The best way to kill off the Climate Debate is to do what Team-Alarm has done for years — stop talking about whether it’s real, and just project forwards, detailing the collapse. For twenty years others have been saying “the debate is over”. Now the tables are turning. The debate really is over, skeptics won, and what’s left is to watch it continue to unravel. Clive James argues that it won’t collapse like a house of cards… (an extract from the new IPA book Climate Change: The Facts 2017.)
To take a conspicuous if ludicrous case, Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will, shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues, it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a television camera. If the giant wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.
The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come true need not be enough to discredit him, just as American professor Paul Ehrlich has been left untouched since he predicted that the world would soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted mass death by extreme something.
The scientists who created this grand-swamp-of-failed-predictions should be the first ones to pay — after all, it’s their speciality, and not only have their predictions failed completely. But so far the payback for climate gullibility has not cost scientists much, but it has cost politicians:
When he left Copenhagen, Rudd scarcely mentioned the greatest moral challenge again. Perhaps he had deduced, from the confusion prevailing throughout the conference, that the chances of the world ever uniting its efforts to “do something” were very small. Whatever his motives for backing out of the climate chorus, his subsequent career was an early demonstration that to cease being a chorister would be no easy retreat because it would be a clear indication that everything you had said on the subject up to then had been said in either bad faith or ignorance. It would not be enough merely to fall silent. You would have to travel back in time, run for office in the Czech Republic instead of Australia, and call yourself Vaclav Klaus.
Climate Gullibility costs newspapers:
The print media, with notable exceptions, is on its way down the drain. With almost no personnel left to do the writing, the urge at editorial level is to give all the science stuff to one bloke. The print edition of The Independent bored its way out of business when its resident climate nag was allowed to write half the paper.
In its last year, when the doomwatch journalists were threatened by the climate industry with a newly revised consensus opinion that a mere 2C increase in world temperature might be not only acceptable but likely, The Independent’s chap retaliated by writing stories about how the real likelihood was an increase of 5C, and in a kind of frenzied crescendo he wrote a whole front page saying that the global temperature was “on track” for an increase of 6C. Not long after, the Indy’s print edition closed down.
Clive blames the media for propagating the pernicious myth (me too) but thinks this is an accident because people still hold the mainstream media as worthy of reading:
Few of those people have been reading the sceptical blogs: they have no time. If I myself had not been so ill during the relevant time span, I might not have been reading it either, and might have remained confined within the misinformation system where any assertion of forthcoming disaster counts as evidence.
Clive doesnt’ say it, but perhaps if the “free press” restores itself for a while to true freedom (where news outlets compete to scoop each other for the truth) — perhaps the next FakeScare will be harder to get going.
The effect of this mountainous accumulation of sanctified alarmism on the academic world is another subject. Some of the universities deserve to be closed down,…
If only, academia deserve to be forced to run on pure philanthropy. That might sort them out.
Clive warns against predictions:
Modern history since World War II has shown us that it is unwise to predict what will happen to ideologists after their citadel of power has been brought low. It was feared that the remaining Nazis would fight on, as werewolves. Actually, only a few days had to pass before there were no Nazis to be found anywhere except in Argentina, boring one another to death at the world’s worst dinner parties.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, when it was thought that no apologists for Marxist collectivism could possibly keep their credibility in the universities of the West, they not only failed to lose heart, they gained strength.
I would point out that there were few research grants for Nazi’s in 1946, but there is always an ocean of collectivist dollars for people researching the advantages of Big Government. Therein lies the boring truth… “follow the money”.
This is an exclusive extract from the essay Mass Death Dies Hard by Clive James in Climate Change: The Facts 2017 edited by Jennifer Marohasy, published next month by the Institute of Public Affairs.