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Climate alarmists, I can't take you seriously until you start living like the Amish
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Climate alarmists, I can't take you seriously until you start living like the Amish

Over the weekend, the Planeteers converged on Washington to hold a "Climate March." I know what you're thinking: didn't they already do that, like, last week? Also, how will marching and holding signs improve the climate? And how many trees were slaughtered to make those signs, anyway? And how much CO2 was emitted by the cars and planes they took to get to this march? And how many of D.C.'s pigeons and squirrels were rudely disrupted from their daily routine because of all the extra humans traipsing through the street? Isn't organizing a march to fight climate change a bit like organizing a hot dog eating contest to fight obesity?

I have posed these kinds of questions to environmental activists many times and never received an answer other than, "You must hate science." I really don't hate science, though. I love science. I hate faux-science. I hate leftist dogma disguised as science. I hate activism that calls itself science. I hate bad conclusions drawn from science. I hate hypocrisy. I hate inconsistency. These also happen to be all of the reasons why I hate climate change alarmism.

But my real problem with the alarmists, who I will now address directly, boils down to this: I don't believe you. And when I say I don't believe you, I mean that I believe neither what you're saying, nor that you believe what you're saying. I doubt both your narrative and your sincerity. I question your facts and your conviction about those facts. Allow me to explain why.

First, your facts. If you stuck simply to the modest contention that the world has warmed very slightly in the last 130 years, and you theorized -- and admitted it was a theory -- that humans have contributed to it in some small way, I wouldn't take much of an issue with you. The problem is that you lie so much. You lie when you refuse to confess that the climate prediction models you use are extremely flawed. You lie when you scream about the "97 percent consensus" that doesn't exist. You lie when you act like the real scientists who doubt man-caused global warming are all kooks and lunatics.

Most of all, your overblown, hysterical doomsday prophecies are lies. The world is supposed to already be over by now, according to you. At the very least, New York City should be under water. We should have all been dead from global warming or global cooling or overpopulation dozens of times over. Around the time of the first Earth Day, we were told that hundreds of millions would be starving to death per year within ten years of that date. Human civilization should have crumbled into dust and the few remaining survivors should be floating through a vast water world, locked in a struggle of survival against Dennis Hopper. Yet, here we are, standing on dry land. How many times are you allowed to be wrong about the end of the world before we are justified in not taking you seriously anymore? I'd say that threshold, whatever it is, has long since been reached.

Second, your sincerity. Here's the real issue I have with you. Even if you've been wrong about the Environmental Apocalypse 100 times, you still insist that this 101st prediction will surely pan out. You tell us that we could be looking at an extinction event within a generation or two. Our planet will turn into Venus sooner rather than later if we don't drastically change the way we live. Major world cities will be lost into the sea, and this will happen within decades. And even those not drowned in the depths of the ocean will face mass starvation or worse. What's more, you tell us that Armageddon may already be happening. Even now, whenever there is a hurricane, or a tornado, or a thunderstorm, or even a snowstorm, you tell us that this is a direct result of global warming caused by our modern lifestyle. This is all quite traumatizing, so it's good for your emotional well being that you don't really believe any of it.

I can only assume that you don't believe it because your actions do not at all resemble what one would expect from someone who does believe this sort of thing. With very rare exceptions, you continue living just like the rest of us. Maybe you recycle your plastic bottles, maybe you ordered a salad at Panera Bread today, but for the most part you are just another callous Homo sapien murdering the planet and cannibalizing the future of the human race. Why? How? You think the world is about to end, for God's sake. What are you doing sitting at Starbucks like the rest of us? Why haven't you renounced all modern technology? Why haven't you fled to the mountains before the sea engulfs your family? Why aren't you doing... anything?

I can only imagine how I would react if I actually believed that the extinction of all mankind was imminent, and my lifestyle was directly contributing to it. At a minimum, I would not drive a car anymore. Ever. At all. I would ditch electricity. I wouldn't eat any kind of meat. I wouldn't buy mass made consumer products. I wouldn't give my money to any company that sells items made in factories with giant smokestacks. Those smokestacks are literally killing people. How could you continue shopping like everything is normal? What kind of monster are you? If I were you, I would live as John the Baptist, eating locusts and wild honey out in the desert. Lives are at stake, are they not? The end is near! Why are you so relaxed about it? Have you even started building the ark yet?

I'm not joking. If I were in your boat (pun intended), I would feel morally obligated to take extreme measures. As a member of the enlightened few, as a person who knows that human life is about to be eradicated, and who knows why, and even when, I would feel an incredible burden of responsibility. If I knew that driving my car, turning on my lights, shopping at the mall, and generally going about my day immersed in modern luxury were all directly causing the current and future death of millions of people, I could not continue engaging in these lethal activities. I would see them as acts of extreme moral recklessness, if not murder, to saunter along on as usual. My conscience would compel me to ensure that I am not responsible for the carnage that is about to occur. How could a person who believes what you allegedly believe possibly arrive at any other conclusion?

It's become a cliche to point out how all of the major environmental mouthpieces, like DiCaprio and Gore and all the rest, also happen to fly private jets in between the several mansions they own. This fact alone does not disprove the environmentalist narrative, but it is a curious fact that none of its most vocal proponents seem to have taken their own words to heart. Imagine, by comparison, if almost every major pro-life activist also happened to sit on the board of Planned Parenthood. If one or two were exposed as hypocrites in this way you might overlook it, but all of them?

Strangely, only the Amish can be seen riding horses and buggies down the street in this country, but even they don't believe that automobiles are going to annihilate life on Earth. You do believe that, yet you still drive them. You know how much CO2 was emitted in order to produce your iPhone, yet you still buy a new one every 18 months. You know that hurricanes and tornadoes are popping up everywhere because of the factories that make your trendy shoes and clothing, yet you still stock your closet full of them. You know that your air conditioning unit is slowly poisoning the atmosphere and leading us rapidly to certain death, yet you turn it on the moment the temperature rises above 70 degrees outside. You know that your refrigerator is a cancerous tumor metastasizing on Mother Earth, yet you still won't preserve your food by drying or pickling it. You know how much safer we'd all be if we stopped using electricity, yet you haven't gotten that ball rolling, either. WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, aren't we? And you can't even be bothered to crack a window and eat pickled cabbage in the dark like a real environmentalist?

You seem only focused on insisting that the government fix the problem. But even if there were a problem to fix, the law couldn't do anything on its own. The law can only influence or coerce behavior. So, rather than sitting around and waiting for the law to tell you to live how you already think you ought to live, why don't you just start living that way? It's like a vegetarian who declares that he will continue eating steaks until the government finally prohibits him from doing so. The cynical among us may conclude that a vegetarian of this type is not a vegetarian at all. If every vegetarian were of this sort, we might suspect that vegetarianism itself is hallucinatory: a belief system that many advocate but none believe strongly enough to actually live by. And if those who advocate it don't believe it, why should the rest of us take so much as a second out of our lives to consider its merits?

Now, please understand that I've cut you some slack here. I've assumed that you don't believe your own tales of civilizational destruction. The less flattering interpretation is that you do believe everything you say, yet you're so unbelievably selfish and lazy that, even staring at Armageddon on the horizon, you still cannot stir yourself to make any noticeable changes to your life. One shudders at the moral baseness required for a person to sincerely say to himself, "Yes, my vehicle is melting the ice caps and inching humanity ever closer to liquidation, but, screw it, I don't feel like walking." I have faith that you are not so cold and heartless. I have faith that you are merely disingenuous hypocrites. Let's hope I'm right.

To see more from Matt Walsh, visit his channel on TheBlaze.

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