This article about “climate fatigue” by Francesco Grillo is one of the better arguments I have seen in the Guardian on the topic: “Climate fatigue isn’t a sign that Europeans are in denial – it’s a sign of their fear”. It starts very much in the usual fashion:
The first step is to recognise that climate fatigue in Europe has little to do with Europeans being less concerned about the impact of volatile climate systems. Indeed, people feel the effects directly and terrifyingly as the continent is increasingly battered by heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods.
I am suspicious of that claim that the decline in European popular support for climate measures “has little to do with” many Europeans ceasing to believe in the seriousness of the claimed coming catastrophe. It has lots to do with it, obviously. If the people of Europe still held the same level of belief in the imminence and severity of CAGW (Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming) as they did five years back, their support for drastic measures to head off this disaster would also be at the same level as it was then. They don’t and it isn’t. Their increased scepticism is justified. A great many predictions of doom have failed to come to pass. Click on the word “CAGW” to see relevant past posts by me and others on this blog going back more than two decades. I will restate my own opinion: that anthropogenic global warming probably is occurring but at nothing like the apocalyptic level claimed. Angela Merkel would have been better off saying, “Wir schaffen das” about climate change.
However honesty compels me to say that some of the decline in belief is motivated by people finally having twigged that the bill for Net Zero will not ultimately be paid by the infinitely absorbent corporations and governments of legend, but by them. When people drop a luxury belief because it ceases to be a luxury they can afford, they do advance towards reason, but not by means of reason. Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for. It’s not like the prophets of doom are immune from motivated reasoning themselves. The point is that Europeans have realised, correctly, that if we actually do all that the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. If we do a quarter of what the Greens want us to do, it will impoverish us. That would be bad, even from – or especially from – the point of view of people worried about climate change. Impoverished societies cease to care about the environment.
This is why I said that Mr Grillo’s article is one of the better ones I have read in the Guardian. They are not usually so honest about the cost:
But people are also terrified of what they believe will be the cost to individuals of the required energy transition. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the global transition to net zero will require additional investments in fixed assets of $3.5tn a year until 2050. That’s about a quarter of all the tax raised worldwide. There is still no convincing mechanism for financing this in ways that reassure families, individuals, small firms and farmers that they are not going to be bankrupted. Increasingly, ordinary citizens know that many of them will have to foot crippling bills for such things as renovating homes to make them comply with energy efficiency rules.
And
… in a country such as Italy, more than half of existing homes need to be adapted to the new standards. Italian families would have to pay out about €500bn over the next decade, an average of €40,000 per affected household, according to a study done for the Vision thinktank I am affiliated to. No wonder many families, impoverished by years of economic stagnation and more recent inflation, view the green deal not as a transition to a more just model of distributed energy production, but as a waking nightmare.
The fact that the net zero nonsense was impossible and unaffordable was always obvious to anyone who was paying attention. To me that isn’t the main issue. The main issue is that the whole CO2 will destroy the world meme is, and always was, based on junk science.
“…the continent is increasingly battered by heatwaves, wildfires, storms and floods.”
This is simply a lie. There have always been heatwaves, wildfires and floods, the claim that they are increasing is simply false. Even if the claim were true, the claim that the entire problem is caused entirely by CO2 would still be absurd.
If Europeans are finally waking up to the fact that they’ve been had, all I can say is it’s about bloody time.
Hear, hear!
I suspect (hope?)this will quickly pivot to attacking The Science to avoid admitting to themselves that they’re too cheap to fork out to Save The Planet.
Tony Heller, Mark Steyn and many others have shown, for years now, that the data is systematically faked – that both some scientists and government agencies are guilty of blatant data tampering – or even just making data up. And that the motivation is a political agenda of social control and international governance. That there is such an agenda was openly admitted by David Rockefeller and others as long ago as the Rio Conference of 1992.
The scientific truth, for example on historical temperature readings, does not seem to be a matter – as this has become a cult, a substitute for religion.
Quite literally – for example Pope Francis recently hosted a group of children in the Vatican, the “pre selected questions” (yes that is a quote – the “questions” were pre selected) were all about the Green agenda, and Francis gave the “politically correct” replies – the Gentleman then led the children, not in Christian prayer, but in a Nature (Climate) Chant.
People who do not follow the new religion, and “cling to” (Barack Obama’s words) the old religion, get removed – as Bishop Strickland just found out. As Francis is not the exception among the leaders of the “mainline” churches – he is the norm. The “New Atheists” argued that if people rejected Christianity (as the leaders of many the “mainline” or “mainstream” churches have) they would become models of rationality – but, long before them, G.K. Chesterton pointed out that what tends to happen to people who reject Christian “dogmas”, is not that they become perfectly rational “persons of reason” – but rather they become crazed, desperate to find something, ANYTHING to believe in – hence the “Social Gospel”, “Liberation Theology”, “World Governance” and, now, the Climate Cult.
My wife and I have been rereading Atlas Shrugged aloud to each other. And I was struck by a chapter in Part Two where the planners are discussing their new policies, and one of them sums them up as “Well, this is the anti-industrial revolution.” Only to be promptly told, “We can’t say that to the public!”
Problem, how do we get rid of it? The Conservatives, Labour and LibDems are all signed up to imposing Green Poverty good and hard.
Followers of Mark Steyn will be aware that for more than 10 years he has been eagerly awaiting his day in court to challenge the lies and data manipulation of the self-proclaimed Nobel Laureate Michael Mann – a breathtakingly untrue and easily refuted claim BTW, but still he made it.
It may be a complete coincidence that the case is now on its 4th judge and the delays, postponements and prevarications continue unabated.
It may also be case that some very important people don’t want Mr Steyn to be given the opportunity to shed much needed light on the fraud still being perpetrated on us all.
And all of these fixed assets will require further expenditure to maintain and replace them when they get too old. You have to be pretty damn certain that the ‘disease’ of Anthropogenic Global Warming is catastrophic enough to be worth the catastrophic costs of avoidance.
People are just wiseing up, when terms like ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’ started being used, it was obvious this was nonsense and just a political power grab.
If anything it’s a ‘climate annoyance’ in most people’s minds, no-one wants to be seen as a polluter so there’s always some support for environmental measures, but the extent the alarmists take it is where the fatigue sets in, especially after a few failed predictions.
Mix in the blatant hypocrisy of the underlying latent anti-nuclear ideology with the promotion of failing technologies like wind power and chemical battery energy storage, and it’s soon obvious these alarmists are morons and the last ones who’ll lead us into a zero carbon future even if that’s what you want to do.
The really wonderful thing about the climate fraud thing is that when you’re the gatekeeper to the “SCIENCE!!!” behind it all, you can do whatever you like to torture the data. Because of the long timeline involved, it’s easy to say “Yeah, it’s getting much warmer…” because those hot years stick out in people’s memories. They’ll buy off on it because you can make the narrative seem real.
The problem comes with this, as with all such millenarian tripe, when the world doesn’t end on your schedule. Then, you’ve got to account for that, and if you don’t see the parallels between the religious nutter “End of the World” types and the climatistas, you’ve limited exposure to both sorts.
End of the day, they’re ruining the credibility of science and scientific thought by turning it into a quasi-religious affair of faith and unquestioned authority. You really have to wonder if the lab-coated idiots doing these things grasp that point, and if they care…
Oh, they do know, and they do care, just as all high priests in history. It’s a form of control.
And I’ve just watched a glorious piece of rubbish on Panorama (BBC) espousing all the green policies mentioned & the “evidence” to support them,
The essence of their message was that countries & energy firms are still exploring for more oil & gas. The reporter admitted he’d spent a fortune (in CO2) travelling the world to to make the program & interview an aged Scientist who kept saying we must stop what we are doing or we will exceed the 1.5°C “target”. All without any mention of the two “elephants in the room” China & India.
People go mad all at once and only gradually return to sanity, one at a time.
When it rains the media (and the education system) blames it on human C02 emissions, and when it does not rain (anywhere in the world) they also blame human C02 emissions.
This is not science, it is anti-science (although anti-science supported by many scientists – who are financially and professionally dependent on the establishment). Any “data” and the opposite of that data (rain or lack of rain, heat or cold) is used to “justify” an agenda of international “governance”, totalitarian control (tyranny) over the lives of ordinary people.
An international agenda of tyranny that has been public, out-in-the-open (no “conspiracy”) since the Rio conference of 1992.