The 'climate change' jihad

 Christian Whiton:

It’s silly season for climate change alarmists as the UN holds its autumn hootenanny in New York and we lurch closer to the annual “Conference of the Parties,” which meets in early November for the 26th year, this time in Glasgow, Scotland.

The elite media and political class assure us that we are now trapped in a climate crisis. This crisis is evidenced by the occurrence of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and other weather events that have been consistently observed here since explorers discovered the New World 500 years ago—and despite the fact that climate scienticians preached as recently as a few years ago that individual weather events should not be attributed to climate change.

The fake science pushed on the public by the government and media has worked somewhat. A Pew poll last year indicated 62% of adults think climate change is affecting their local community. Gallup, exhibiting the trademark arrogance and refusal to countenance disagreement that mark the climate debate, said that 64% of adults “acknowledge the scientific consensus” that human activities cause climate change. On the other hand, a poll in 2019 revealed that 68% of Americans would not pay $10 more per month on their electricity bill to combat climate change. The same poll showed that if you lower that amount to $1, then 57% of the public would pony up. We see that the American public as usual knows better than the elites. The climate is changing as it always has and carbon emissions are something we should probably curb gradually through nuclear power, natural gas, and renewables, but there is no “crisis.” Certainly raising the cost of energy, which would stunt human progress generally, is not the right answer.

Undaunted, our blue-pilled betters in Hollywood and New York are plunging ahead with alarmist propaganda. All of the major late night hosts on the leftwing networks emphasized climate on Wednesday night. It bombed. My colleague, Steve Yates, summed up this latest affront to comedy perfectly:

My kids can’t believe it, but there once was a time when young folks (ya know, the demo) stayed up late to be entertained. Now it’s late night Sesame Street for liberals. Keep pushing viewers to [Greg Gutfeld]. Cool with dads who grew up with free speech and real humor!

In the same way that Roger Ailes, creator of Fox News, made it big by discovering this small demographic called half of America, real comedians and satirists can strike a gusher if they ignore the woke mob. The appetite is out there. They’ll have to work around the mostly hopeless existing distribution channels, but that is becoming easier as barriers to entry wobble. (Conservatives could jumpstart this transition by ceasing to waste money on things like the Heritage Foundation, RNC, their college, or the local ballet, and instead fund either conservative or apolitical media companies, screenwriters, real writers, documentarians, videographers and producers, comedians, etc.)

How best to make a fact-based argument against climate change alarmists? Don’t do what I once did when a young man in a Washington, DC bar earnestly told me that he had embarked on a career of fighting climate change. I asked him if he knew that there were actually vineyards in England among the resident blue-painted savages when the Romans arrived or shortly thereafter, which tells us that the climate is always changing, and that he was wasting his life in fretting about the topic professionally. Neither he, nor my friend who was courting him seemed remotely impressed with my argument.

Far better at making the skeptical pitch are people like Bjorn Lomborg, a former Greenpeace activist who came around after studying the lack of evidence behind alarmist environmentalist claims, including those about climate. He has a new book out, “False Alarm,” which I haven’t yet read, but his 2001 opus, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” was always within arms-reach of my desk in my first stint at the State Department in the Bush administration. It was my privilege to work on speeches explaining to foreigners why we would not be party to the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s greatest Rube Goldberg Machine until it was supplanted by the Paris climate deal. Lomborg has a blog worth reading.
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I keep reminding folks that the climate change crowd has been serially wrong in its predictions of gloom and doom.  For at least the last 50 years they have annually claimed that we have only 10 years to change our ways to save the planet and yet here we are.  The poles are still not ice-free and New York City is still not underwater. 

See, also:

The ‘Science’ of Climate Change

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 The parade of imaginary environmental catastrophes during the last 70 years is very long. Here are some books predicting this or that environmental disaster: Our Plundered Planet (1948), Road to Survival (1948), Silent Spring (1962), Famine 1975! (1967), The Population Bomb (1968), The Limits to Growth (1972), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. Climate (2014), The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019).

Richard Lindzen, one of the most accomplished climate scientists in the world by virtue of his discoveries, does not have to kowtow to the global warming mob. In an essay, he pointed out that scientific data that challenge the global warming hypothesis are simply changed. He cites examples of how environmental extremists have infiltrated scientific organizations.

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And: 

History reveals the ridiculousness of 'climate change' hysteria