As I write this, sitting in my Susitna Valley office, it's -9 outside. Honestly, in south-central Alaska, even the most hardened sourdoughs wouldn't mind a little global warming right now. The climate will do what the climate will do, and we can comfort ourselves knowing that the environment, yes, has been in a warming spell. It began with the receding of the last major glaciation and will probably continue for a few thousand years more.
That's a good thing. Crop yields are increasing. CO2, it turns out, is good for plants. Human casualties and property destruction due to natural disasters are down.
In fact, many of the arguments the scolds use to try to induce panic over anthropogenic climate change are just falling apart, and the recent United Nations COP30 conference gave us a few stunning examples of how the scolds are doubling down on stupid, trying to keep up the panic. Watts Up With That scribe Vijay Jayaraj has some examples.
The panic is real among climate alarmists as their scaremongering of the past three decades loses its power over a public awakening from a spell induced by a corrupt political class and sustained by a compliant business community and media.
So, what is the response of those holding onto the fantasy that humankind is driving the planet to an overheated apocalypse and that politicians who struggle to manage public services could control something as complex as the climate? They attempt to spice up warmed-over lies with more outrageous ones.
This theater of pathetic prevarication was encapsulated perfectly in humid, overcrowded halls of the recent COP30, the 30th version of the United Nations’ annual climate conference. Year after year, celebrities of politics, business and entertainment fly to exotic locations, burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel, to admonish working people who insist on driving to their jobs and to pressure the Third World to accept energy poverty for the sake of a world that theoretically might be cooler by a degree or two. The hypocrisy is matched only by the thirst for power and other people’s money.
Those halls, we might note, are at the end of a pristine new four-lane highway cut through the supposedly endangered rainforest, so that the attendees could zip from the airport to the venue in their air-conditioned limousines without being troubled by the necessity of passing through the town. Between that and all the private jets, one shudders - shudders, I say - to think of the carbon footprint this event put forth.
And, yes, the panic was palpable.
Al Gore, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stood before cameras warning of imminent catastrophe, never acknowledging that previous predictions had failed to materialize.
Here is a sampling of falsehoods:
- The Lie: “The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable and accelerating.” The Truth: Global demand for oil, gas, and coal is at an all-time high. The “transition” lives only in press releases of Western governments. The rest of the world is drilling and mining.
- The Lie: “Climate action creates jobs and wealth.” The Truth: “Green mandates destroy industry.” Look at Germany’s deindustrialization and the wreckage of the automotive sector in the U.S. and Europe. “Green jobs” are subsidized mirages that vanish the moment government subsidies disappear.
- The Lie: “We are running out of time.” The Truth: “We have heard this for 50 years and counting.” In the 1970s, it was a coming ice age. In the 2000s, it was Arctic ice that would be gone by 2013. The timeline of doom makes the promise of a used car salesman look like a Boy Scout’s pledge.
The really big lie is that there was any real danger to being with.
Look, as I'm continually saying and writing, especially on the issues of science, climate, and energy, we solve today's problems with tomorrow's technology. If our warming earth ever does start to cause problems for people in the warmer parts of the planet, then the answer isn't less reliable, less affordable energy. It's more reliable, more affordable energy, and new technologies to produce it - small modular reactors, maybe even fusion if anyone can ever make that work.
Some of us are old enough to remember Midwestern summers, hot and muggy, when almost no one had air-conditioning in their homes. One would shower at the end of the day and dry off, only to be sticky again moments later. Modern air-conditioning changed that, and this was made possible by reliable, affordable electricity. Not only homes but businesses and even hospitals were affected.
And, of course, all of those dire predictions from the scolds have this way of never happening; the scolds are beginning to sound a lot like an unhinged sandwich-board-wearing nut standing on a street corner and predicting the end of the world every alternating Tuesday, and of course being wrong every time - yet he keeps shouting.
Read More: Failed Prophecies Are Now Sinking the Climate Cartel
Primary Energy Fallacy: The Flawed Math Behind Green Hype
Here's the onion:
Gore attacked President Donald Trump’s move away from the cultic climate movement, knowing that without the checkbook of the U.S. taxpayer the U.N.’s redistribution schemes are dead.
And there you have it: The money. It's always about the money. Mr. Gore has made a boodle peddling idiotic carbon credits to the rubes. There's a lot of money in radical activism, for some reason or another, and a lot of that money goes somehow into the pockets of the activists, whether the issue is either climate change or Black Lives Matter.
Maybe this COP30 will be the last. But the scolds, being scolds, won't stop. If this cause completely falls apart, which it looks to be doing, then they'll just find something else to annoy us over.
