Former climate activist Michael Shellenberger has condemned alarmists for “terrorizing school children” with false claims that the world is about to end.
The life-long environmentalist has given Sky News host Chris Kenny a lengthy interview about his decision to speak out against the alarmist rhetoric which he says is creating anxiety in young people.
“I have a 14-year-old daughter and she is fine because I’ve explained the science to her (but) her friends are very alarmed,” he said.
“Adolescents these days have a lot to worry about, anxiety and depression are rising among everyone really, certainly adolescents, and I thought it was not right to be terrorizing school children and giving them false information.”
Shellenberger – who has been invited to be an expert reviewer to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – maintains that climate change is occurring but says it is not a “catastrophic threat”.
He says the science has been hijacked by a “handful” of activist scientists who are spreading “science fiction”.
“The majority of scientists are not activists, there are actually only a handful of scientists who feel the need to terrify people,” he said.
“I don’t think this is really that complicated, we need to lift everybody out of poverty, and we need to do our best to preserve natural places and things have just spiraled out of control.
“This climate change thing has just got too crazy.”
Shellenberger said he had noticed a “dark tradition” of anti-human rhetoric spilling from climate change activists, including views that humans were a “cancer” or a virus.
In the second half of the interview – which will air on Sky News Australia on the Kenny Report at 5 pm on Tuesday night – Shellenberger also weighs into whether climate change was a significant cause of the Australian bushfires.
“Yes there is evidence of that,” he said. “However, It is massively outweighed by two factors; the accumulation of wood fuel in the forests and the development of new houses near forests.
“Is there some contributing role of climate change? Yes. Is it very significant? No.”
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He’s still tarring all forestry and fuel-wood with the one brush, however. From a conservation and natural resource management perspective, both are far more nuanced than his understanding of the matter.
First World forestry was the first hate of the environmentalist movement and that’s not something that they relinquish easily.
“(T)he accumulation of wood fuel in the forests” leading to greater fire casualties is a problem caused directly by this hate.
The Union of Concerned Scienists is just a handful of Scientists who have mostly gone political an push Fear and Politic over Rational Thinking over Common Sense