We need to stop shrieking about a ‘climate emergency’

January is the ideal month for gaining a sense of perspective. I’m increasingly convinced that the “climate emergency” is another social mania we’ll look back on with: “J-eez, what was that about?” Why?

The paradigm displays the classic anthropocentrism of our era. As organized religion declines, we replace God with humanity. Arrogating to our species the power to dial global temperature up or down is typically arrogant (see: pride, goeth, fall). Claiming that something is all your fault is as vain as claiming it’s to your credit. Regarding “the planet” as a frightened fluff ball that requires our protection is the ultimate hubris. “The planet” can squash us like bugs. Or with bugs, which sounds especially gross.

Scary climate predictions are made by the kind of computer models that brought us the Covid hysteria

If technically secular, the belief system is suspiciously Christian. You know, all that feeling guilty for living and atoning for our sins. All that renunciation of pleasure (holidays, steak); better still, all that ruination of other people’s pleasure. Whether we can control the climate, humans can unquestionably control each other, and this movement relishes tyranny. It’s focused on what we may not do (fly, use a gas cooker). For any priestly class, despoiling other people’s fun provides its own dark joy.

Starting something doesn’t mean you can stop it. Even if we attribute a slight post-industrial rise in temperature entirely to human agency, we can’t necessarily reverse the trend. When you drop a brick from an overpass and then regret it, you still smash some poor windshield.

Big picture, it’s unusually cold. Geologists estimate that most of the last 500 million years were much hotter than today. During the 300,000 years of human existence, the temperature has repeatedly peaked to present-day levels without anyone refueling an SUV.

If our species can’t adapt to tiny changes in average temperature, we’re doomed anyway. On a graph of reconstructed planetary temperatures, the one configuration you never see is a flat lateral line. Temperature doesn’t plateau for our convenience. The climate is always changing without our help. We should be grateful it’s not getting colder instead.

We’re constantly told the world’s about to end, and then it doesn’t. Holes in the ozone, acid rain, overpopulation; in the 1970s, we were all going to freeze to death. The soothsayers are never held accountable for having been wrong. OK, apocalypticism has become a genre of entertainment. But this time the stakes are enormous — with spiraling energy costs and the destruction of manufacturing, nothing less than western economic collapse. We keep crossing ostensible red lines beyond which all is lost, and then, embarrassingly, we’re fine. So the catastrophizers just draw a new red line. How many times does Charlie Brown run at Lucy’s football? How many times do we believe small barnyard fowl who cluck about the sky falling? Is there some deep human need for pending disaster?

Climate propagandists lie. They take surface temperature readings at Heathrow airport. They refuse to cite less distressing satellite readings. They attribute single extreme weather events to climate change without supporting data. They play on the fact that up close, all natural disasters seem like the worst ever. They suppress good news, such as the recovery of the Great Barrier Reef and the fact that hurricanes have not grown more frequent — only reporting the “hottest July on record” without noting when the “record” goes back only to 1940.

Climate alarmism appeals to young people’s weakness. It’s a Get Out of Life Free card that legislates against ambition. Deciding there’s no reason to raise children if we’re all going to die spares them a lot of bother, though also love, satisfaction and purpose.

The solutions won’t work. What with renewable intermittency, rare earth insufficiency, the short lifespan and poor recyclability of turbines and solar panels, and impractically astronomical transition costs, the purported solutions are feeble if not silly.

The solutions aren’t meant to work. Rather than calling us towards some sunny upland, the emotional engine of this mania is angry, hostile, spiteful and nihilistic. Its prophets don’t expect to succeed. Maybe the climate cult spurns nuclear because nuclear can generate reliable zero-emission power at scale. The preferred solutions are half-hearted and designed to fail. The real goal seems to be a glorious, climactic self-destruction.

The science is sketchy. CO² is 0.04 percent of the atmosphere. The gas reaches a saturation point where its heat-trapping capacity diminishes. Increased CO² has further greened the planet, which is observable from satellites. More plants = good for us = duh. Historically, CO² has risen after temperature rises. Historically, the proportion of CO² in the atmosphere right now is if anything dangerously low. Scary climate projections are generated by the kind of computer models that brought us the Covid hysteria. Shudder.

The folks issuing eco edicts aren’t engineers and don’t know what they’re doing. EVs only break even on carbon emissions after 50,000 miles and, all told, may not reduce emissions at all. But posturing politicians have no interest in reality.

The people who promote this stuff promote lots of other stuff that’s unbelievably dumb. Broadly, this is the same crowd that believes meritocracy is racist and men can be lesbians. They can’t be trusted.

The next catastrophe is seldom what we worried about beforehand. Previous to 9/11, only a few unheeded voices warned us about Islamist terrorism. Me, I anguish over international monetary collapse, in which case your money’s probably safe. We reliably fear the wrong disaster.

It’s true that fossil fuels are finite. They’re getting harder and more expensive to extract. At some point, an energy transition will be compulsory. But this process will only pay off if led by bottom-up technological breakthroughs rather than clumsy, ignorant top-down government.

My prediction, then: net zero goes bust well before Britain’s secretary of state for energy security and net zero Ed Miliband’s ludicrous 2030 deadline for a clean energy grid — along with its subsequent blackouts. Expect a scramble of backtracking. Ed’s reduction of the goal from 100 to 95 percent renewable energy five years hence was just the beginning.

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