Every age has its pessimists. The ’60s had Rachel Carson and her overblown manifesto Silent Spring, which foretold of the poisoning of the planet by man. The ’70s were influenced by the radical ideas of Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Bomb envisioned “hundreds of millions of people” starving to death in the next decade. Neither authors’ visions of disaster came true. Despite their spectacular failures, both Carson and Ehrlich remain heroes of apocalyptic leftists. Perhaps more stunning still is the fact that the enduring mythos of impending doom that they and others like them created retains its potency in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The myth of doom is a triumph of perception over reality.

Frank Miller’s graphic novel, 300, which appeared in theaters on March 9, 2007, put the climactic battle between the ancient Persians and the Spartans on the big screen with startling special effects. The film, now available on DVD, promised to be a heavily stylized visual bacchanalia to be sure, but, in its subject matter and its timing, it promised to convey a message both about our understanding of the ancient past and our understanding of current events. With regard to the ancient history, it gets a significant element completely wrong.

Anyone growing up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember the scare stories about forests denuded as a result of toxic acid rain. The most famous of those scare stories centered on the famous Adirondacks.

If the worst was to be believed, acid rain would eventually make Saranack, New York, look like the surface of the moon.

Over the years, the acid rain scare story was gradually supplanted by the all-encompassing fear of global warming. But even as recently as 2000, CNN was still reporting that the Adirondacks were in danger. On April 19 of that year, the news channel reported on its website: "A new federal study finds that acid rain still devastate lakes in the Adirondacks, 10 years after Congress amended the Clean Air Act to deal with the problem."

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's documentary on the threat posed by global warming, took home two Oscars at the recently held 79th annual Academy Awards. The Academy awarded the filmmakers with the Oscar for best documentary and gave another to singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge for the song "I Need to Wake Up" that was used in the film.

A monk or a priest or an emissary. “I wonder what I have become this day,” the man in the garb of a priest thought as he walked the muddy path between rows of shoddy hovels. Ulfilas, the Bishop, scratched his head and mused that, as a younger man, he had once had a full head of hair. God had compensated him, he thought, giving him a full, thick beard.

God had also seen fit to challenge him. The son of Cappadocian parents who had been captured in a barbarian raid and carried off, he had been raised amongst those barbarians, the Goths, who lived beyond the Danube River. Among them he was raised to manhood, and afterwards, as their Bishop, he brought them Christianity, albeit of the Arian variety. All had been well, it seemed, until recently. The Roman town in which he now resided with a small band of Goth immigrants was becoming palpably nervous. Traders returning from Gothia told tales of disaster that some thought impossible. If they were to be believed, the Gothic armies, unmatched in military valor, had been routed in battle by the mysterious and terrifying Huns far to the east and were in headlong retreat. Whole families and villages, upon hearing of the disaster, had packed what belongings they could and abandoned their homeland. There would be no safety, they thought, unless they could reach Roman territory.

The scene is nothing short of apocalyptic. A fleet of fishing vessels, seven or eight in all, lies immobile in the desert sands of central Asia. Most of the ships are in tight formation, seeming to jockey for position in the center of a curious channel cut through the desert. The fleet is silent and ghostly, floating in an ocean of sand where once they plied the blue-green waters of an immense inland sea. At one time these ships hauled tons of fresh fish to local canneries. Now they serve as monuments to one of the greatest ecological disasters of all time.

The landlocked fleet is all that remains of the vibrant fishing industry that was once supported by central Asia’s great Aral Sea. As recently as 1960, the salty Aral covered a surface area larger than that of Lake Michigan. Prior to the 1980s, fisherman brought in an average catch of almost 40,000 tons per year of pikeperch and other commercially useful fish. That fishery has disappeared just as quickly as the lake itself. According to data from the University of California-San Diego, today the Aral Sea has lost as much as 75 percent of its former volume and its surface area has shrunk by 50 percent. Imagine not being able to see Lake Michigan from Chicago and you have some idea of what it is like to live in one of the Aral Sea's former port cities like Moynak or Aralsk.