The Concept of the Political in Brief

Carl Schmitt is notorious as a prominent Nazi. But he wrote the 63 page The Concept of the Political, first published in 1932. 

Schmitt starts by noticing that nobody has ever defined the political. And when they do, they tend to skate around, equating “political” is in some way with “state”

So what is the political? Schmitt sets forth the following definition.

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

It is easy to compare the friend-enemy distinction to others, such as “good and evil in the moral; beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic”. But the political is different, because only in politics does disagreement lead to conflict.

[The enemy] is just the other, the stranger… so that in extreme cases conflicts with him are possible.

Of course, the enemy is easily thought of as "evil." But the "evil" need not be the enemy. The political, and its "friend-enemy" distinction, is independent of other distinctions.

Although the political is independent of other distinctions, people have tried to soften the friend-enemy distinction: in business, liberalism has softened the enemy into competitor. In a moral world there are hopefully only debate opponents. But, aside from hopes and aspirations, the friend-enemy distinction is something apart.

The political is the most extreme kind of human antagonism, and any antagonism "becomes more political the more it gets to the extreme point." And, of course, the more extreme that political antagonisms get within a state, the closer they get to civil war.

The word “conflict,” he writes, “does not mean competition” or “debate” or the routine “struggle” of life. It means killing.

The terms friend, enemy, and conflict… refer specifically to the real possibility of physical killing.

What about “religious war?” For Schmitt, the war is political, because the opposing religions experience each other as enemies. Same with the Marxist “class struggle.” 

The state -- as political entity -- contains enormous power, waging war with human lives at its disposal to send out and kill other people. Thus, it tends to identify "internal enemies" as genuine threats that can escalate to actual civil war.

Combining the political with the moral is deceiving. The idea of a just war is nonsense, or political propaganda. So is the idea of "outlawing" war. If a people is determined to maintain its existential existence, then it must be prepared to decide for itself who is a friend and who is an enemy, and act upon this decision. But a people that has subcontracted its protection to another is not long for this world for "a weak people disappears" as a political entity.

The idea of a world state is nonsense. It would require a world in which nobody feared an enemy. And a world without enemies would be a world without politics. Thus the idea of the League of Nations (or the United Nations) as an association of humanity is nonsense. 

There is an ongoing question of whether man is good or evil, but Schmitt asserts that political theories are clear on this

[T]he strange... observation remains that all genuine political theories presuppose man as evil... as a dangerous and dynamic being.

Indeed, it is by recognition of this that a thinker reveals himself as a political thinker. 

Political thought and political instinct thus prove their worth theoretically and practically in their ability to distinguish friend from enemy.

The inability to determine the enemy is fatal, as inthe Russian nobility before the revolution, the "relativist bourgeoisie" and the ancien régime aristocrats of France as people that did not see who the enemy was.

Although "liberal thought" pretends to ignore the state and politics, in its actions liberalism smuggles power and politics in the back door. "The enemy is no longer called the enemy but in return he is set up as a threat to peace[.]"

How Do You Spell FBI? Exactly: KGB

This morning I sent a contribution to the Gen. Flynn Defense Fund. I shoulda done it months ago.

But anyway, what with the "bombshells" and the "walls closing in" of the last few days we have a pretty good idea about what happened to Gen. Flynn in 2016 and thereafter.

Someone in the Obama administration -- and it doesn't really matter who -- said, in the time-honored phrase, "who will rid me of this troublesome priestgeneral." And the loyal underlings, Barnacles and Stiltstockings all, went to work to rig up a case against Flynn, on the time-honored principle beloved of crooked cities like Chicago, that "you'll never work in this town again." Or is it: "we were just measuring you for a pair of concrete boots."

As St. Augustine wrote, 1,600 years ago, the only difference between a criminal gang and a government is the "addition of impunity." For the government. That, I tend to think, is why big city machines seem to be rather relaxed about the ethnic criminal gangs that abound there. They understand that they and the criminals are in the same business: the protection racket.

See, Gen. Flynn was a problem for the Obama administration, because he insisted on criticizing the administration's Middle East policy while in the administration. That is why he got fired as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014.

But he didn't go quietly. In 2016 he became a vocal supporter of Donald Trump. And that, I presume, was the last straw. Good Lord, who does this guy think he is? Someone needs to teach him a lesson.

But there is no wind that blows nobody any good. For years, decades, we have been told to believe that it was the Nixons and Reagans and Bushes that used the police powers of the government on their enemies. And then there was J. Edgar Hoover, a one man blackmail machine.

But really there is nothing in my lifetime that seems to compare with the readiness of the Deep State bureaucrats to use the government's police powers to persecute Trump and his minions. I don't think it represents any particular corruption on their part. They are just doing what "everybody does" and usually gets away with. Because "we are the good guys," and all that.

Hey, remember the bad old days of the Nixon administration? Remember Archibald Cox, liberal hero, who was fired by President Nixon in the Saturday Night Massacre? Then as now, the Deep State was united against a Republican president. In those days there was cooperation between the federal courts, Judge Sirica presiding, and the forces trying to get Nixon out. How special!

But this time, it may very well be that Judge Sullivan may betray his Deep State pals and let Flynn off the hook.

In the Nixon era the Deep State Narrative won, partly because Nixon did do illegal stuff. Ever since, I suspect, Republicans understand that they can never, ever, cut corners. Not on anything.

But Democrats assume that they can always finesse the rules. Because their pals in the Deep State will do the necessary and what we now call the Resistance media will forward the appropriate leaks and set up a drumbeat about "bombshells" and "walls closing in" that will persuade the suburban moms.

I say this is a bad thing, for Democrats. You see this in the whole Trump Russia Collusion and the Pelosi Impeachment. Democrats just assume that, whatever they do, they can manage public opinion and master the Republicans in the public square.

So nobody in the upper reaches of the FBI seems to have thought: Wow, even if Gen. Flynn is a traitor to the Cause and a rat fink and a threat to All Good Things, I sure wouldn't want to be using the FBI as though it were a US version of the KGB. This is America, and we don't use the police powers to hunt down opponents of the regime. No, sirree!

And apart from the ethics of the case, suppose they came after Me, loyal appointee and/or civil servant? Whatabout my pension? Whatabout being pursued by prosecutors for years and getting financially ruined? Would I be able to make it back on a book deal? Whatabout my kid getting into Harvard?

And another thing. The big problem with the Obama administration is that anyone that criticized the Obama administration was automatically attacked as a racist.

Hey, lefty friends! Do you see why that might be a problem? That it might encourage the Obamis and their deep-state pals to cut a few corners? Because we can always threaten our critics with a charge of racism? Do you see that it might in the end rebound on Democrats? Because some day, way into the future, the sons of the sons of Democrats might not be as sharp as their ancestors? Do you see that it might encourage racist-sexist-homophobe voters like me to never, ever vote for anyone except a white male who doesn't get any diversity Pokemon points?

You don't see it? Well, maybe you are going to learn this summer about it, good and hard. Because I think that the Trump War Room has been planning for months how and when to make all the illegalities of the anti-Trump resistance come to a head just in time for the election. Complete with perp walks, indictments, and Trump releasing appropriate videos with the statements of his opponents that are completely blown up by the clear and obvious attempt to screw him and his people over.

See one of the facts of Politics 101 is that, while Republicans don't get their message out most of the time, because Resistance media, when it comes to an election Republicans can get their message out, because paid media. And that tends to move the polls, as people actually get to hear the other side. Just sayin'.

And it may be that in the year of the Wu Flu, the educated Gentry mostly has desk jobs that can be done at home and ordinary Commoners have outside jobs that can't be done on the computer. So, the Democratic Gentry voters feel OK and take their dogs and kids for a walk in the neighborhood and the Republican Commoner voters are beside themselves and rioting in the streets or in the Michigan State Capitol (How about those G-U-N-S!). Hey libs! Peaceful protesters: nothing to see here!

But really, dear liberal friends. We really have to do something about the FBI and the use of the state for pursuing the political opponents of the Gentry. Not because it's wrong, but because one day, and it may be right now, the eevil racist sexist homophobes are going to decide that the system is stacked against them. And that normal politics doesn't work for them.

I just don't think you'd want that.

Downstream-ism in Brief

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture."

John C. Wright extended the idea in "Last Crusade: Fighting the Wrong Battle," He said that:

In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion.

But I think that is not far enough. I say that:

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religions is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Now, what the meaning of life is downstream from I have yet to determine. But here is a clue from Carl Jung:

It is only the things we don't understand that have any meaning.

What does that mean?

Politics is about who is the enemy.

Culture is about who are we.

Religion is about who is God.

The meaning of life, the universe, and everything is about everything else.

Downstream-ism Table of Contents

Dutch Finance in Brief

Today we take it for granted that government and finance are joined at the hip. But it was not always so. Back in the feudal era the monarchs funded themselves from their royal estates and they fought wars with the feudal hosts of their top vassals, their noble tenants-in-chief.

Commerce and trading run on credit. Merchants typically borrow to anticipate the sale of their merchandise; it just makes sense. But merchants also need protection, for their valuable cargoes are an eternal temptation to Vikings and pirates upon the high seas. Thus the need for navies. It just makes sense for merchants to finance the local political Big Man in return for protection from pirates.

And it makes sense for the local political Big Man to cultivate the local merchants and borrow from them.

Of course, it can all go wrong, and Britain's King Edward III ruined a few Italian bankers with his Hundred Years War in France.

But when Henry VIII of the six wives decided to nationalize the English armed forces and disarm the nobles, things got more serious, and Henry's wars resulted in multiple financial crises and debasings of the currency.

It was the Dutch that solved the problem with the invention of central banking in their war of liberation against Spain from 1566-1608. The Exchange Bank of Amsterdam provided a market in government debt that, you might say, joined government and commerce into a joint enterprise.

The Dutch brought their finance to England when they invaded in 1688 and set up the Bank of England in 1692. The Brits promptly started a Second Hundred Years War against France, and ran their national debt up to 250 percent of GDP before teaching the French a lesson near the village of Waterloo in 1815.

Alexander Hamilton brought Dutch Finance to the newly born United States of America and founded the US national debt by buying the debt issued by the various states during the Revolutionary War at par and setting up the Bank of the United States. Hamilton's financial system made it possible for President Jefferson to finance the Louisiana Purchase mostly with debt.

Since the early 19th century two additional lessons have been learned. The first, advocated by Walter Bagehot in 1873 in Lombard Street is that the central bank must act as the "lender of last resort" for the financial system backed, if necessary, by the full faith and credit of the national government. But this lesson have proved hard for US central bankers to learn, as the Federal Reserve System failed to act as "lender of last resort" in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Lehman Brothers failure of 2008.

The second lesson is not to permit a collapse of government credit into hyper-inflation. Because Hitler.

Dutch Finance Table of Contents

German Turn in Brief

Most Anglo-Saxons believe in a mechanical world of mechanical causation and logic and reason -- whereas the other guys are led by their feelings. But the Germans, following the British David Hume, realized that this was not so. We are all governed by our feelings, including the feelings that we don't even feel.

With Kant, the Germans believed that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances that get processed by our brains into a theory of reality.

I maintain that Kant leads directly, do not pass Go, to the modern physics of relativity and quantum mechanics -- developed mainly by Germans.

I believe that Kant leads directly to German psychology, with Schopenhauer, Freud, and Jung and the theory of the unconscious. As I wrote

[Freud's] psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression. 

What? Schopenhauer invented "repression?"

Then there is Wagner. His operas were all about characters in medieval romances, Tannhauser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, and a rehash of the Nordic myths in The Ring of the Nibelung. Wagner was a fan of Schopenhauer.

And Nietzsche, who is often dismissed as "the Nazis' favorite intellectual." Nietzsche argued that for moderns, God had Died, and this meant a brutal process of decadence -- the dying off of the old order -- followed by nihilism, the terror of the eternal recurrence, as in the movie Groundhog Day, and finally the birth of a new god with the revaluation of all values. 

Nietzsche's most famous work is Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is philosophy presented as a prophetic narrative.

Nietzsche imagined the Übermensch but I think that the new man will be a Sacrificial Hero rather than his egoistical hero.

Why is that? Because the German that came after Nietzsche was Jung. And Jung, along with Freud, reckoned that if we wanted to understand human nature it would help to look at the ancient myths in a new light: not as superstitions but as universal human experiences. Jung talked about archetypes and the collective unconscious. And one ancient archetype is the Sacrificial Hero. You know: Jesus Christ.

After Jung? The Frankfurt School, in particular Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. They recast the Marxian oppression binary of bourgeois over proletarians and made it bigger: mankind over the world. "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men."

Finally, there is Jürgen Habermas. He was a leftist, but one that had climbed out of the Marxian materialist world.

Thus, for Habermas, humans are not merely rational actors pursuing their strategic ends through the use of instrumental reason, as the Enlightenment and his teacher Theodor Adorno supposed. They also live in community in the world, the lifeworld of Husserl, with other humans with whom they communicate and develop moral agreement.

German Turn Table of Contents

Good Life in Brief

The ascendancy of today's lefty wokism presents us with a profound challenge. This challenge, as Spencer A Klavan demands, is to come up with “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.” We must generate a new answer to the eternal question that every human yearns to answer: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," and which the left has got so thoroughly wrong.

But this new answer will not be an Absolute Truth, the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for all time. It will not be Forty-two: the representatives of the union of philosophers have ever demanded "rigorously defined areas of doubt and uncertainty." It will just be a pretty good answer, for now.

What should it be? The Olympian gods that determined the outcome of the Trojan war? A revival of Christian culture? Enlightenment reason and logic? Romantic individualism emphasizing inspiration and creativity? Obviously not the religion of lefty politics.

I have come to believe that this new vision must be based on the German Turn, the revolution in philosophy, in science, in politics, and in the sciences of the mind, that began with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. It is the language of the modern world, and in particular, the language of the left: if you do not understand the German Turn you cannot understand the Wrong Turn of the left.

What does that mean? It means abandoning the idea that we can know reality, because logic and reason and because the other guys are governed by their feelings. On the contrary, said Kant, we cannot know "things-in-themselves" and anyway, as Freud said, 90 percent of our mind is "unconscious," or feelings by another name.

We humans have come a long way. We used to experience life and the universe as a complete mystery known only to the gods. Then we got wise and decided that our understanding of the world had been handed down by God to humans in a divine creation and a program of divine law. Today the modern imagines himself as the creator. He is a discoverer, an explorer, a creator. 

Thus we no longer believe that the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the story of the gods on Mount Olympus. Nor do we advanced thinkers believe that the world was created in six days and that the suffering of life ends with a Redemption and the End of Time.

Nor can we advanced thinkers accept the leftist narrative that suffering is the fault of white oppressors, and will end when the arc of history finally bends towards justice as demanded in mostly peaceful protests by leftist activists.

The new meaning of "life, the universe, and everything," I will propose, is a personal existential journey, full of peril and most likely to end in disaster, or at least in failure. The creative explorer cannot be a proud activist but instead a humble traveler, a Sacrificial Hero.

The German Turn tries to understand this, lurching through Kant and Hegel and Goethe and Schopenhauer and Marx and Wagner and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung and Heidegger and Marcuse and Habermas and their Anglo-Saxon adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson, as I have investigated at length.

I say that the German Turn starts with Kant saying we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances, sense impressions that we then conjure up into a theory of reality. It continues, with the Romantics, that there is something that comes before logic and reason. It means, with Wagner, that there is a lot more in those ancient myths than mere superstition and something more in medieval romances than rescuing damsels in distress. 

It means, with Nietzsche, that any time a God is Dead the former believers cannot avoid a nihilist eternal recurrence ending in a revaluation of all values. It means, with Freud, that 90 percent of our mind is the unconscious mind. It means, with Jung, that we should work to better understand our unconscious and the archetypes with which it seems to be programmed to interpret and interact with the world. 

It means, with Horkheimer and Adorno, that “Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them” and with Habermas that humans do not live in a mechanical world but in a Lebenswelt, a “life-world,” Heidegger's being-there in a face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world.

But why are we so inspired to understand the world in a new way? Because the old ways do not have meaning for us any more. 

For a start, we cannot believe in the primitive experience, where humans are eternally obsessed with the suffering of life, and that there must be a reason for all the misery. To primitives, according to Mircea Eliade, human misery arises out of a fault, in ourselves or in our neighbor.

Primitive man, according to Eliade, solves the problem of existence and its suffering by denying history, living life in an annual repeating cycle, with each New Year representing a new Creation following a brief descent into Chaos. We still celebrate the new hope of every New Year, just like the ancients.

With the Axial Age religions mankind dares to enter history, but is taught to believe that suffering ends with a Redemption at the End of Time, the hope that the natural self-hate that issues from our universal suffering will be dissolved in the moment of Redemption.

The Left’s secular religion prophesied by Marx imagines it is replacing the Christian experience of personal Sin and guilt, and yet has proved to be just another priestly attempt to resolve human suffering with the hope of Redemption -- here on Earth rather than in Heaven. And it seems to include a lurch back to the primitive, insisting that all suffering arises from a social or economic fault or a “hate,” and that there has to be a fault. It doesn't seem to have worked out very well.

So now it is time to grow up and understand that suffering is forever, and imagine a new experience and analysis of suffering, one that does not deny history or insist on fault, or resolve it in the Sin and Redemption binary, but rather accepts its inevitability: dealing with suffering rather than blaming the Other or magically resolving it at the End of Time.

But how do we get to this new understanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything?" The best place to start is by telling the story of one modern creative that got it all wrong.

He was a modern religious prophet, rich-kid son of the leading lawyer in Trier. He created an ingenious meaning of "life, the universe and everything" that explained the world as a sub-lunar battle between Us and Them: the capitalists vs. the workers. But then there were special people like him, Communists, who would volunteer to organize the workers and lead them to justice against the mean-spirited bourgeoisie. Subsequent rich kids have proposed to organize the minorities against the racists. Or the women against the patriarchy. Or the gays against the haters. Was Marx a genius, or what?

I call this meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" Ego Heroism.

That’s what our modern artists and writers and activistes and revolutionaries and Ego Heroes are all about. You heroically solve the sufferings of the world in your creative manifesto or work of art or activist agenda and then demand, in a mostly peaceful protest, the right to implement it, as activiste, or revolutionary, or expert, or Minister of the Department of Silly Walks and end human suffering for evermore. And never mind the butcher's bill.

But shouldn't the activiste heal himself before he heals the world? Maybe the Egoistic Hero is not the answer. If not, then what?

The answer is as old as the hills and as new as yesterday: the Sacrificial Hero. We all know something about him because we all know about the iconic Sacrificial Hero, Jesus Christ, who died on the Roman cross, not to mention Moses who died before the Israelites reached the Promised Land. The Sacrificial Hero is an archetype that shows up everywhen and everywhere, and has been an especial interest of the followers of Carl Jung, including Joseph Campbell and recently Jordan B. Peterson.

But what is the Sacrificial Hero for our own time?

Perhaps the best place to start is to check off what the Hero is not. He is not the fanciful knight of the medieval romance. He is not the lefty activiste acting out a fantasy of revolution. He is not the leader of the nation, feted by battalions of flatterers or serviced by a 2,000 woman “Pleasure Squad.” He is not the peacocking journalist truckling to the powerful while imagining himself speaking truth to power. Nor is he the expert or the academic.

Our Hero is instead the mediator between Order and Chaos, and will probably die, a Sacrificial Hero, on that fateful border. But that is where the creative life must be lived, for life cannot long thrive in the arid safety and often cruel hierarchy of Order and the experts. And life is unendurable as unmitigated Chaos.

Notice how the idea of Sacrifice has changed over the years. Prior to Abraham, you sacrificed your son to the gods. Then, Abraham discovered, it was OK to sacrifice a lamb instead of Isaac. Later, God sacrificed his own son, Jesus Christ, to teach us to sacrifice ourselves rather than sons and lambs.

So the Hero, privileged and masculine and Sacrificial, must descend from the safety of privilege and offer himself to suffering, as he learns to navigate the dark realms of Chaos in a generalized and vaguely constructed archetypal journey into the underworld of the unconscious. For here be dragons. Another version of this is Nietzsche's journey through decadence, nihilism, and the terror of eternal recurrence to the revaluation of all values -- but that ended, in his case, in madness.

And the Hero's journey ends on the border of Order and Chaos where, if he is fortunate, our hero may expand the realm of Order just a little and thereby benefit the rest of humanity. Or maybe not.

Our hero does not experience suffering as someone else's fault; that is the primitive world-view. He does not experience suffering as something to be escaped through Divine Redemption; that is the Axial Age world-view. Nor does he experience suffering as the wages of inequality, or racism, or bigotry: that is the lefty world-view. For the Sacrificial Hero suffering is life, and life is suffering, and there is no escape from it.

To repeat: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for the Creative person, for someone who aspires to the highest and the best, is the journey of the Sacrificial Hero, a terrifying journey into the underworld of the unconscious, and not the Ego Hero, the simplistic self-worship of the "ally" bravely advocating for the "oppressed peoples" suffering under the domination and exploitation of the "white oppressors." 

Wow! This is cool. But what about the Old Ones, the folk still living by the light of the Old Ways? What about the primitives, who experience suffering as somebody else's fault? What about responsibles, that accept the challenge of dealing with their own fault and suffering, but live in hope of eventual Redemption? And what about our lefty friends that live to be Redeemers, allies that will defeat the dragon of oppression?

The answer is simple. The Old Ones get to live their Old Way, and we, the Wise Ones, understand them, their reality, and the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" that they have developed to make sense of the world. And if we understand them, then surely we will be able to live in the world with them, to share a "life-world" with them and, as Habermas says, communicate with them and develop moral agreement. One thing we will not do is cancel them.

The new world that is to come begins with the discovery of a new meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" by a Sacrificial Hero that suffers on the border between Order and Chaos. But that is just the beginning. Then it is up to the prophets to prophesy new religions. Then it is up to the writers and artists and thinkers to imagine new cultures. Then it is time for politicians to teach a new generation of people how he cares about people like them, and for Anybodies to create the next technological revolution.

And what these creative prophets will preach and creative writers will write and sauntering politicians will enticingly offer will also include a respectful and insightful understanding of the needs of people not like them: ordinary Responsibles, for whom meaning involves accepting the challenge from a God that created the world and laid down the rules for a good life that they try to follow; and the needs of Subordinates, who will always look to a beneficent Oz to make things right.

Years ago I thought that it would take generations to work all this out. But then I thought that if a guy like me, that had read a few books, could see the blurry outline of the problem and the glimmerings of an answer then probably brighter lights had already solved the problems. Only their lights were still emerging from under a bushel. So now I have a faith that the truth is out there, the prophets are already born, the writers are already writing, and the politicians are already rehearsing their sound bites. 

If I can imagine a blurred “vision of the good life” through a glass darkly, surely the geniuses have already seen the new peaks rising vividly before them, face to face.

Next step: "What is the Meaning of Life?"

Climate Change Predictions

 1967: Dire Famine Forecast by '75

1969: Everyone will disappear in a cloud of blue steam by '89

1970: Scientist predicts a new Ice Age by 21st Century

1970: America subject to water rationing by '74 and food rationing by'80

1971: US Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming

1972: New Ice Age by 2070

1974: Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast

1974: Ozone depletion a 'Great Peril to Life'

1976: Global cooling will cause a world war by 2000

1978: No end in sight to 30-year cooling trend

1980: Acid rain kills life in lakes

1988: More droughts likely

1988: Maldives completely underwater in 30 years

1989: Global warming and rising sea levels will wipe entire nations off the map

1989: NYC's West Side Highway underwater by 2019

1990: Acid rain no environmental crisis

1990: We have five years to save the rainforests

1999: The Himalayan glaciers will be gone in ten years

2000: Snow will soon be a thing of the past

2004: Britain to have Siberian climate by 2020

2007: Global warming will cause fewer hurricanes

2007: We'll be in an ice age by 2020

2008: The Arctic will be ice-free by 2013

2009: Polar ice cap will disappear by 2014

2009: Just 96 months to save the world

2012: Global warming will cause more hurricanes

2013: Ice-free Arctic in two years

2014: 500 days to avoid climate chaos

2014: The science is settled

2018: We have 12 years to stop global warming

2018: The world would end on June 21, 2023

2019: The world will end in 12 Years

2023: The planet is burning, and people are dying

2024: Polar bears will starve to death