Let the Mockery Begin

It is easy to mock people who gather naked at a mountain waiting for aliens to save them from the end of the world, or people who think the end of the calendar signified doom, or that some hidden planet on the other side of the Sun is going to destroy Earth. Why don't we mock the people who use the color of science to predict doom? Why do we forget the last projection of doom when the new one comes out?

Seriously, people, the world is reasonably fine:

2012 has been a spectacular year in terms of net global prosperity, accompanied by less hunger, less disease, and less war than ever before. All of the gloom-and-doomers fears of “peak oil” and overpopulation and widespread famine and the like have all miraculously failed to materialize, and standards of living around the world continue to improve.

Limits of growth? Not so much. The population bomb? Fizzled. Starvation? Only when used as a weapon or from government incompetence or malice. AIDS? Individual tragedies and not a planet-emptying plague. Peak oil? Seriously? The exhaustion of any critical resource? Remember copper scares? Now it is helium. How long before someone suggest the death penalty for those like me who have a canister at home for my child's balloon toy? Yet we seem to do fine every time some resource is running out. A new ice age? That was so 1970s.

Global warming? Not so much and maybe good in small amounts.

Or at the local level we have periodic alarms about running out of landfill space in X number of years. Somehow we keep finding space to open new landfills. Huh. It's almost like nobody wants to open new landfills while we have many years of space left because it would be stupid to just let that new landfill sit there waiting for demand for years to come just to have 2X number of years left of landfill space to keep the panic mongers quiet.

It's always something that will end the world as we know it. And the solution is to trust in God, aliens, or the all-powerful federal (or UN) government to control our lives for our own good.

And damn us to Hell or just kill us if we stand in their way of "saving" us. It's always the pathetic Austrian promising to kill undesirables, isn't it?

I'm not saying ignore problems. Problems we'll always have. But the record suggest they are solvable. Work the problems, people. And mock the world-will-end crowds who keep gathering to tell us how to live our lives.

Get your own lives, nutballs. And leave the rest of us alone.

Tip to Instapundit for both articles.