Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t ivankinsman – according to doomsday futurist Mayer Hillman, wealthy survivors of the inevitable collapse of civilisation might have a chance if they embrace love of music and prevent climate refugees from entering their northern enclaves.
‘We’re doomed’: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention
By Patrick Barkham
The 86-year-old social scientist says accepting the impending end of most life on Earth might be the very thing needed to help us prolong it
“We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in. “The outcome is death, and it’s the end of most life on the planet because we’re so dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. There are no means of reversing the process which is melting the polar ice caps. And very few appear to be prepared to say so.”
Hillman, an 86-year-old social scientist and senior fellow emeritus of the Policy Studies Institute, does say so. His bleak forecast of the consequence of runaway climate change, he says without fanfare, is his “last will and testament”. His last intervention in public life. “I’m not going to write anymore because there’s nothing more that can be said,” he says when I first hear him speak to a stunned audience at the University of East Anglia late last year.
…
“With doom ahead, making a case for cycling as the primary mode of transport is almost irrelevant,” he says. “We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.”
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Although Hillman has not flown for more than 20 years as part of a personal commitment to reducing carbon emissions, he is now scornful of individual action which he describes as “as good as futile”. By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
Instead, says Hillman, the world’s population must globally move to zero emissions across agriculture, air travel, shipping, heating homes – every aspect of our economy – and reduce our human population too. Can it be done without a collapse of civilisation? “I don’t think so,” says Hillman. “Can you see everyone in a democracy volunteering to give up flying? Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan? Can you see the majority agreeing to restrict the size of their families?”
Hillman doubts that human ingenuity can find a fix and says there is no evidence that greenhouse gases can be safely buried. But if we adapt to a future with less – focusing on Hillman’s love and music – it might be good for us. “And who is ‘we’?” asks Hillman with a typically impish smile. “Wealthy people will be better able to adapt but the world’s population will head to regions of the planet such as northern Europe which will be temporarily spared the extreme effects of climate change. How are these regions going to respond? We see it now. Migrants will be prevented from arriving. We will let them drown.”
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Sadly Hillman’s prediction doesn’t seem to be very specific on timescale, which effectively makes his claims untestable.
But I’m sure you will join me in expressing appreciation of the Guardian’s tireless efforts, to entertain us with the colorful predictions of their parade of increasingly eccentric climate doomsday prophets.
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When he greets the prospect of massive depopulation with a “beaming smile” Mr. Hillman differentiates himself from his fellow doomsayers by his honesty, since for all of them massive depopulation is their ultimate preferred goal. Of course, as George Carlin has so aptly illustrated in his comedy routine, which has played here often, if we all disappeared tomorrow the planet would not skip a beat. Why they all blather on about an outcome which they ardently long for being a looming catastrophe is,as always, unclear. Let’s face it, if they had any bit of logical consistency, they would all be lobbying for massive increases in CO2 to accelerate the arrival of our day of demise
Thanks to the efforts of climate alarmist John Kerry, James Taylor is all tuned up and ready to play “You Have a Friend” during the Themopaclypse. Oh wait … singing produces CO2. Can’t have that in a zero carbon world. Also, the same for love, or rather, love making. Too much heavy exhaling of dreaded CO2. Education is only carbon free if you read books by sunlight. As for happiness, if it is indeed “a warm puppy” then that damn puppy is breathing out all amounts of CO2.
Let’s face it this guy is just yammering on to stay in the spotlight now that he has stopped writing.
The wise man speaks when he has something to say, then stops. The foolish man speaks when he has to say something, and never stops.
Clearly Hillman is off his meds. Or needs stronger ones. Because he sounds battier than a bat-cave.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mud8PLSvrXk
Mental masturbation, at any age, is ugly. Sadly, that is the basis of Nobel Peace Prize awards.
Like with the non-mental variety, most are decent enough to keep it behind closed doors.
Sadly, Dred, music videos don’t follow that rule.
“Can you see the majority of the population becoming vegan”
Ancient man, pre-civilization were hunter-gatherers. A purely vegan lifestyle by humanity would require significant agriculture to provide enough daily calories for everyone. So of course, it’s clear he expects most people to simply chose to die off along with their family. He should set the example.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2m9Woo6UwoI
Hi. My name is Edith Ann, and I’m five and a half years old. My schoolteacher told us that global warming was going to kill off everyone, so i asked her how plants would survive without us?
She didn’t understand my question, said it was silly.
So I said plants came first in the primordial ooze and then they were running out of carbon and other chemicals to grown on, so they invented animals, and here we are. So how will plants do without us?
She made me go home with a note to my mother.
And that’s the truth. PFFFFTTT!
In addition, when I run across something as bodaciously stupid and self-centered as Hillmann, I want to ask him if he would be the first to volunteer for the death cycle.
As long as these doomsayers insist that getting rid of humans is the answer to everything, I think they should be asked if they’ll volunteer to go first. Then the rest of us can get on with our lives.
They, in their enlightened state, are much more valuable than you are.
She better watch out. I believe they have a big red button hidden under the desk for the likes of her.
Oh, Edith Ann has one in her bookpack, too.
Labelled “Shark Tank”?
Time the Guardian went bust.
It’s already on that trajectory.
I think they’ve bee burning through their ~ £800 million trust fund at about £100 million per year recently.
Meanwhile, I iz in Lincolnshire – Gainsborough and possibly at THE very spot where Knut did his tide-turning stunt. Its raining.
About 15 years ago, a particularly industrious friend of mine (lets call him Norman, coz that’s his name) saw an opening ‘in the agricultural market’ because of Global Warming. He foresaw that Cumbria would become toasty & warm and the local peasants would take up arable farming instead of chasing manky old yowz (sheep) across the bleak and rainy fells. In the mud.
He thought he’d buy a combine harvester and so he did. From a farming chap in Lincolnshire as it ‘appens. (They call em ‘Barley Barons’)
Lincolnshire is a truly epic place for growing stuff, don’t stick a walking stick into the dirt or it’ll grow roots and you’ll have to get another from somewhere.
Parts of it are really really flat. The ‘Fens’ as opposed to the ‘Wolds’ which are hilly.
As one might use a VW Dirty Diesel to navigate these features (the fens), one will notice that one’s Sat-Nav tells one that one is maybe 3,4,5 or even more metres below sea-level. So what.
But the observant ‘one’ will notice that the land or fields are easily 5, 6 and 7 or more metres below the road one is travelling along.
OK, they built an embankment for the road, one might think.
Back to Norman’ retail therapy.
Norman had noticed the rather different (from Cumbria) landscape and mentioned it to the Barley Baron.
“Aye” said the Barley Baron.
Go figure…
Is carbonoxide a problem or symptomatic of something else??
Countenance the possibility that the ‘missing’ 4 feet of the Barley Baron’s field is now actually wafting around a volcano in the Mid Pacific.
(Hawaii just set a new daily record for rain, did you see that. The WunderGrundKids are having kittens about it)
Continually working the fields for years leads to steady deep water removal (mostly evaporation as water is pulled upward due to wicking (capillary action), even without active groundwater pumping) from silty and clay soils. Clays can especially compact as they lose water, but silty soils will compact too.
I saw your comment Joel O’Bryan and cannot resist .
The fens are mainly peat and peat soils sink as they are mostly organic matter and as they dry out the organic matter compresses and breaks down and you guessed releases CO2.
We have large areas of peat swamps in the Waikato NZ and they are continually sinking as they are drained . The secret of farming these soils is to not over drain them .Keep the water table at about 50 centimeters
Working heavy clay soils in wet conditions leads to compaction and declining yields.
Farmers try to keep off these soils when they are wet .
We get this end of the world stuff in our news papers and TV.
The New Zealand Herald used to be a very good paper but unfortunately it is now become a marxist rag,and the other regional papers are scrambling to keep up.
Wait a second…what about the combine harvester?
Did he make a go of it?
Or has his money been wasted?
I guess I better stock up on a ton of diesel for the generator to power the tower of Marshall amps. Got to Rock On!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T1UaeuFn04s
I hear there are vacant properties at Jonestown.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sxR70fpZ870
Apparently some saw the word “music” in the post title and thought it meant “post only music clips”.
Every time that I read the name Hillman I can’t help thinking of the Hillman Imp, a rather eccentric sixties rear engined car. The Imp was a bit naff but my parents had a Hillman Hunter which was a really nice car. It was roughly the same size and shape as the Ford MK4 Cortina but had a much nicer interior and much better handling and performance.
Hillman Imp car was crap… but the 875cc engine was superb; I put one in a motor bike in 1970 (got 139mph over 12miles on the M4, fast at the time)
It it worth reflecting that should climate doom fail to arrive some will be really, really upset .
The fact that is would be nothing but good news for most people would mean nothing to them.
And will it prompt a sober reexamination of their priorities? Likely not.
“We’re doomed,” says Mayer Hillman with such a beaming smile that it takes a moment for the words to sink in.
When someone speaks about pending doom with a big smile on his face, he’s either trying to pull a fast one, or he’s actually looking forward to humanity being wiped out. Based on what Hillman says, he is looking forward to the “collapse of civilisation.” It seems to be a fantasy of his. He assumes that he would be among the wealthy elites who escape to a northern utopia to spend his day listening to music. But where would he get the batteries or instruments to play his music, from amazon.com? What happens to stocks, bonds, or bank accounts when civilization collapses? Who would buy your real estate investments so you can move north? And who is going to give you food or clothing for your currency or your gold? You can’t survive by eating gold. I don’t think Hillman has given this any real thought. If he had, he wouldn’t be smiling.
That’s also what I was thinking….the only music there would be would be that coming from instruments being played by someone and/or singing. Kinda the way things were before electricity and the phonograph. You couldn’t even play a pipe organ unless someone was pumping air into it with a bellows, but they would probably lack the energy anyway due to that vegan diet…. I guess in Hillman’s mind chamber music and piano recitals will be back in fashion, because that will be the only music that will be available with no power.
The English did much the same as the Dutch to dry out the naturally soggy bits of their realm.
Out of place. Apropos of Fens comments above.
History repeats, albeit with different knobs on. Back in the lead up to the first millennium ( ad 900 on). It was well known that the coming of the apocalypse was due circa ad1000, along with the second coming of Christ.
A healthy market ensued in the peddling of indulgences and perpetual prayer for the departed etc. Many books written but none I can cite from memory.
In the human affairs climate, little appears to have changed, except perhaps in the advent of readily available energy, now deemed satanic by some of us unless liberally indulged by those who must be obeyed.
PS: Not sure whether to put a sark character (:/sark) here: So leave it to others to consider any validity.
they don’t need or care about those with sense taking them seriously, just as long as there are plenty of gullible fools that do. preferably gullible fools who will foot their bills.
To all of the ‘alarmed climate change snowflakes’ out there, I suggest a hot cuppa coffee with a splash of ‘irish’ and chill out with the following:
“Garden In The Rain” – Diana Krall
https://youtu.be/EZOyrxp1i3w
The doomsday criers needed new purpose once the millennium came and went.
I have noticed over the years that people near the end of their lives, or with undiagnosed terminal illnesses, begin to talk more about doom and gloom and end of the world scenarios.
Futurists are generally unsuited to the task of attempting to predict the future, which, outside of very broad strokes is, indeed, unpredictable. I say this because all those who have engaged in it won’t get the broad strokes right. They are invariably social scientists, preachers, biologists and philosophers, who all have one thing in common. They proceed from the petri-dish-zero-sum-model because they have no sense of the magnitude and dynamics of human ingenuity.
It is this elephant-in-the-room factor that remains a blank in doom futurists’ analyses inspite of the fact that it has been the confounder of every doom forecast without exception from Malthus at the turn of the 18th-19th Century, Jevons (economist in the 1860s: industrial revolution will end because we will run out of coal) and Erlich’s “Population Bomb” and the Club of Rome’s report in the 1970s that foresaw billions starving and the depletion of metals and other resources before 2000.
Human ingenuity completely decimated these scenarios. There is less poverty and hunger today in actual numbers despite a more than doubling of 1972s population of 3B. So here is what empirical data from the history of doom forecasts foretells about today’s end-of-world Global Warming – there will be no doom to confront. I feel Mayer Hillman at 86 senses a more personal near term doom.
I think it also became harder to scare people with warnings of an earth crowded out of habitability once most people had taken an airplane ride with a window seat.
100%
Here’s Larry Norman’s take on the climate armaggedon:
https://youtu.be/rD7YODSdmDo
Okay no gun permits or truck rentals for climate doomsters.
Maybe rental companies can start requiring that a vetted driver has to drive the rental truck for questionable customers.
The trouble with Hillman is that he clearly lacks the wisdom that eventually comes with age. When he gets to my age perhaps the reality of things will come home to him, and he will find it necessary to withdraw the tripe he’s already written, and which he appears to continue writing. Perhaps the simplest thing would be for him go to the literature and data. There’s a lot of pertinent information there.
I love the logic. We must reduce the population else global warming will — wait for it — else global warming will reduce the population.
“…. music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.” ….. well this thread is that old geezer’s dream come true. Someone send him a link!
There are a lot of contributions of music here on this one!
Clearly “social science” was invented so that the feeble minded could play at being scientists.