AOC has had no shortage of insanity emanate from her mouth, so much so that it’s hard to keep up. Even as I’m writing this, she’s already said about a half-dozen other crazy things worthy of mention in the past 24 hours but you gotta stop somewhere and comment, right?

One of her dumbest proclamations of the recent past was that the world is literally going to end in 12 years due to unaddressed climate change.

“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’ ” Ocasio-Cortez asked Coates.

When someone is threatening you with death unless you do what they want, it’s probably safe to assume their motives aren’t pure. Her statement is crazy on its face and mirrors many other failed doomsday predictions in relation to the climate. From Bernie Sanders saying we had ten years in 1989 to Al Gore doing the same thing in 2006. In the end, these predictions always turn out to be nonsense simply spewed to push political agendas.

Realizing how much these nonsensical doomsday assertions hurt the credibility of their cause, some climate scientists are now pushing back for various reasons.

Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, told Axios that the idea that there is only a finite amount of time to fix climate change is the wrong way to look at the problem. She summed up the IPCC’s 1.5-degree report this way: “Every action matters. Every bit of warming matters. Every year matters. Every choice matters.” Hayhoe says she worries that deadlines will make people treat climate change more cavalierly to start, since 12 years can seem like a long time.

The IPCC’s report has a lot of issues on its own but that’s not the focus of this write-up.

Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Florida, said the 12-year deadline became attractive for media headlines in spite a lack of support from the IPCC report itself: “For some reason the media latched onto the 12 years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.”

This is true. After the IPCC report was released, politicians began to immediately misread it and use it as propaganda to push their socialist programs, all in the name of “solving climate change.” Isn’t it weird how every solution to climate change involved a socialistic takeover that will destroy the economy? It’s almost as if their motives aren’t to actually save the planet or something.

AOC took it a step further with her ridiculous 12-year timeline, citing no evidence for the contention. Instead of ridiculing it, many in the media either repeated it uncritically or supported her claim as a way to push the narrative. If you truly believe in catastrophic climate change, this is hurting your cause, not helping it.

For my part, the climate is always changing, mostly for natural reasons. Does humanity have some impact? Probably. Everything on the planet has some impact and there’s little we can do about that. The idea that we could make some magical changes among human behavior that would stop our imminent doom in 12 years is asinine. Furthermore, the idea that destroying the fossil fuel industry would lower carbon emissions is even dumber. Does AOC realize that without fossil fuels, the planet would simply burn more dirty forms of energy such as wood that would hurt the environment more overall? There’s a reason pollution is so high in places like Africa despite their lack of development.

None of this makes any sense and it should be ridiculed for the nonsense that it is. Humans are resourceful and throughout our history we’ve developed technology to combat the problems we face. We will do it again. The idea that a tiny temperature change over 100 years (which may not even happen) is going to destroy humanity simply doesn’t add up. AOC is probably doing more to help those who are skeptical of the solutions offered for climate change than those who are hysterical about it and want to become communists, so maybe I should be thanking her?

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