Reality catching up with Climate Charlatans

The group of people who steadfastly retain their faith in the CO2-as-cause-of-global-climate-catastrophe meme is growing smaller and smaller with the increasing release of new science demonstrating that CO2 is far from the bogey-compound it's made out to be.

This group now almost exclusively comprises publicly funded climate scientists, environmental activists who have hijacked the cause to suit their own political purposes and left wing politicians who see global warming as an ideal cause to increase government control in people's lives.

Professor Philip Stott provides a cogent analysis of the current state of play and why the Climate Faithful can expect to be disappointed:

Yesterday, a mere 35,000 protesters [by contrast, between 60,000 and 80,000 folk participated in the Peterloo protests of August 16, 1819] took to the streets of London to shout about - er, well - everything, from evil bankers to ‘global warming’ and the urgent need to support motor-car manufacturing. To say that the protest was both inchoate and incoherent would be to understate its naivety. Moreover, it took no fewer than 150 separate organisations, from trade unions to charities, to muster the 35,000 souls. Meanwhile, some 70,000 diehards trekked to Wembley to watch a fairly boring friendly match between England and Slovakia (at least England won 4-0). By contrast, in 2002, the Countryside Alliance persuaded over 400,000 people to march in defence of hunting the fox and country living, a figure confirmed by the Metropolitan Police; and just think of those 1819 Peterloo statistics when adjusted for relative population size. Moreover, the ‘global warming’ contingent yesterday was, as usual, a small, if rather noisy, runt. As ever, it was a case of empty vessels making the most sound.

35,000 is a pathetic turnout, really, especially when one considers that the G20 is being held and there are a more than usual number of protesters in town.

Al Gore describes Global Warming as a 'planetary emergency'. If this were true then why are there so few people who are out and demonstrating?

Consider this. If, by 2050, the planet is going to be a wasteland, or well on the way to being one, due to man's continued burning of fossil fuels then why are governments so blasé in their response? Why don't they ban motor car racing? Night time sporting events that require lighting? Tourism via air travel? Big plasma TVs (such as California is considering)? Or a raft of other 'unnecessary' items?

Imagine that a real planetary emergency existed; scientists had established with 100% certainty that a meteor would hit earth in 2050 with the potential to wipe out a large amount of life on earth.

Wouldn't there be more than 35,000 people marching in the street? Wouldn't the policy response of government be more meaningful than the failed cap-and-trade carbon scheme?

The Five Big ‘C’s

Sadly, I think that neither our politicians, nor the mainstream media like the BBC and The Times, have quite yet grasped how few people are convinced by the ‘global warming’ panic. I speak to many groups around the country, and I am constantly amazed (and encouraged, I might add) by the level of scepticism I encounter. Indeed, I am now more convinced than ever that, despite the hysteria and the manic depressive hyperactivity that will inevitably accompany the run up to the Copenhagen climate meeting in December, we are about to enter the Last Days of the ‘Global Warming’ Grand Narrative. It is surely crunch time for ‘global warming’, as it faces what I call the five Big ‘C’s:

The Credit Crunch: all over the world, important corporations are quietly withdrawing support for so-called ‘renewables’, while targets for carbon, and markets for luxuries like ‘organic’ food, are collapsing. We can no longer afford the indulgences of Green ‘global warming’ utopias. After all, which is the more dangerous? ‘Global warming’, or the massive reordering of the world economy folk demand in its name [“Not in my name!” cry I], likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes? Luckily, it won’t happen;

I've pointed out before that it's not just in the financial world that bubbles are created that need to be cleaned up by way of a recession. Good times are also when some of the world's dopiest ideas take hold. Global warming is just one of them.

The Coal Crunch: during the latest cold snap in the UK, wind power provided a derisory 0.4% to 0.6% of our electricity. Just guess what coal generated? Over 50%. All over the world, we are seeing a resurgence of coal, gas, and oil. There is no choice. The politicians have left the diversification of our energy supplies woefully late. Coal and gas will be Kings once again, and soon. As we read in today’s The Sunday Telegraph: “The Government gives the go-ahead for three new 1,000 megawatt gas-fired power stations in Wales. Each of them will generate more than the combined average output (700 megawatts) of all the 2,400 wind turbines so far built. The days of the ‘great wind fantasy’ will soon be over.” The fatuous jibe of the arrogant and snide UK Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, that opposing wind farms is as “socially unacceptable” as “not wearing a seatbelt”, will surely come back to give him severe political whiplash. No wonder politicians are held in contempt by so many;

Anyone who promotes wind power as the answer to the world's energy needs is an immoral, incompetent misanthrope.

The Colonial Crunch: the idea that the countries of the BRIC(K) [Brazil, Russia, India, China, and (Kenya)] are going to roll over and accept the capping of carbon, and to fall happily in line with the more damaging and expensive delusions of Europe over climate-change policy, is just political hogwash. In reality, of course, Europe itself is backtracking like mad. Developing countries will no longer be lectured to neo-colonially by former weakening colonial powers that constantly fail to swallow their own medicine;

But, but, but...aren't we 'showing leadership' to the rest of the world by slashing our economic wrists? Of course those countries aren't going to do anything. Their leaders would be hung, drawn and quartered in the public square by their own populations.

The Climate Crunch: especially damaging is the inexorable, and probably inevitable, fact that climate itself increasingly fails to fall compliantly into line with the virtual world of the climate modellers. This will severely undermine the whole credibility of the Grand Narrative with the public. In addition, attempts to scare the world sick, like the recent cobbled-together science meeting in Copenhagen, are even concerning some of the more serious scientists involved, like Mike Hulme, Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research: “We should let politics decide, without being ambushed by a chimera of political prescriptiveness dressed up as (false) scientific unanimity” - a most brave, and wise, comment. Further, certain of the scientific claims are so far fetched that they are just bringing down ridicule onto the basic science involved; and finally:

I'll go into broken record mode here: climate models have a zero percent successful prediction rate. This must be the case for three fundamental reasons: 1) they're the result of massive backfitting, which statistically invalidates them as predictive tools; 2) they do not include all of the variables involved in determining the climate; and 3) of the variables they do include they incorrectly weight their impacts leading to CO2 being the main driver of their projections.

The Credibility Crunch: in the end, I predict that the real killer crunch with the public will be the ever-widening credibility gap between the rhetoric of the politicians and their appalling hypocrisy and abject failure to be able to reduce CO2 emissions in any meaningful manner. As coal-fired power stations are re-established around the world [without carbon-capture-and-storage (CCS), of course]; as gas flourishes; as tar-oil sands are developed; as car ownership continues to grow; and as politicians, and pie-in-the-sky academics, fly to ever more conferences, the public will call time on the Great ‘Global Warming’ Charade. After all, people now have real problems to face, like losing their jobs and being unable to pay the rent or the mortgage.

Which is demonstrated by the increasing gap between the economy and the environment in public surveys when asked to choose which one governments should focus their attention on.

The ‘Global Warming’ crash is surely imminent. The lever that switched the signal to green, and the branch-line points to the main line, will cause a mighty collision, the fall out from which could be both terrible and fascinating to watch. The Fat Controllers had better be well prepared.

I must admit that I will feel a great sense of satisfaction when the Climate Curtain finally falls.

Politics always lags the public mood so it'll be another few years yet before that happens. I look forward to enjoying the nice bottles of red I've got stored in the cellar just for the occasion.

Parenthetically, the death of Climate Fascism will also weaken the power of the United Nations and that will be a good thing, as well.

(Nothing Follows)