https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2024/08/whatever-will-climateers-cook-up-next/
Whatever Will Climateers Cook Up Next?
By Tony Thomas
Among the inspirational spokesfolk sermonising about saving the planet from fossil fuels are actress Jane Fonda and ex-husband Ted Turner (2024 net worth $US2.5 billion). Jane ditched Ted in 2001 after 10 years marriage, leaving Ted so heart-broken that he needed a quartet of girlfriends for consolation. He rotated each for one week per month.
Jane extracted $US40 million from Ted as a divorce settlement. This helped keep the wolf from her door as she turned author in 2020 to write “What Can I Do?” about arresting the planet’s imminent death from CO2. The same year, with other Hollywood A-listers, she also signed a petition against excessive consumerism, which demanded that governments fiercely crack down on emissions:
The ongoing ecological catastrophe is a meta-crisis: the massive extinction of life on Earth is no longer in doubt, and all indicators point to a direct existential threat … The pursuit of consumerism [see here] and an obsession with productivity have led us to deny the value of life itself …
For Leigh Sales at ABCTV’s 7.30, the combination of celebrity Jane and more touting of global warming was irresistible. The interview was a classic. Fonda literally wept on camera about emissions “trashing our home” (in her case an $US5.4 million Los Angeles townhouse):
All these wonderful species are going to go and life is going to be very, very difficult to live and eventually possibly the human species will go as well because we are trashing our home and I just, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself or die with myself if I don’t do something.
She grieved with Sales (herself on something north of $400,000) about the cost of living:
Do I need money? There’s that. People forget that we are working people. I belong to three unions. I have to earn a living. I have a bottom line that I’ve got, that I have to meet and its tough right now. I mean, not that tough, I have a roof over my head and a very nice home that’s paid for and food and I have an assistant with me and I’m very, very lucky, but I’m worried. We will have gone almost a year without working and that’s scary…. I have to keep working.
You might by now be asking, “So what? Got anything new to say about celebrities?” Well, yes I have. This essay is about how celebs warn that global warming will turn us into cannibals, maybe you’re not up with that prospect yet? Jane’s ex-husband Ted is a leading public intellectual on this cannibalism forecast. He’s influential too – in 2017 he donated $US1 billion to the United Nations.
By 2038, he believes, the last survivors of the world’s heat-stricken masses will turn on each other for food. His prediction in 2008 was taken up by the conservative Washington Free Beacon online newspaper:
In order to help people prepare for what is coming, the Free Beacon created the Countdown to Cannibalism Clock, which will let you know exactly how much time is left until you must engage in the practice for basic sustenance.
Apr 2, 2008 – From the Charlie Rose Show: TED TURNER: Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not ten but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there’ll be no more corn grown. Not doing it is suicide. Just like dropping bombs on each other, nuclear weapons is suicide. We’ve got to stop doing the suicidal two things, which are hanging on to our nuclear weapons and after that we’ve got to stabilize the population. When I was born- CHARLIE ROSE: So what’s wrong with the population? TURNER: We’re too many people. That’s why we have global warming. We have global warming because too many people are using too much stuff. If there were less people, they’d be using less stuff.
On my calculations, the Cannibalism Clock now stands at 28 minutes to midnight, but I can’t find the clock online. It must be somewhere. The Washington Free Beacon, by the way, is no lightweight . Not part of regime media, this year it disclosed the plagiarisms by Harvard’s diversity President Claudine Gay, forcing her resignation.
Ted Turner forecast temps would be 8 degrees hotter (he was talking Fahrenheit) by 2038, frizzling the world’s crops. “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state — like Somalia or Sudan — and living conditions will be intolerable.” Who’s to blame? “Too many people are using too much stuff,” replied the billionaire. As he put it, “I lost Jane [Fonda]. I lost my job here. I lost my fortune, most of it, got a billion or two left. You can get by on that if you economise.”
Some say Turner’s cannibalism prediction is already coming true, others claim the cases are just random:
♦ In Pakistan, two brothers were caught digging up corpses and grinding them into curries, forcing the government to bring in new laws against such ingredients.
♦ In Russia in 2010, a couple not only killed and ate from more than 30 people, but put leftovers into meat pies which the wife sold to the military trainees and student pilots at the academy where she worked. Police found they’d also made a least one jar of human pickles.
♦ In Bangkok in 2018, a restaurant owner killed a patron after a row, and tried to disappear the evidence by adding small pieces of his victim to his menu items. As it was a vegetarian restaurant, diners quickly complained and his scheme unravelled.
♦ Also in 2018, a 22-year-old Russian literally axed his landlord, and with his 12-year-old girlfriend Valeria, microwaved and ate him. Valeria, who also cooked parts in a frying pan, told police the heart was too sweet but “the brains turned out to be much more tasty.” Her adult boyfriend killed himself and Valeria was sent to a school in southern Russia, but she bragged so much to classmates about tasty brains that she got transferred to a one-teacher orphanage.
Ted Turner might have got his cannibal inspiration from the cli-fi MGM movie Soylent Green of 1973, which foresaw global warming turning New York City in 2022 (yes, 2022) into a downmarket version of Mumbai and, by the look of it, run by Democrats. The usual odd pair of detectives comprises Robert Thorn (handsome tough guy Charlton Heston, after he got into his Moses robes) and Edward G, Robinson as his clapped-out pal Sol Roth, who complains, ” How can anyone survive in a climate like this, a heatwave all year long, the greenhouse effect, everything is burning up!” [1]
In Soylent Green the usual evil corporation has monopolised half the world’s food supply and provides the masses with edible Soylent Red and Soylent Yellow wafers about the size of domino tiles, made from lentils and soybeans. It has introduced a Soylent Green chip which everyone finds so delicious they riot to get a share each Tuesday.
Without wanting to spoil the plot, Soylent Green is not made from tasty plankton as labelled, but from humans scooped off the streets by riot trucks. Today (2024) human ready-to-eat chips have not eventuated, but the 1973 film’s forecast was spot on about New York’s imperilled electricity. Sol Roth says he has to pedal a stationary bike “half way around the world” to power the pair’s sole light bulb and charge up their room’s battery . Rusted petrol-powered cars litter the streets Havana-style (but I didn’t detect any EVs).
With uncanny prescience the film also foretells the inflation from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, with a few vegetables and two jars of sauce on offer for $US279.15. A smoker’s fantasy goes, “If I had the money I’d smoke two or three of these every day!” The film also flunks computer-ology, with the heroine 50 years out from 1973 enjoying an arcade Computer Space tussle on a little screen. She chortles, “I demolished five saucers with one rock!”[2]
On the downside, beautiful young women have become “Furniture” for toxic male apartment owners. One owner says, “We give them a day off every month, you would think they would be grateful.” To seduce Charlton Heston, another Furniture Lady promises “to turn that air conditioning up all the way, I will make it cold like winter used to be.” Heston replies, “You are a hell of a piece of furniture.”
For some reason all the corpses on Dr Evil’s conveyor belt remain in cloth shrouds as they’re processed into wafers, which must give Soylent Green, however delicious, a cottony taint.
Reviewers were scathing: the New Yorker said the “pompously prophetic thing of a film hasn’t a brain in its beanbag.”
While New York human-sourced wafers circa 2022 are interesting, my editor is always keen on local angles on cannibalism. There does happen to be one involving the Western Sydney University PhD thesis of Jungian psychotherapist Dr Sally Gillespie, stalwart of the Melbourne-founded Psychology for a Safe Climate band of sisters. It’s titled Mapping Myths, Dreams and Conversations in the Era of Global Warming but sadly is no longer publicly accessible.
For scholarly purposes she created a seven-member group of mainly excitable women, some 50-plus, to share their climate-apocalypse dreams – “fellow crew members sailing a vessel of inquiry.” It’s thrilling to discover what makes climate feminists tick. By their second meeting they’re fantasising about surviving “systemic collapse.” They suspect their present core values might alter. For example, “stories of cannibalism are shared” (p106).
Dr Sally: I wonder what those stories are serving for us at the moment, in teasing us into these questions. Not only the literal question: would I eat someone else or not? [but] what’s the value of human life and culture and society?
As I wrote at the time, if you’re on the plump side and walking up Alexandra Parade, Fitzroy, cross the median strip if Sally’s team’s is coming. You just never know!
That reminds me of another academic, a Swedish professor asking a conference audience about their willingness to eat human corpses. What precisely went on there is in dispute, and I’ll do my best below to get you the facts.
The professor is behavioural scientist and marketer with the Stockholm School of Economics. He allegedly told a Gastro Summit in Stockholm on September 3, 2019, that we could combat global warming by eating corpses. This could help save the human race if only people would “awaken the idea”. Using a Powerpoint display, he acknowledged that the project would need to overcome many taboos, and said it could be more plausible to eat insects and your pet cats and dogs.
Tackled in the international hullaballoo, he said he’d been misquoted. He told Swedish TV4 in an interview the same day that he had merely been gauging how far consumers would go in terms of breaking taboos in the context of global warming.[3] Just a marketing man’s hypothetical, in other words, and what’s more, the google-translate of his Swedish was rough.[4]
Well, said the sceptics, let’s see your notes, your Powerpoint and that video of your talk, and we’ll get them translated. But the video is unavailable and Professor Soderlund had no notes to provide. His Powerpoint was not readily available “for technical reasons,” he said. I can’t imagine what those technical reasons might be. The conference people might have deleted their electronic copy and he might have lost his USB stick, but wouldn’t the file still be on a home or office computer where he created it?
The left-wing oracle for exposing urban myths is snopes.com. You can bet your life they wanted to debunk the mockery of climate alarmists. Söderlund emailed snopes:
I believe that the issue has somehow been hijacked by people who do not believe that global warming and other climate issues should be taken seriously — and, given this, it may indeed be useful to refer to events indicating that climate activists have completely crazy ideas (such as that we should eat each other). Just for the record: I do not want to eat human meat, I do not want to be eaten, I do not think that eating humans influences the climate, I am not an activist, I am just a researcher who thinks that it must be possible to ask questions about also the dark sides of what we humans do and do not do.
But without the video and Powerpoint, and given Soderlund’s denials, snopes’ reluctant verdict on true-or-false was, “Mixture”. Snopes notwithstanding, the reporter for the right-of-centre Epoch Times, Swedish-speaking Celia Farber,[5] who broke the story, had clearly seen Soderlund’s video presentation. She wrote
In his talk, Soderlund asks the audience how many would be open to the idea. Not many hands go up. Some groaning is heard. When interviewed after his talk, he reports brightly that 8 percent of conference participants said they would be open to trying it. When asked if he himself would try it, he replies, “I feel somewhat hesitant but to not appear overly conservative … I‘d have to say … I’d be open to at least tasting it.”
The logo for the talk, titled “Food of the Future: Worms, Grasshoppers, or Human Flesh,” featured a splash of blood as part of the graphic design. Marketing blurbs were
Are we humans too selfish to live sustainably? Is cannibalism the solution to food sustainability in the future? At GastroSummit, you will get some answers to these questions…”
In any event, Soderlund’s premise was that global food supply was on the brink of disaster, which like most or all previous climate predictions is baloney. Food output and yields continue to feed population growth. Output can keep rising (even without greater land use) through better harvest logistics, “smart” targeted use of water and fertilisers, innovation spread among peasants via mobile phones and AI, and so on.
I’d like to say this is the last word on cannibalism and climate, but it ain’t. There’s a veritable industry of academics out there specialising in alarm about how global warming will accelerate cannibalism among a vast variety of non-homo sapien species. This industry’s motto should be “All warming is bad, even in Melbourne” (top temp today: 12degC).
Without even trying I’ve turned up dire climate cannibalism papers about lobsters (aka “Attack of the cannibal lobsters”), six unfortunate Neaderthals, glaucos-winged seagulls ($US300,000 grant and two PhD dissertations), Arizona tiger salamanders (water lizards), damselflies (little dragonfly lookalikes), polar bears, caddisflies (“very hairy”), wolf spiders, Alaskan snow crabs, Arctic foxes and, last but not least, wind farms (when they eat up each others’ downstream windiness).
Well , enough on cannibalism. I call out to my wife, “Plenty of potatoes with the roast tonight!” Wife replies, “No need, I’ve got Swedes”.
Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
[1] A curiosity is that in 1973 the climate science hive-mind was in fear of global cooling. If you doubt that, see here.
[2] This was the 1970s era’s first depiction on screen of a computer game.
Dr Gillespie’s book ‘Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves’ “draws upon my professional background as a Jungian psychotherapist and my doctoral research into the psychological terrain of ongoing engagement with climate crisis.”
[3] Soderlund, asked in the interview if he’d eat human flesh himself, replied that he’d “be open to at least tasting it.”
[4] In snopes‘ translation of Soderlund’s TV4 interview, the interviewer asked how likely he thought it was that eating human flesh would catch on, in the same way that eating insects has been touted as a possible means to lower carbon emissions and combat food shortages. He thought cannibalism was unlikely to become appealing, having an even greater “yuck” factor than eating insects. He added: “But if we need to turn over every stone when it comes to climate and sustainability, it’s still worth raising this question.”
[5] Celia Farber is a Swedish-American writer with a background in magazine reportage and investigative reporting. She has written for Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and others.
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I read Harry Harrison’s “Make Room, Make Room” well before Soylent Green was made out of it (very loosely), and it was even worse as prediction than the movie. Paul Ehrlich all the way down.
But there is a market for scary stories, and they keep coming out. But if one thinks it through, they are by and large as plausible as zombie movies.
I skipped from the headline right to your comment and entered my +1
Zombie movies may be a poor analogy given the behaviour of our political and bureaucratic elites these days. A zombie apocalypse may be happening before our very eyes. Take Joe Biden for example – staring blankly into space, moving about like a cardboard cutout, sniffing girls hair as if to determine if the brains are fresh.
It would have to overcome more than that. Clearly, cannibalism has taken place as evidenced by the stories of the infamous Donner Party and other reliable sources. However, from personal experience, I find that burning human flesh has a repulsive odor, totally unlike pork spareribs on a grill. While living in California, I had shot a wild boar, and invited some friends over for BBQed spareribs. My best friend, who had been converted to Vegan by his wife, shared with me that the smell aroused primal urges to try tasting the hormone- and antibiotic-free boar spareribs; alas, he lost out on the unique opportunity after one disapproving side glance from his wife.
Once, as a teenager, while I was experimenting with high-voltage, RF brush discharges from my 100-Watt ARC-5 war-surplus transmitter, I accidentally cauterized part of my thumb, which healed completely without a scar. The distinctive odor of the cauterization was was very unpleasant!
While on TDY in Point Barrow (AK), while in the Army, I smelled the odor again. It was coming from the toilets at the Army base, which were vented to the open air. Because of the permafrost and the low Winter temperatures, the Army had come up with a unique solution for disposing of human waste. The toilets in the latrine had propane torches in them that were activated by closing the lid after voiding one’s bowels. The flame was intense enough to reduce feces to a pile of white ash in a few minutes. The unpleasant odor permeated the air around the base facility.
The Donner Party members resorted to eating their leather belts, the soles of their boots, and the harnesses of their animals before they finally resorted to eating their former friends. Therefore, I suspect that sane people would go to great lengths to avoid cannibalism, viewing it as an absolutely last choice to survive.
“My best friend, who had been converted to Vegan by his wife, shared with me that the smell aroused primal urges to try tasting the hormone- and antibiotic-free boar spareribs…”
Henry David Thoreau said something similar in Walden Pond- something like “I once saw a woodchuck and felt a primitive desire to grab it and eat it raw”.
I haven’t tried it, but I would imagine woodchuck tastes something like rabbit. I was once at some kind of a ‘street fair’ where there was an Air Force recruiting booth staffed by a couple of survival school instructors. I asked one of them what was the tastiest wild food he had ever eaten. He replied “roasted beaver tail.” Not too far removed from woodchuck.
Axils, WaPo, The Guardian – “Why cannibalism is good.”
Australia has its share of recent silly claims about one lot of settlers who boated or walked in a few thousand years ago and recently became generic aborigines with numerous claims for land ownership in one form or another despite leaving no written record apart from a few rock scratches and the odd surviving primitive art on rock faces here and there.
Honest, diligent historians like Keith Windschuttle have documented what actually happened when in 1770 there was recorded contact (Capt James Cook) of europeans with aborigines, then settlement by the First Fleet in 1788. There are accurate recorded descriptions of cannibalism. That black practice was more routine than rare. To counter this negativie property, there have been counter-claims against the europeans, such as that they stole black and half-cast children, indeed creating (a myth of) a whole “stolen generation.”
Journalist Tony Thomas has summarised stolen generations research by Keith Windschuttle into a small paperback of 98 pages. If you have interest in the topic, I can supply a copy if you you give me an address. My email is sherro01 at outlook dot com.
What we need is a legal type of mechanism to reduce the number of fake news items appearing almost daily and a type of endorsement that a work is able to be trusted. I know we have fact checkers, but they often need labelling as unsafe. Systems get screwed around lately by journalists who lack the skills of the craft that were standard 20 years ago and before, with properties like honesty, accuracy, truth, repeatability, etc.
Geoff S.
Some sad news. The late John Daly’s website “Still Waiting for Greenhouse” has been taken down. The temperature data from the weather stations is still useful, especially the
Death Valley temperature data. The temperature chart for Brisbane showed constant seasonal temperatures from 1949 to ca 2002.
BTW: What type of chemist are you? I am a retired organic chemist. I turned 80 on Aug 1.
Harold,
Mainly the usual well-rounded Physical, Organic, Inorganic and some Polymer that was taught in my early post-grad times of the 1960s. Over the years before retirement, mostly mineral exploration geochemistry, but many secondary projects that could involve anything – one day managing a large pilot plant to convert ilmenite to rutile, another day with lead poisoning topics from a closed battery recycle plant we inherited, todesign and interpretation of a very large airborne surveyof Iranseeking uranium for the Shah, plus many others projects. I found that there is never a shortage of new, interesting projects if you volunteer to conduct them, contrasts with a boring life if you sit there waitring for someone to allocate a project to you.
What happened was a steady shift from enjoyable science in a wonderful team of explorers working at top world science standard, followed by the inevitable drift into upper management and too much time spent in brawls with greens and governments forever trying to restrict free enterprise and the big prizes. In the last 20 years the opposition to productive science with the proven track record of free enterprise has become heavily threatened by ignorant people who have little idea how science works, but who have “ambition” in the form of unrealistic dreams. They need to be identified and exposed for the frauds that they are. They are often green in politics, in both senses.
Geoff S
People like Ted Turner, are the anti-humanitarians that the climate cultists and far-left agendas are supporting…
… willingly !
Eat the rich.
Nah: eat your Greens!
I see what you did there.
Tony Thomas is my favorite Australian climate writer
I usually find his articles on a UK website the same day they are published on Australia’s Quadrant, or the next day.
Climate Scepticism – joint ideas under construction (cliscep.com)
If you have the link to a website that has been taken down, look for it in the Wayback Machine archive.org
The site comes up but some links do not work.
A link to Jerry Brennan, at the very bottom, says a little.
The Nenana Ice Classic works – I did not try others.
The Free Bacon online newspaper?
We seem to be fast tracking a civil war, economic collapse and a world war…. So he might get his wish. Though the green boondoggle has helped with economic collapse by running up huge debts.
Cannibalism would be tough though. Everyone is jacked on meds. I’d prefer to eat healthy. I’m not eating some Ozempic, adderall, 10x boosted, SSRI infused purple haired suburban climate nut.
To paraphrase Yogi Berra, predictions are hard … especially about the future.
It is no secret that the entertainment industry, of which Turner is part, has been pumping out dystopian melodramas set in the future for many decades. It is a staple product of the industry.
Just like politicians, entertainers understand that fear is a great motivator to gin up ticket sales, ratings points, and mouse clicks.
This is a nonsense prediction cos everybody knows you won’t be allowed to eat meat well before 2038.
“could be more plausible to eat insects and your pet cats and dogs.”
“Socialism always begins with a utopian vision for the brotherhood of man and ends with the people eating their pets”
-Toby Young
We have been warned.
I have a problem. Jane is nuts, Ted is nuts. But Jane dumped Ted so can’t be all bad. Words fail me.
Or did Ted take up his prediction because he was chasing Jane? No, I don’t know the timing, and don’t care.
If Hillary dumped Bill (or vice versa), would that make either of them better?
More likely one was getting in the way of the other’s ambitions.
There is a 2038 problem, but it’s not what Teddy predicted. 😉
Good grief, Charlie Brown.
How can so much wrong “information” fit in a single article? The only things right about it are that 32-bit dates will wrap around in 2038, and that earlier UNIX versions used 32-bit dates. Oh, and the epoch beginning in 1970.
Nobody has used int for times since the late 1990s, and time_t has been a 64-bit value for just as long.
My organisation checked for and corrected any 2038 susceptible code in 1999 while we had lots of Y2K money to splash about.
Oh, well, it might briefly get me out of retirement briefly in another decade or so, if the pay is good enough.
Thanks for pointing it out, Paul. It certainly is far more plausible than Ted’s zombie apocalypse.
My tech buddies and I get a kick out of this “Unix Epoch” problem. It makes us nostalgic for the Y2K days of a quarter-century ago. 😁
Ah, the good old days, before HP shot itself in both feet with their Itanic.
It was great fun playing with the various *BSD and Linux distros.
It’s a shame that the non-Intel architectures and most of the commercial UNIX versions have all but disappeared – Aches, Hockey Pucks, Slowlaris.
Sorry, got all misty eyed and way off topic there.
Ted Turner?
Hummmm . . . hey, I think I remember that name from somewhere in the distant past . . . wasn’t he famous for somehow being involved with Jane Fonda? The above article mentions something about that.
Ted Turner started out selling billboards. Jane started out being Henry Fonda’s daughter.
Then she took off her clothes in Barbarella. (Not sure if her Dad was proud of that or not.)
In 1998, Turner gave $1 billion to create the United Nations Foundation, a public charity to broaden U.S. support for the UN**. The agency now is in full support of the Sustainable Development Goals and the promise of the Paris Agreement on climate change. {**My underline: Americans’ views of the United Nations remain largely negative as a steady 58% say it is doing a “poor job” trying to solve the problems it faces, (Gallup poll) }
I would have been happy to apply that money to useful causes.
I understand that most of that $1 billion went toward suppressing the zombie apocalypse . . . you know, replacing it with the more benign COVID-19 pandemic. As a consequence, today one hears hardly a word about a predicted attack of zombies. But COVID-19 and its variants live among us.
I might have been misinformed, of course.
Is cannibalism worse than the wealthy developed nations telling people in poor nations they should not and can not use the resources our planet provides to make their lives better, the result being tens of millions will die from hunger, diseases and conflict that could all be avoided using common sense, free markets and a bit of honesty.
I don’t like Jane. However, I do kind of feel sorry for her putting up with Ted for 10 years.
Ted Turner and Jane Fonda you know you are about to hear a bunch of trash talk. No respect for either of them.
Record yields for almost all commodities (corn, soybeans and wheat) and prices are dropping.
Hanoi Jane.
Story Tip. Here’s the thing. The tiny tiny tiny increase in one of the scarcest gases in the atmosphere, CO2, has played its well documented part in increasing the productivity of the World’s agriculture. The fact that agricultural production has increased by more than 50% in a few short decades, famine and hunger is almost a thing of the past. It is way past time to ridicule the partisan “global warming” babble and cheer the massive improvement to life on earth because of CO2. 👌😄😂