Climate change delusion
Posted by Richard on July 10, 2008
From Andrew Bolt at NEWS.com.au comes word of the first known hospitalization of a sufferer of "climate change delusion":
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".
"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."
(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)
…But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.
Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."
And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ."
Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?
Well, Barack Obama warned us a while back that "[w]e can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times …" Being forced to pay more for food and energy seems positively moderate compared to being forced to eat less and turn off the furnace. (Although, to be fair, I don't think Obama has claimed that failure to adopt his statist agenda would lead to mass deaths. Not yet, at least.)
But this is actually a very sad story, because this 17-year-old is merely exhibiting an extreme version of apocalyptic beliefs that are rampant among young people in Western nations, who have undergone years and years of enviro-whacko indoctrination at the hands of their teachers. I suspect there will be many more cases of acute climate change delusion.
I remember a segment from one of John Stossel's special reports (I think it was Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?) in which he talked with a bunch of kids, maybe 9 or 10 years old, about the environment. All these kids were convinced of impending environmental catastrophes, and more or less resigned to inheriting a poisoned, inhospitable planet, a grim future in which they were likely to die young. As they talked about it, their shoulders slumped, their eyes were filled with sadness, and it seemed that every ounce of the joy of childhood had been drained out of them. It was very disturbing.
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