{"id":16534,"date":"2012-08-19T00:07:24","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T05:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16534"},"modified":"2013-09-25T09:39:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T14:39:42","slug":"the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/19\/the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh\/","title":{"rendered":"The end of the world is nigh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sell all your posessions! Live for the now! Repent your sins! Or, as Matt Ridley<\/a> suggests, keep calm and carry on:<\/p>\n

This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. \u201csuper volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?\u201d the site\u2019s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on December 21 this year. but they have no doubt it will happen. after all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but \u201cthe sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following \u2014 from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.<\/p>\n

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: \u201cThe outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.\u201d Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: \u201cThe battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s [“and 1980s” was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines \u2014 hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now \u2026 nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.\u201d Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: \u201cWe could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.\u201d<\/p>\n

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists<\/em> moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: \u201cThe global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth\u2019s atmosphere.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sell all your posessions! Live for the now! Repent your sins! Or, as Matt Ridley suggests, keep calm and carry on: This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. \u201csuper volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?\u201d the site\u2019s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,65,28,73],"tags":[347,302,932,101],"class_list":["post-16534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-environment","category-media","category-randomness","tag-debunking","tag-jimmycarter","tag-thecrazyyears","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4iG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16534"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22270,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16534\/revisions\/22270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}