IT IS almost exactly five years since the first Climate Scaremongers column. I wrote then about various attempts by the BBC, Met Office and others to ramp up fake scare stories in the run-up to the COP26 Climate Jamboree in Glasgow.
As I write this last column, it’s amazing how little has changed. The same silly scares continue to be peddled, even though they never come to fruition. Meanwhile, the next jamboree, COP31, heads to Turkey in November, with emissions higher than ever and most of the world still declining to give up fossil fuels. At Glasgow, Alok Sharma wept when he could not get an agreement to phase out coal, which is more than he did about pensioners who cannot afford to heat their homes because of Net Zero.
Meanwhile, the real world refuses to play ball with predictions of climate doom.
Far from melting away, as the ‘experts’ have constantly claimed, Arctic sea ice has remained stable for the last two decades. The ice cap in Greenland, which has been slowly retreating since the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-19th century, will take 25,000 years to disappear at the current rate. At the other pole, sea ice area in the Antarctic is the same as it was during the 1980s.
Hurricanes are not becoming more intense or frequent, a fact confirmed by the US Federal climate authorities.
Even the latest IPCC review admitted that the world’s weather is not getting more extreme in terms of floods, droughts or storms. The only trends they can detect are more intense heatwaves, which are countered by less intense cold weather.
Nor are weather disasters becoming worse in economic terms. The cost of these events has actually been declining in recent years when measured as a proportion of GDP.
Various apocalyptic predictions of sea level rise have not come to pass. Instead, sea levels around the world, and the UK in particular, are rising at the same slow pace they have been doing for more than a century.
The world’s production of food carries on rising year by year and those poor polar bears are doing fine as well, with three times as many of the perishers than there were in the 1960s.
In short, the world has carried on as it always has.
Politically, cracks are now appearing in the facade of Net Zero in this country as the public begins to wake up to the crippling costs involved. And all for little result: our emissions have barely fallen in the last decade or so, when imports are taken into account. The impact of websites such as TCW on public opinion cannot be overstated.
As a result, both Conservatives and Reform are pledged to scrap the Net Zero Act, though it seems unlikely that Kemi Badenoch’s backbenchers will ever allow her to do so. And, of course, realism is now taking control in Trump’s America.
We have constantly been told that China is leading the way on renewable energy, but that was just gaslighting from the climate establishment. Last year, China obtained only 6 per cent of its energy from wind and solar power, less than half the UK proportion.
Of course, the propaganda won’t stop. The Met Office still spews out fake prophecies of climate doom – Saharan temperatures and drowning cities, to name just two recent examples. Meanwhile, its increasingly hysterical reporting of a bit of lovely sunny weather has become less and less credible, based as it is on temperature measurements next to tarmac runways, car parks, roads or other artificial heat sources.
The BBC will no doubt carry on doing what the BBC has always done. But the public no longer believe it.
