The peril of overpopulation has been a favorite trope of doomsayers ever since Thomas Malthus published his spectacularly wrong essay on runaway population growth overwhelming the food supply in 1798. Malthusianism's debunking across the ensuing centuries hasn't deterred subsequent doomsayers of a multitude of flavors, nor has the appetite for such dystopian prediction waned. Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth came out in 1970, and became the best selling nonfiction book of that decade.
I call the de mode form of doomsaying warmism: the view that anthropogenic global warming will cause massive and irreparable harm to the planet across the next century, coupled with a singular and exclusive remedy. Its proponents, when they're ignoring all their past failed predictions, are demanding that humanity incur massive pain today in order to stave off the 80-years-from-now problems they are certain will bring ruin to Mother Earth.
The specter of overpopulation remains a far-too-common bugbear among the ranks of the greens, warmists, and various other Gaia worshipers, who see humanity as a blight on the planet rather than as the only thing that makes the Earth remotely relevant. They also peddle perpetual skepticism toward human innovations that make lives easier and better, as evinced by their desire to keep a large fraction of the populace in poverty rather than allow them the fruits of the modern energy economy.
That human ingenuity has been outpacing population growth since forever is of no interest to them. Nor is the fact that the First World has a major depopulation problem - birth rates are below replacement, meaning that populations are aging, and that pay-as-you-go social security systems will eventually be stretched to the breaking point.
It is gospel in their minds that there are too many people on the planet. So much so that I've seen laments that the world would be better off if a third of the human race died off far too many times (once is too many, but the actual number far exceeds that).
So, by extension, we get the sociopathic thinking that produced this article's artwork.
And behind this unsigned sentiment published on the World Wildlife Federation's website:
Though his methods may be difficult for environmentalists to stomach, ecologists believe it may be the first ever case of successful manmade global cooling.
Are you [REDACTED] kidding me?!?!?!
Genghis Khan's predations wiped out 40 million people, or about 10% of the Earth's thirteenth century population. Scaled up to modern numbers, that's be the equivalent of killing every single man, woman, and child in Europe. To "silver lining" such monstrosity, or diminish it as "difficult to stomach," is callous beyond belief, and speaks of a sociopathy that belies the paper-thin veneer of good intent regarding the rescue of the planet from human activity.
But, if they want to play that game, here's my take: Khan died in 1227. The Medieval Warming Period ran until about 1250 AD. It was followed by the Little Ice Age. Which, if we are to presume that humans cause everything, might suggest that Khan's massacres are responsible for centuries of ensuing human misery on top of the murderous destruction of his invading hordes.
Human misery is, it horrifies me to say, of little concern to the Greens. Who, by the way, are first-world enough and wealthy enough to suffer little more than inconvenience from the prescriptions they've written for the world.
Want further evidence of this Green monstrosity? Consider the opposition to GMO crops, to Golden Rice, to DDT, to modern agricultural practices that feed more and more with less and less land, and to the utter indifference at the millions who die preventable deaths every year from their obstinacy.