“Why does the sun keep on shining? Why does the sea rush to shore? Don’t they know it’s the end of the world? ‘Cause you don’t love me any more.” — Skeeter Davis, 1963

I saw on the news this evening that the scientists who do the Doomsday Clock annually since 1947 have placed the hands at 100 seconds before midnight. That’s a graphic representation of what they believe is how close we are to destroying the human race.

Some call it “The Sixth Extinction.” And they blame human beings for getting us close to The End and perhaps eventually something akin to Slim Pickens riding that A-bomb down from the plane at the end of Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

I hear tell a lot of talk pro and con about climate change and I am now convinced there are three ways to frame the debate — the phony Y2K hysteria before the year 2000, the tobacco industry’s coverup of the health dangers of smoking cigarettes and the long-standing dilemma about believing or not believing in a higher power and its consequences for the latter.

Climate change is just like the Y2K hoax

How well I remember just two decades ago the hand wringing and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the millennium bug. I recall attending many municipal meetings in which councils of government were given somber updates on their electronic equipment being “Y2K compliant.”

There was this doomsday scenario outlined by the clocks turning over from 1999 to 2000 and wreaking havoc on our extensive computer systems, except Apple, of course. There were dire predictions of power blackouts and pandemonium.

I remember talking someone I knew out of suicide with the challenge to hang in here just to see if everything was going to go there in a handbasket. It didn’t.

Climate change skeptics like to use this as an example of exploiting fear to sell us something. After all, the only ones who benefitted from Y2K were those who sold us equipment to get Y2K complaint, even though we didn’t need to be.

“…And if you smoke, it’s just to death”

Jimmy Dean’s song from 1961 was one of the earliest warnings, three years before the U.S. Surgeon General declaring that smoking cigarettes likely will ruin your health and cause early death.

We’ve been told in years since that some tobacco company executives knew about the science and continued to market their product, all in the name of continuing to make profits. The debate raged for decades, with television being forced to drop cigarette advertisements in 1971 and health warnings being posted on cigarette packs.

Comedian Bill Hicks said he usually bought smokes that warned of causing low birth weight, which obviously didn’t apply to him.

Things got more serious much later when airplanes began banning smoking during flights, schools prohibited lighting up anywhere on their campuses and now even bars and restaurants are smoke free, despite losing business.

Those who insist climate change is real compare the public relations battle to the history of tobacco companies hiding the truth and funding smoking campaigns. These days the suggestion is that fossil fuel industries are funding “junk science” to combat warnings by those who support a Green New Deal.

In both of these framings, follow the money, the love of which is at the root of all evil.

What is the path to heaven or hell?

Climate change advocates say that if everybody takes the warnings seriously and make wholesale changes in lifestyles to reduce polluting of our air and water, at worst we will have a healthier and better planet on which to live.

That’s almost like Pascal’s Wager or Holden Caufield’s reasoning in The Catcher in the Rye for saying his prayers before he goes to bed at night. The thinking in this is that even if you don’t believe, you’re better off praying and doing what the Good Lord says, just in case you’re wrong and Judgment Day comes a-calling.

I suppose I won’t be around to see whether it’s been a hoax or the real deal. But I do worry, perhaps far too often about the future prospects for my grandson, who should have an excellent chance to live into the 22^nd century.