Brendan O’Neill wonders why we are all happy to pour scorn on Christian predictions of the end of the world, yet treat similarly apocalyptic Green claims seriously:
The eccentric Californian preacher Harold Camping, who claims that Jesus will return this Saturday and bring the world as we know it to an end, has been the subject of much Twitter-teasing and ridicule. “The Rapture? If it comes near me this Saturday I’ll kick its arse through its neck”, says Charlie Brooker. “I expect everyone who thinks so-called Judgement Day is on May 21st to support science and reason from the 22nd onwards”, says Professor Brian Cox. Brave stuff indeed, mocking a man of God who is clearly a few clowns short of a circus. But what I want to know is this: why don’t these Camping critics, these alleged challengers of bunkum and defenders of reason, also stand up to the far more mainstream yet equally batty predictions of End Times emanating from the environmentalist lobby?
Perhaps Camping’s real crime is that he has got the date of the Rapture wrong. After all, according to the green writer Andrew Simms’ countdown to doom, which is published monthly in Brooker’s own newspaper the Guardian, we have 67 months left to save the world. Camping you idiot! The world’s not going to end this Saturday – it’s going to end in December 2016!
Of course Simms, who runs the ominous One Hundred Months project, is not so crude as to talk about Apocalypse or Judgement Day or Rapture. No, he simply says: “We have 70 months to save our climate. When the clock stops ticking, we could be beyond our climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.” Which of course is just a more PC, more sciencey, less instantly insane-sounding way of saying exactly what Camping has said: that there is an endpoint to the world, it is arriving soon, and it will involve some judgement of mankind for his sins against God/overuse of carbon. Where Camping says our sinful behaviour has precipitated Saturday’s rapturous showdown, Simms says it is the “global suicide pact” of human greed and nature-wrecking that gives us only another 70 months. Both of them sound mental.
