The same magazine that warned last year the “Uninhabitable Earth” was coming due to global warming, is now making even more over-the-top claims about that threat.
New York Magazine climate columnist David Wallace-Wells not only interpreted the latest U.N. climate warnings as “permission to freak out,” he made plenty of predictions that could urge others to panic, too.
After quoting Grist’s Eric Holthaus who said “civilization is at stake” and other media, Wallace-Wells took it up a notch: “If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is actually, worse than that — considerably worse. That is because the new report’s worst-case scenario, is, actually, a best case.”
“In fact, it is a beyond-best-case scenario. What has been called a genocidal level of warming is already our inevitable future,” he continued. “The question is how much worse than that it will get.”
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Why? Wallace-Wells wrote that it is technologically impossible to keep warming below two degrees warmer — and “we are headed” towards four degrees.
He described that as “a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs.”
In his scenario Latin America would suffer “eight million cases of dengue fever each year,” there would be dramatically less global grain production, a 30-percent smaller economy and “at least half again as much conflict and warfare” as now.
Wallace-Wells argued that even a $5,000 per ton carbon tax that grows to $27,000 per ton is “only a spark to action, not action itself.” The Daily Caller reported that it would mean a $49 per gallon gasoline tax that skyrockets to $240 per gallon by 2100.
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Action would look like “a complete rebuilding of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, a thorough reworking of agricultural practices and diet to entirely eliminate carbon emissions from farming, and a battery of cultural changes to the way those of us in the wealthy West, as least, conduct our lives” — all in “two, or possibly three, decades.”
Clearly, it wasn’t just the IPCC that “hit the panic button.”
The network also latched on to the latest IPCC report. The night of Oct. 8, all three evening news programs issued warnings that “time is running out” and there could be only 10-12 years to stop climate change. That was more than 10 years after the UN, Al Gore and others made similar claims about there only being ten years left to prevent a climate catastrophe.
