How Is America Going To End?

We could be crushed by a climate strongman.

For the doomsayers of the 1950s, there was no doubt how America would end

There’s a danger in believing that our generation’s existential crisis will be the one that destroys us. In a Weekly Standard piece on “The Icarus Syndrome,” Jim Manzi notes the parallels between Britain’s 1860s “Coal Panic” and the modern disaster scenarios of peak oil and climate doom. But the fact that coal shortages and the Cold War didn’t vanquish the modern world doesn’t prove that climate-change fears are overstated. It just means we survived long enough for something else to destroy us. So, let’s assume we can’t stop climate change with policy, changed behavior, or by dumping iron into the ocean. How could global warming bring about the end of America?

Slate