It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.
But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom-laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realized the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, canceled, blacklisted, called a “denier” and generally deemed evil. In 2010, in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.
The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future global warming. They changed the name to “climate change” so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heat waves. Then they inflated the language to “climate emergency” and “climate crisis,” even as projections of future warming came down.
“I’m talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,” said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion in 2019, though the science says no such thing. “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,” tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after that decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.
Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming. Journalists always love exaggeration.
We may be reaching peak Blair’s Law here: “Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.’” QED:
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