London Times columnist: ‘Where are all those climate sceptics now?’ – ‘They’re suddenly quiet’ – Given the UK heatwave, ‘I do find myself wondering if there is anything that any of them would like to say’
Where have all the climate sceptics gone? Remember them? Perhaps I shouldn’t rake over the coals when it is already so hot but I could swear there used to be loads. For 20 years you couldn’t write about climate change without them all abruptly descending on you, like those weird bluebottles we now get coming in from our garden whenever we cook fish. Politicians, pundits, dissident experts, on and on.
What happened? Have they just shrivelled away, like our lawn? Have they been recycled? Are they in the brown bin? Guys, why so quiet?
I’m not talking here about people merely unconvinced by the economics of net zero. Nor even those who feel that anything we might do would be pointless virtue signalling, because we’re small and China isn’t. No, I mean the voices who used to tell you that it was all rubbish. That man-made global warming wasn’t really a thing, and that people who pretended it was secretly communists. Because now, with UK temperatures set to hit 35C at least once for an unprecedented four months in a row, I do find myself wondering if there is anything that any of them would like to say.
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This sort of thing probably had its heyday that year with the so-called “Climategate” scandal.
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A hunt for villains, to be fair, will find them on all sides. If the Cop climate conferences of recent years have descended into a stuttering farce, then at least a part of that is due to the willingness of many developing nations to stall progress in order to blackmail richer countries into paying “reparations”. Advocates of renewable energy, meanwhile, have overpromised and underdelivered, as seen by stories this week about wind farm operators being compensated for producing more electricity than the neglected national grid can handle. If climate scepticism is now being replaced by climate fatalism, no wonder.
Having written about our changing climate for most of my career, there are two aspects of all this that I did not, in my naivety, see coming. The first is that inaction would win, and look set to keep winning, even while the predictions of the climatologists were proven true, day after sweaty summer day.
The second is that there would be no shame. No mea culpas. Nothing. Because you expect at least some, don’t you? When people say a thing, fiercely and combatively, and that thing turns out to be wrong. God knows I’ve got a lot wrong on these pages, and God willing I’ll be indulged to get plenty more wrong in the future. In a bad week, that makes for a long night of the soul. In a good one, it’s grist for the mill of the next column. But to just slink away? To pretend it never happened, even when the stakes were so high? How could you? How can they? Where have they all gone?
Excerpt: For obvious reasons, I don’t read the Times (or the Times of London, as Americans call it). But my attention was drawn to a comment piece by one of its dripping-wet columnists blaming me – and evil climate sceptics like me – for the recent prolonged bout of hot weather.
“Where are all those climate sceptics now?”, the blanket-gnawing thumb-sucker asked rhetorically in the headline. The implication, of course, was that Global Warming was now so totally real and deadly and beyond reasonable doubt that all those fools who used to question it had by now, quite rightly, fled into hiding for fear of the righteous retribution they fully deserved for their toxic, planet-destroying denialism.
So I wrote a reply in the Spectator which gently but firmly put the bed-wetting hysteric back into his cot. Climate, I explained, is not the same thing as weather. Just because it’s sunny doesn’t mean we’re doomed. Nor should we bomb the economy back to the Dark Ages on the basis of an untested theory that the harmless trace gas CO2 might somehow be used as a control knob for world temperatures.
You’ll find the piece here, if you’re interested. It’s a quick, easy read, nicely catty in places, but I don’t think it tells you much that you don’t know already. I’ve been making these Climate 101 arguments for years, most notably in my book Watermelons, which I first published in 2012. But they’re the points you make to a Normie audience, like most of the Spectator’s readership, rather than to the kind of Awake readership I am mainly addressing here.
