Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent COP summit in Belém, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. [emphasis, links added]
It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible.
By failing to pledge a cut in fossil fuels, COP achieved less than nothing; the venue caught fire, the air-conditioning malfunctioned, and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper.
Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he conceded that global warming “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” after he closed the policy and advocacy office of his climate philanthropy group, is just the latest nail in the coffin.
In October, the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) shut down after JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs led a stampede of other banks out the door.
Shell and BP have returned to being oil companies, to the delight of their shareholders. Ford is about to cease production of electric pickups that nobody wants. Hundreds of other companies are dropping their climate targets. Australia has backed out of hosting next year’s climate conference.
According to analysis by the Washington Post, it is not just Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democratic Party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president last year.
The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European Parliament has voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping fight climate change.
It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers, and research grants.
Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, and falling sperm counts.
Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored, or in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.
But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming.
I first wrote a doom-laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realized the effect was real, but the alarm was overdone; the feedback effects were exaggerated in the models.
The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy, I was abused, canceled, blacklisted, called a “denier”, and generally deemed evil.
In 2010, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe, so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.
The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future global warming.
They changed the name to “climate change” so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heat waves. Then they inflated the language to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” even as projections of future warming came down.
“I’m talking about the slaughter, death, and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,” said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion in 2019, though the science says no such thing.
“A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,” tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018.
Five years later, she deleted her tweet and shortly after that decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.
Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense, but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming.
Journalists always love exaggeration. Capitalists were happy to cash in. Politicians welcomed the chance to blame others: if a wildfire or a flood devastates your town, point the finger at the changing climate rather than your own failure to prepare.
Almost nobody had an incentive to downplay the alarm.
Read rest at The Spectator World
