clock at two minutes to midnight.
The clock was established in 1947 as a symbolic measure of the likelihood of a human-made catastrophe from unchecked scientific and technical advances. Started by the threat of nuclear war, the assessment was broadened to include other spectres.
The bulletin said this year, “humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention.
“These major threats -- nuclear weapons and climate change -- were exacerbated this past year …putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger.”
The assessment by the bulletin puts the lie to the oilsands critics who have been preaching that it is Fort McMurray that will destroy the earth. Even though the bulletin includes climate change as the major threat, the oilsands – which contributes less that one per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – is a negligible factor in climate change.
There is a new fundamentalism in 21st century Canadian culture – environmentalism.
It has rituals – protest parades and roadblocks – emotions like hatred of climate change deniers, and end times beliefs and rationalizations.
It is apocalyptic, teaching about the “end times” such as the moment when oilsands will destroy the earth.
This new religion is most like the American hard shell Baptists who have a Calvinist belief that only the true believers, the elect, can be saved.
They say that people who build pipelines and produce bitumen from oilsands are, in Shakespeare’s words, on “the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire.”
Sweden is meeting internationally-set targets for emissions reduction on the way to be carbon neutral by 2045. But, 14-year-old Greta Thunberg organized a school strike and set up a picket of climate protesters in front of the Swedish parliament. The objection was to get Sweden to do more to push back climate changing emissions.
In December Thunberg told the COP24 (United Nations Climate Change Conference) in Poland that, “we need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity.
“And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, maybe we should change the system itself.
“We have run out of excuses and we are running out of time.”
“I am panicking,” she told the annual Economic Forum in Davis last month.
Thunberg says there is no point in going back to school because her teachers give her hopeful cant about climate change, then “fly to New York for vacation.”
Do the impacts of climate change threaten the mass extinction of human life?
Thunberg says yes.
Is there any good news? Will the human race adapt?
Thunberg says not likely.
Is it too late to repent and mend our ways?
Thunberg says there is 12 more years before global warning reaches the point of no return.
Is Thunberg the new Jeanne d’Arc, the 15th century teenage French warrior in the Hundred Years War, burned at the stake by the English who were enraged by her popular appeal.
Thunberg is a mystic, not a scientist.
She is a member of the fundamentalist wing of the climate debate.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist and author.
