Kerby Anderson

Earlier this month, Jonah Goldberg wrote a column and other writers are still quoting one of his lines. He said: “The more you sound like some cowbell-wielding street preacher wearing a sandwich board that says, ‘The End is Nigh!’ the more likely people will ignore you.”

It’s a vivid image of a street preacher but he uses it to criticize the hysterical rhetoric being used by environmentalists these days. He says that one of the hallmarks of the “Ugly American” is a habit of thinking foreigners will understand what you’re saying if you just shout it louder and louder. The Ugly Environmentalist, he says, is doing the same thing by grossly exaggerating doomsday predictions with more and more hysterical rhetoric.

Here is just one example of this rhetoric. Astrophysicist Stephen Hawking predicted the consequences of Donald Trump withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. He warned that, “Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 240 degrees and raining sulfuric acid.” He may be a brilliant scientist, but this is certainly crazy talk.

This hysterical rhetoric creates two significant problems. First, people who hear it constantly begin to close their ears and minds to it. When we were children, we heard the story of the boy who cried wolf one too many times.

Second, there are the people who do believe it and are absolutely convinced that climate change will hasten the end of civilization and the end of life on this earth. In order to prevent this dystopia they are willing to endorse any policy and punish anyone who appears to be standing in the way of saving the planet. That is why you sometimes hear environmentalists say that climate change deniers should be put in jail. A few have even suggested the climate skeptics should be prosecuted as war criminals.

That is why all of this hysterical rhetoric is really very dangerous.