The tragi-comic climate doomsday cult 

World leaders have made complete fools of themselves at COP26

By Melanie Phillips

Ice fair on the river Thames, London, 1814

What would happen if a doomsday cult were to take over the world? Science fiction? No. It’s happened.

How else to explain the collective lunacy of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, an absolute farce where world leaders made complete fools of themselves?

There’s been much criticism of the hypocrisy of the event, with hundreds of private jets flying into Glasgow to hector the world about reducing carbon emissions.

Far, far worse has been the total erasure of rationality in the hysterical chorus that this was the “last chance to save the planet” — and the fact that no-one in mainstream debate has challenged this as utter unscientific garbage.

Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, said in his address:

It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.

Pledging once again to make Britain the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” he said people were

quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and an abruptness that is entirely man-made.

Was this the same Boris Johnson who in 2015 called the concern that global warming was causing rising temperatures a “primitive fear” which was “without foundation,” and who claimed in 2013 that wind turbines couldn’t “blow the skin off a rice pudding”? It was.

Speaker after speaker said COP 26 was the planet’s last chance to save itself from extinction through climate change. Do none of these people ever stop and wonder why this very same claim has been made over the years with just as much urgency —only to be made again when the climate apocalypse hasn’t happened or has been once more mysteriously postponed?

At COP26 on Monday, we were told we had until 2050 to save the planet. We were “quite literally” in the “last chance saloon,” said Prince Charles.

Addressing the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, Prince Charles had told delegates “our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control”. Which set the last chance saloon in 2016.

In 2018, climate scientists said there were 12 years to save the planet. Which took the last chance saloon to 2030.

In July 2019, the BBC’s environment correspondent Matt McGrath wrote there were now 18 months to save the planet since

the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.

McGrath reported:

“The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute.

The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.

“I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” said Prince Charles, speaking at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently.

Alas for the planet: COP26 has failed to achieve the binding commitment it sought from the world to keep global temperature rise below 1.5C through achieving “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050. So is it now all over for Life As We Know It? For the predictions at COP26 were blood-curdling and absolute.

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres insisted it was an “illusion” to think there has been enough progress reducing carbon emissions, and said mining for coal, oil and gas was like “digging our own graves”. The world’s addiction to fossil fuels was pushing humanity to the brink. “We face a stark choice: either we stop it — or it stops us,” he said.

Yet by the climate cultists’ owns lights, the planet is now irrevocably doomed to extinction because the world has failed to commit itself to do what it must do to save it. So it follows that there’s no point whatever in continuing any carbon restrictions at all.

That’s how stupid all this is.

Evidence of how this issue is frying people’s brains (if not the world) was provided by the mess that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, got himself into when he  compared climate change to the Holocaust. The Mail reported him saying:

“People will speak of them (current world leaders) in far stronger terms than we speak today of the politicians of the 30s, of the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany because this will kill people all around the world for generations, and we will have no means of averting it”.

Asked whether that meant failure to act on climate change would be worse than people allowing genocide to happen, he replied: “It will allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale.

“I’m not sure there’s grades of genocide, but there’s width of genocide, and this will be genocide indirectly, by negligence, recklessness, that will in the end come back to us or to our children and grandchildren”.

Oh dear. Realising virtually immediately that he had made a grievously inappropriate comparison and diminished the genocide of the Jews, the archbishop quickly apologised and retracted his words. But the fact that he had said them shows the extent to which “climate change” has simply unbalanced people and erased all sense of proportion and reason.

Shockingly, even the Queen has endorsed this mania. Praising the commitment of the late Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Prince William in

encouraging people to protect our fragile planet,

she said:

It is the hope of many that the legacy of this summit — written in history books yet to be printed — will describe you as the leaders who did not pass up the opportunity; and that you answered the call of those future generations. That you left this conference as a community of nations with a determination, a desire, and a plan, to address the impact of climate change; and to recognise that the time for words has now moved to the time for action.

The Queen was representing the government’s position — the role she is supposed to play. However, she seemed to be personally endorsing “net zero”. It’s bad enough that Prince Charles bangs on about this. The Queen, however, is supposed to be above politics, and we must never know what she thinks — a role she has played to absolute perfection throughout her long reign. Until now.

But then, a key part of this lunacy is the belief that “climate change” is above not just politics but all normal discussion— that there can be no argument against it. The issue is beyond debate because the science is said to be “settled”.

But science is never settled. The climate change cult is akin rather to religious faith — more than that, to the type of religious faith that brooks no dissent.

Yet this is absolute madness. As I wrote here — and on many occasions over the past three decades — there is no evidence that today’s climate is displaying anything other than the normal fluctuations in climate patterns over the centuries. The predictions of climate apocalypse are all based on dodgy computer modelling, laughably inconsistent measurements of temperature and outright falsifications of the evidence.

On The Daily Sceptic, Chris Morrison asks why journalists and politicians more sceptical about the “net zero” policy given that it’s based on the outputs of unreliable models. Good question! Morrison  writes:

The suggestion is an unproven scientific hypothesis based on the output of climate models that over a 30-year period have yet to record an accurate forecast among them. The vast majority greatly over-estimate global warming, yet are routinely presented as evidence for a hard green agenda that says the matter and science is beyond debate.

…Sceptics of the hypothesis are routinely traduced as ‘deniers’, although quite where the equivalence is between denying the proven fact of the Nazi Holocaust and questioning fanciful climate model predictions is hard to see.

To put it mildly. Moreover, in total contradiction of the core belief that rising CO2 levels inevitably and inescapably drive global temperatures upwards, satellite and surface measurements show that there has been no global warming for seven years.

Morrison goes on:

Of course the flatlining temperature should be well known to agenda-driven journalists, politicians, activists and academics, hence the recent move from global warming to Climate Crisis, then Climate Emergency and now Climate Breakdown. To back up these emotional claims, the emphasis has turned to ‘extreme’ weather – what we used to call bad weather. Heat, cold, rain or drought, everyone is a winner. Of course, cherry picking individual weather events and blaming it on long term changes in the climate is about as unscientific as you can get and not a scintilla of credible proof has yet been produced to back up the claims.

Almost daily, the headlines are filled with news from the Met Office’s gauge at Heathrow airport where record temperatures are to be found, helped by acres of concrete and black tarmac and the warm breezes from jet engines and numerous industrial air-con units. In 2019 the BBC highlighted one ‘record’ high temperature in one day in Antarctica and splashed it across all of its media outlets. The recent news that the South Pole had its coldest six month winter since records began was ignored. One-off event good, longer term trends bad.

…We don’t know for certain if humans cause all or most global warming by burning fossil fuel. But it seems highly unlikely. From around 1945 to the late 1970s, there was a fall in global temperatures and the almost unanimous fear was global cooling. Then the temperature rose for 20 years leading to the “settled” science of global warming. Now it is flatlining and possibly heading for cooling so Armageddon beckons with “extreme” weather.

Is CO2 to blame? Well, humans only contribute three per cent of all CO2 entering the atmosphere. If we destroy our industrial lifestyle by cutting our modest contribution, can we be sure the other 97 per cent will behave itself in a world that is naturally warming a little, as it has done countless times in the past?

A small test recently occurred when the Covid pandemic cut human global CO2 emissions by 7 per cent in 2020. It had no discernible effect on the overall rise, which seems likely to be a product of a gently warming natural climate.

On the basis of an uncertain hypothesis which has become an argument-free agenda for most members of the mainstream media, politicians, activists, state-sponsored scientists and subsidy-hungry industrialists, we are embarking on net zero with little idea, or seemingly care, of the disastrous effect it will have on human society across the globe. Almost every new technology to replace our existing cheap and reliable power has severe disadvantages and heavy costs. The warnings of green disaster have long been evident. In 2018 the long established Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland warned that the Scottish and UK Government green energy policy was likely to lead to severe electricity blackouts. Such events, it warned, “lead to death, severe societal and industrial disruption, civil disturbance and loss of production”.

Yet the public is mostly quite unaware of all this. The public won’t know about the recent work of the noted atmospheric scientist and renowned authority on radiation physics, Professor William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton, who has argued that the heating properties of CO2 fall as more is placed in the atmosphere.

They won’t know about Professor Antonio Zichichi, another emeritus physics professor, who published a letter in 2019, along with 70 Italian academics, warning about signing up to policies of uncritical reductions of CO2 with “the illusory pretence of governing the climate”.

Few know about all the many distinguished scientists who say man-made global warming theory is garbage — because no mainstream outlets will give them a platform. In 2006, the BBC decided to stop giving any air-time to climate change sceptics. The BBC is now no more than a propaganda outfit for the climate change cult. As Dan Wootton wrote in the Mail:

But most concerning has been a full-fledged BBC climate campaign masquerading as journalism.Perhaps that was best illustrated by the corporation’s climate editor Justin Rowlatt, an anti-Trump protestor whose sister is one of the Insulate Britain zealots arrested for blocking roads.

His “interview” with the prime minister amounted to a shouting match, with a clearly exasperated Boris Johnson helplessly turning to look at his advisers on a number of occasions.

In one exchange, Rowlatt yelled: “You’re going to the developing world saying ‘phase out coal’, at the same time as not ruling out a new coal mine in Britain. A new coal mine in Britain! We started the industrial revolution. We should close the mines!”

If anything embodies and signals the end of the age of reason it is this climate cult, in the grip of which the west has gone through Alice’s looking-glass into a surreal post-science, post-truth world.

No wonder Russia and China didn’t even bother to turn up to COP26. Their contempt for the west must be bottomless as they look upon its accelerating economic and cultural green suicide — and rub their hands.