Climate Crisis at the Telegraph

At the Telegraph, the otherwise usually reliable and interesting Tim Stanley has written (if it was him) a terribly boring tract about climate change.

“I’m coming to the view that the Online Right is going wrong, eschewing compassion or charm, talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance”, he writes. "Take climate change. This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.”

Stanley, it seems, wants a Groundhog Day climate debate, to reset what he calls the “online right” back to the hug-a-husky, look-I’m-on-a-bike vapidities of the mid-2000s, all the way through to the Greta nonsense. But haven’t we done that?

Just as the Conservatives seem to be beginning to own up to the mistakes they made, and now that Reform are offering an alternative, such that British politics may at last be emerging from the toxic consensus that has dominated at the expense of democracy since the last century, we hear that:

Climate change is real – and the Right needs to get serious about it
The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows

Stanley organises his view of the “online right” “eschewing compassion or charm” and “angry irrelevance” around a single comedian’s comments. And he contrasts these emotional shortcomings with European wildfires, which he claims are made “infinitely worse” by climate change.

To quote the podcaster Konstantin Kisin’s speech to the Oxford Union in 2023, the future of climate change will not be decided by wee Britain with its 2 per cent of global emissions but “by poor people in Asia and Latin America who couldn’t give a s--- about saving the planet… because they are poor”. That speech, witty and compelling, was a turning point in my disillusionment with the Online Right. It sounded so certain and correct, yet I knew it to be wrong.

That comedian is admittedly out of his depth, and the predominance of such individuals and events — rather than a process of reflection on its failures, towards a better set of ideas and a more coherent right-of-centre way forward than celebrities prancing around on stage — are indeed indicative of low standards and razzmatazz taking the place of serious work. I don’t think it’s enough to have people make statements to receptive audiences at expensive conferences. And it’s not enough to have rallies and fireworks. I’ve bemoaned recently the over abundance of ‘slop’, which is becoming extremely tiresome.

But climate change propaganda always was false and emotionally manipulative. Dying polar bears, falling walruses, massively exaggerated prognostications coming to nothing. And now wildfires, according to Tim... Which globally show a very significant decrease, not increase. In fact, according to one data source, European wildfires are at a historic low.

Even if it were not, the point would be lost on him that land use in Europe is perhaps the most regulated in the world, and so if the region seemingly bucks the global trend, we should begin attempting to understand why by looking at policy. We should note the same in Australia, Canada, and California -- places notable for their policies rooted in extreme green ideology and for their wildfires, where such an argument might be more plausible.

It turns out that wildfires are natural phenomena (where they are not arson, which he does at least admit) and are exacerbated by green policies allowing fuel load to build up on forest floors because that is more ‘natural’. In the same way, UK regulators decided that no flood management is the most ‘natural’ form of flood management.

And so on, and so on. You can do this for every seemingly ‘natural’ disaster that is “linked to” climate change. And it turns out that there’s very little evidence of such a thing -- poor decisions are behind every such catastrophe, which simply aren’t getting worse. Here my discussion with Dr Calum Nicholson while back, in which we take apart the concept of a ‘natural disaster’.

Podcast 5. What is a 'climate migrant'?

·

August 25, 2024

Apologies for the radio silence… I have been moving home and doing the endless repairs on my new house. And I’ve been doing absolutely tons of work — all climate related, which shall be coming online later this year. It is also much harder to book guests in this, the holiday season. Normal service is being resumed…

Back in the Telegraph, Stanley explains that “we’ve endured the three worst harvests on record in the last six years”. Well, yes, Tim. Have you seen what they’ve done with energy prices? Have you seen how much fertiliser — which we no longer make — now costs? Have you seen what has happened to water infrastructure, despite a very significantly larger population?

“Three worst harvests” and “infinitely worse” are highly emotional terms, and owe little to any context or fact. Agriculture, claims Stanley, “is threatened by a phenomenon that some bloggers still think is a hoax”.

No. Agriculture is threatened by green politics. Indeed, many farmers have been pointing out that the destruction of agriculture, through economic policy and regulation is deliberate. Greens have been quite open about it, claiming that agriculture is the one of the leading causes of global warming. In the Netherlands, it contributed to a radical new realignment of politics. Many green “intellectuals” (such as they are) openly call for the end of agriculture altogether, arguing for lab-grown everything. Consider this, for example, from our favourite George…

It sounds like a miracle, but no great technological leaps were required. In a commercial lab on the outskirts of Helsinki, I watched scientists turn water into food. Through a porthole in a metal tank, I could see a yellow froth churning. It’s a primordial soup of bacteria, taken from the soil and multiplied in the laboratory, using hydrogen extracted from water as its energy source. When the froth was siphoned through a tangle of pipes and squirted on to heated rollers, it turned into a rich yellow flour.

This flour is not yet licensed for sale. But the scientists, working for a company called Solar Foods, were allowed to give me some while filming our documentary Apocalypse Cow. I asked them to make me a pancake: I would be the first person on Earth, beyond the lab staff, to eat such a thing. They set up a frying pan in the lab, mixed the flour with oat milk, and I took my small step for man. It tasted … just like a pancake.

Yum!

As if channelling George, Tim’s article gets even worse. “Every year, an average of 110,000 people are displaced by natural catastrophe in Bangladesh alone”, he claims in a passage about the effect of global warming on developing economies.

It’s one of the claims that I examine my short film “Why there is no Climate Crisis”…

I show that Bangladesh’s population and GDP, among other metrics have improved radically in recent decades. That would not be the case, if there were a “climate crisis” of any kind. Bangladesh suffers less from weather than it ever has previously. But it is green ideology -- and green ideology alone -- that makes Bangladesh appear to be a victim of anthropogenic climate change.

Here’s an older film, looking at how simulation becomes ever more ‘real’ than reality itself, leading even scientists to become trapped in green ideology.

And here’s the problem… The actual facts — i.e. what can be measured — turn Tim Stanley’s emotional appeal for “compassion” upside down.

If concern for others, for the world, or for the future, is expressed through concern about global warming, then “compassion” is turned into conceited callousness. The green agenda would lock billions of people into the poverty that has characterised their existences, green ideology having the habit of finding picturesque “charm” (to use his own term) in feudalism and rural idyll. And it would do this to service the vanity of western planet-saving super-heroes, their ailing political institutions, and journalistic egos — all in the service of the now-anti industrial billionaire grantors of the green blob.