Outside your window, living standards are rising, crime is declining, pollution is down, and longevity is increasing. But in pop culture, we’re all doomed. The Hunger Games films have been box-office titans, joined by World War Z, Interstellar, The Book of Eli, Divergent, The Road, and other big-budget Hollywood fare depicting various judgment days. Over in primetime, the world is ending on The Walking Dead, The Last Ship, The 100, and Under the Dome.
The same outlook obtains in nonfiction literature. Books that foresee doomsday— Collapse by Jared Diamond, The End of Nature by Bill McKibben, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett among them—win praise from commentators and sell briskly. Books contending that things basically are fine don’t do as well. One might think that optimism would be marketable to contemporary book-buyers, who live very well by historical standards, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Readers prefer material that depicts them dwelling in the final generation. Perhaps declining religious belief in Armageddon has been replaced by an expectation of some natural-world version of the event.
Into this adverse market steps The End of Doom by Ronald Bailey, an impressively researched, voluminously detailed book arguing that the world is in better shape than commonly assumed. Bailey deflates doomsday by showing that human population growth does not mean ecological breakdown; that food supply increases faster than population and probably always will; that far from depleted, most resources are sufficient to last for centuries; that air pollution in the United States is way down; and that cancer is in decline.
Specialists will argue about some of the studies Bailey cites to support these contentions. So much environmental research exists today, for example, that one can find a study to prove practically anything. But in the main, Bailey’s selection of research is fastidious and convincing.
Bailey spends too much time, though, on discredited trendy bleakness from the 1960s and 1970s—such as Paul Ehrlich’s global famine predictions and the 1972 Club of Rome report. One can practically hear dead horses saying, “Stop flogging me.” The End of Doom redeems itself with a clever chapter on how precautionary principles boil down to this rule: never do anything for the first time. “Anything new is guilty until proven innocent,” Bailey writes, but he goes on to chronicle how many new ideas denounced as dangerous turned out instead to make life less risky.
The highlight of Bailey’s book concerns the most important issue in today’s environmental debate: climate change. During the 1990s, Bailey was a prominent skeptic of artificially triggered global warming. He declared the hypothesis unproven and called for more study. Though the instant-doomsday Left depicted this position as denialism, the 1991 National Academy of Sciences report, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, took the same view. Bailey’s position was quite reasonable back then. But if you call for more research, and that research proves the case, then you must switch sides—and Bailey does, to his credit: “The balance of scientific evidence indicate[s] that manmade global warming likely pose[s] a significant problem for humanity.”
Today, a near-unanimous scientific consensus exists on the existence of “artificially triggered global warming”—that clunky wording being necessary because most of the greenhouse effect occurs naturally. In a 2014 joint statement, the National Academy of Sciences and the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Science found “clear evidence that humans are causing the climate to change.” Unless one knows more about science than the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society combined, one must accept climate change as scientifically established. The views of Senator James Inhofe—chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee—and others that global warming is “a hoax” suggest despair regarding the science literacy of prominent Washington leaders.
Here’s the rub. Though there is a scientific consensus that climate is warming—including warming during the now-discredited “hiatus” claimed by the talk radio world—and that human action must play some role in it, that’s as far as the consensus goes. No scientific agreement exists on how much the climate will change or what kinds of problems this will cause. A broad range of outcomes, from warming being mildly beneficial (especially for agriculture) to huge calamity (flooding of coastal cities) is possible.
This makes the current state of climate-change debate distressing. The Left calls anyone who questions its crazed apocalyptic claims a “denier,” though many sound reasons exist to be skeptical of the worst case. The Right answers with an equally crazed contention that nothing has been proven, when this is clearly not so.
The End of Doom tries to take a middle position between the extremes. The problem facing political discourse is that the hard Left and the hard Right don’t want a golden mean to be found.
