With the breakdown of “expert” views on COVID – mask mandates are useless; vaccines do not stop transmission; the virus most likely came from that Wuhan lab – it’s time to get a terribly take a closer look at another major “solid science” pseudo-consensus: climate doomsday scenarios.
Climate change is real and human activity is contributing to it. But the exact mechanisms are nowhere near as well understood as accepted wisdom says — and the terror campaign hysteria over how to handle it, from Greta Thunberg and Al Gore all the way to Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul and most of the media, is complete anti-science.
Carbon fuels and the technologies that depend on them are essential to modern society: Pretending that governments can simply phase them out, allowing substitutions to exist is downright magical thinking – and policies based on unicorns and magic crystals can only bring disaster and suffering.
Yes, the hysteria also points to disaster and suffering. But that entails even more disconnection from reality (long documented by brave skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and others). Here just one few:
- At the 2021 UN Climate Summit in Glasgow, John Kerry said we had only nine years left to stop global warming. That followed Prince (now King) Charles’ claim in 2019 that we only had 18 months. Which contradicted AOC’s claim that same year that we only had 12 years left. Which went against the British Greens’ 2004 claim that climate change would wipe out all of human civilization by 2020. That timeline undermined the 1989 UN prediction that we had only three years left to win the climate battle – a major failure after the same body said in 1972 that there was only a decade left before time ran out.
- Think also of the climate refugees, that is, people who will supposedly be driven from their homes due to climate change. The Institute for Economy and Peace predicts as many as 1.2 billion climate refugees in 2050; but the cerebrum has as bad a record here as it did on doomsday. The United Nations provided 50 million such refugees not so long ago by 2010a massive migration flow that completely failed to materialise.
- As for individual extreme weather events, the record of “experts” is just as miserable. Despite endless predictions of raging wildfires and floods drowning the city, the overall death toll from such events has fallen drasticfrom about 500,000 worldwide in the 1920s to about 18,000 from 2012 to 2022.
- Don’t forget about the helpless bugs that like to heat up greens. Remember the disappearing polar bear, a cornerstone of Al Gore’s morally panicked masterpiece “An Inconvenient Truth”? Turns out their numbers are upwards from 2.5 to five times since the 1960s. The reportedly dying coral of the Great Barrier Reef is now holding out more coral than ever since records began.
Green fanatics, the numbers show, are as in the dark about the climate situation as Anthony Fauci et al are about COVID. Their “solutions” – ban gas stoves! Tesla’s mandate! eat mealworms! – are equally nonsensical, tapping into the imaginations and emotions of wealthy progressives rather than rationally striving to reduce the (very real) risks that climate change actually poses.
It’s time we stopped listening to them for good.
