In my life, in no real order

In the 60s and 70s there was going to be nuclear armageddon and we were all going to die. I was somewhat worried and went on marches, wore badges and even had huge Atomkraft Nein Danke stickers on my car doors. Then, suddenly, it all stopped being an issue even though there was still a man wandering around London with a sandwichboard carrying the message: ‘The end of the world is nigh’. I asked him. Turns out it was something to do with Jesus or god or somesuch, not all-out nuclear war. Brilliant.

But now, suddenly, there was a new existential threat: the world was cooling apparently and most scientists were in agreement that an ice age was going to come within a decade or so, they had data and graphs and all sorts of stuff to prove it, the upshot of which was, we were most probably going to die even without nuclear war. I was worried. Maybe the sandwichboard man was right after all.

Then pollution was going to cause global dimming which would exacerbate global cooling and lead to total system collapse within a decade or so and nitrogen was going to build up in the atmosphere (I can’t remember why) and also cause global dimming, 50% less sunlight, which would lead to catastrophic cooling and more or less wipe us all out. The threat was convincing and, apparently so real, a bunch of us got together spending months trying (and failing) to organise a functional self-sufficient off-grid survival community.

In 1977 when I was living in Germany, we were all going to freeze to death in the dark within just a few decades. I very nearly did freeze to death trying to hitchhike somewhere on route to Bad Hersfeld in a blizzard. Everything seemed very convincing. Everyone was worried, also because it was generally, bloody freezing absolutely indicative, so the ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’ quoted in the press told us, of imminent, chilly doom. I went on a march and a sit-in. Meantime, a regular consensus of Scientists was trying to convince me they had found intelligent life on mars, a highly intelligent civilization to boot. ‘Yipee!’ But, apparently, they had all died out. ‘Nooo!’ And then the sun came out and it got warmer and the press somehow forgot about our imminent demise and the whole consensus of scientists did a total 180; there was, they assured us, no life on Mars at all, certainly not intelligent life.

Then, at the end of the 70s start of the 80s, within a decade or so acid-rain was going to cause mass crop failure, destroy the world’s oxygen-producing forests, acidify lakes and rivers and seas and we were all going to die of asphyxiation or starvation… or both. Suffocating to death on an empty stomach was going to be a real bummer. I waved a banner or two if I remember and was rather concerned. But not for long because soon that narrative sort of fizzled out too.

Then they discovered the hole in the ozone and it was going to get bigger and bigger and we were all going to die of skin cancer but that threat was, for the moment, only Downunder so I was only slightly concerned but vowed to keep an eye on the predicted massive and catastrophic expansion, just in case. I couldn’t join any protests because there weren’t any but, for the cause, I stopped using spray-on deodorant which I was sure would put paid to my ever finding a girlfriend. Not that using deodorant to up my pulling power with girls was advisable though, because suddenly the aids epidemic was upon us, and after all the gays had died out, millions of straights were going to die too and nobody would be having sex anymore except those that already had aids. But actually, thinking about it, that was OK because we were all going to asphyxiate anyway because now the Amazon, the lungs of the earth, would in a few short years, totally disappear and who gives a fuck if you get aids if you’re soon going to suffocate to death a week later. But then, phew! the Amazon survived and god knows how, is still there 30-40 years on. The aids ‘epidemic’ just sort of fizzled out and rather depressingly, I found out via a Gallup poll that most girls had never much liked my deodorant anyway, which explained a lot of things. Scarred for life I’ve never used deodorant since. Life was looking good.

But, oh no, now we were going to reach peak oil in a few decades with consequent societal collapse which would force us to return to a more primitive lifestyle. I was actually quite happy about that though.

Then about the same time, if I remember correctly, we had apparently reached peak mineral and some ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’ were even claiming we had reached peak oil *and* peak mineral already. Technology was going to collapse possibly leading to societal retardation. I had no real views on that. Everyone seemed to be pretty fucking retarded to me anyway, especially the journalists and at this point the scientists and experts too. But the prospect of the promised vicious oil wars did pique my interest somewhat. I think I might have bought a book on the subject.

But then, even more gloom. We were soon not going to have anything to eat because the world’s production of food could not cope with the increase in population. Overpopulation was a massive threat, we were going to be invaded by hordes of starving and very annoyed diversely coloured people, and vicious food wars would kill us all if we didn’t die of starvation beforehand. But then all that sort of fizzled out… and... relax!

Then by way of a light intermission perhaps, where we could swig some Pepsi and chew on some GM popcorn, the whole technological pack of cards was going to collapse due to the Y2K Millenium bug. Planes were going to fall out of the sky, ships crash into harbours, massive fires would break out, banks would zero their accounts and we were all going to lose our money. Hospitals would have no life-support and people would die. But good news, this time, we weren’t *all* going to die. Just some of us. It seemed rather silly to be honest. Were humans that astonishingly stupid? But what did I know? Maybe it was going to be total chaos after all. But even us unbelievers checked our computers and bank accounts asap on new year’s day with some trepidation,

Anyway, intermission over, there was a landfill crisis and landfill space was going to run out very very soon and then there would be mountains of rubbish on the streets and rats and other vermin would increase to plague proportions, the run-off would pollute the water table and we were all going to die of horrendous pestilential diseases. Then Sars was going to kill us all, then the West Nile virus, then bird flu, swine fever, ebola, zika virus and it was all going to be very very bad. I considered accumulating a huge arsenal to keep the pestilential hordes from our door but somehow, maybe through the power of homoeopathy - products now available at all good chemists - we managed to survive them all. But then, ‘Oh my god!’ swarms of invasive killer bees were soon going to arrive. Lots of us were going to die. Would hospitals be able to cope? I wasn’t sure exactly what these bees were going to eat because, naturally, pollinators were already dying out because of pesticide use (nothing to do with competition from the massive overpopulation of domestic bees of course) and there wouldn’t be any flowering plants left very very soon and anyway, in the UK, we only had a few harvests left until total soil depletion so there were going to be sod-all plants left anyway. But then all this was pretty irrelevant as it turned out because the end of the Mayan calendar was nigh. Total apocalypse. Absolutely total, except for only one or two safe havens on the entire planet sheltering people rich enough and stupid enough to buy houses there. Was this going to be it? The end? But no it wasn’t – again - and finally we could confess that all in all, life was not actually that bad. Except that, apparently on May 1st the Christians were all going to be raptured, again, and the rest of us, after a huge fucking global party free of humourless god-botherers, were all going to die miserably and rot in hell for eternity. Fun fun.

But enough of this levity. Now, ‘groan!’, we had a new rather convincing problem and all scientists were in agreement - anthropogenic global warming - not global cooling anymore - would lead to catastrophic sea-level rise, societal collapse and within a few decades my future kids would wish they were dead never having seen snow or polar bears. I became a believer, an alarmist and was very worried and rather angry that they were fucking up my planet. No demonstrations of course, demos were old hat, nobody was doing them anymore, but I was very annoyed.

Then AGW sort of failed to happen. In fact it failed to happen over and over again and rather suspiciously, it morphed into climate change and then I discovered polar bears were actually exceedingly numerous and I began to have a niggling doubt that the ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’ might be lying through their tenured teeth. Then thanks to a worrying rhetorical concept called ‘scientific consensus’ and the ‘97%-of-all-scientists-agree’ bullshit and an argument with an idiot doomer called Guy McPherson, and a new round of absurdly stupid ‘climate alarmism’ I’d had enough and started checking their (formerly ‘our’) ‘facts’. I listened to, and as far as possible randomly checked, the opinions of the sceptics and with the advent of the new array of climate buzzwords pushed by the lying journalists - ‘climate catastrophe’ and ‘climate collapse’ and ‘climate chaos’ and ‘climate emergency’ and ‘global weirding’ , and then all that stuff about Climategate and Al Gore and bullshit climate data and repeated preposterous and failed predictions and temperature data modification and homogenization and ridiculously outrageous climate models and no catastrophic sea-level rise, and a marked decrease in hurricanes*, absurd claims of warming and ice-melt, almost mythical tipping points, and so many records being broken that, on checking the historical data, weren’t, and lots and lots of polar bears I got, and partly remain, furious at the absurd climate alarmism we are fed every single day of our bloody lives and the lunatic gullibility of scrotum-eyed morons gulping down and reposting blatantly obvious lies without first checking the facts or even trying to check the facts. And to top it all off we were probably to die of Brexit too.

But, now, the worry and suffering are nearly at an end. Now we have Extinction Rebellion who will save us by, I don’t know, blocking traffic or with superglue or something. God knows, but they have it figured anyway and besides, we have Saint Greta to save us although only ‘30 years’, ‘25 years’, ‘12 years’, ‘11 years’, ‘10 years’, ‘18 months’ and ‘it’s too late already’ to do it in before… before, erm, the end of the world, or we’re all going to die or some such other similar bullshit. But now, finally, I smile and sometimes giggle because, despite the posturing and posing and virtue-signalling and all the vain recycling and use of horrible, white energy-saving light bulbs In furiously increasing numbers of redundant streetlights, it becomes glaringly apparent that nobody seriously has ever believed this shit. At least never enough to actually do anything about anything, it’s always been just more run-of-the-mill scare-mongering from the shit-head journalists and lying-arse shitweasel agenda-driven scientists and politicians and the love people have for drama that feeds them. And gradually you see the world for what it it, full of dangerously ignorant, idiotic morons lying to each other and lying to themselves in a perpetual cycle of comfortable contrived fear that will just keep perpetuating itself and there’s nothing we can do about them. And suddenly the world really does start to look rather nice, in fact a hell of a lot better than it has done for most of my miserable, cowering, timorous existence.

* hurricanes were going to become more frequent and when that didn’t happen suddenly the experts had known that all along and it was that hurricanes were going to become more intense, not frequent which didn’t happen either, 25 years since the last Cat.5