We’re publishing a guest post by journalist Chris Morrison asking whether COP26 was the high water mark of climate change alarmism.
One of the defining photo opportunities of the recent COP26 climate conference was the image of Tuvalu foreign minister Simon Kofe drawing attention to rising sea levels by addressing the assembly in two feet of water. Inexplicably missing from any commentary on the PR stunt was the welcome news that the Tuvaluan chain of islands actually grew in size from 1971 to 2014. Back in the real world, a 2018 paper by scientists from the University of Auckland found: “Results highlight a net increase in land area in Tuvalu of 73.5ha (2.9%), despite sea-level rise, and land area increase in eight of nine atolls.”
Coral reefs and sand banks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean are not the most stable geological formations but numerous natural forces determine their size, apart from small rises or falls in sea levels. Using these islands and others such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands, which are also increasing in size, is yet another example of faulty science being pressed into political service to advance the cause of net zero.
Was COP26 a success or failure? The always disappointed George Monbiot of the Guardian sounded the usual unhinged Marxist-Leninist call to arms in a piece entitled: “After the failure of COP26, there’s only one last hope for our survival.” “Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system,” he wrote.
BBC presenter and activist Chris Packham was also underwhelmed by COP26: “Angry, scared and betrayed. We have been failed and scorned by the stupid, the greedy and the evil. Life is now in mortal danger. But it’s not over, it’s just down to us to do what needs to be done and we need to go to it now.”
For fully practicing green zealots who will never be satisfied, it is easy to understand their usual emotional reaction. Elsewhere, many politicians and climate journalists have tried to put a positive spin on the Conference. But the sense of disappointment was evident in the way COP26 disappeared from the headlines almost immediately. It is difficult to get enthusiastic about a final communique running to 97 paragraphs that firmly commits to almost nothing. Plenty of “urges”, “welcomes” and “recognises”, but actual, bomb proof obligations, there are practically none. Asked to ban all fossil fuels within less than 30 years and the message from developing countries couldn’t have been clearer – get lost.
The COP project resembles a large fully laden ship travelling at high speed. In Glasgow it came up against the looming icebergs of unrealistic economic and social expectations and faulty, politically driven science. It is clear that many developing countries led by India, China and including Russia are not going to remove fossil fuels from their energy mix any time soon.
Of course, many smaller countries will happily repeat tall tales about climate change blowing their houses down in the hope that cash will be provided. The suspicion is that the United States is also an unreliable partner since half the country that votes Republican is sceptical about any major part played by humans in climate change. This actually leaves only a few economically significant countries, mostly from Europe led by the U.K. and Germany to carry the green flag. If we are successful in removing 85% of our cheap energy from our modern industrial economies and replacing it with windmills and the sun without causing massive economic and societal hardship, no doubt all the others will be happy to follow in our pioneering footsteps. We are the canaries in the abandoned mine shaft.
It is often asked why climate virtue hunters don’t take their protests to China and India. Why do they not glue themselves to Chairman Mao’s tomb in Tiananmen Square and chant: “What do we want? Climate justice! What do we need? Better loft insulation!” Perhaps because they realise that in a country where half the population barely had enough to eat 40 years ago, they would get a less than welcoming reception.
In 1989 the late Professor Stephen Schneider of Stanford University and an IPCC lead author remarked that in working to reduce the risk of “potentially disastrous climate change” there was a need to capture the public’s imagination. He continued: “That, of course entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
This is the second large obstacle that COP is coming up against. 40 years of increasingly preposterous forecasts of climate doom from Prince Charles and others are now getting beyond a joke. The idea that a scientific hypothesis claiming that humans cause all or most global warming is ‘settled’ when not a single credible peer reviewed paper is able to prove it, is considered by a growing number of people to be little more than an insult to their intelligence. Climate models are not evidence, they are guesses and an excellent discussion of much of the science surrounding atmospheric warming, and cooling, was published by the Daily Sceptic on November 18th by Dr. Rudolph Kalveks.
Many of the scare stories used to promote political climate science have been debunked. Polar bears are not declining in number, they are increasing; tropical corals are not being wiped out by marginal increases in air temperature, they are thriving in waters between 24C and 32C; global temperatures are not soaring, they have barely risen for 25 years and according to reliable satellite measurements have fallen marginally over the last seven years; walruses are not leaping off cliffs to escape climate change, but to escape thriving polar bears; there are more penguins than you can shake a stick at in Antarctica and the South Pole has just recorded its coldest six month winter since records began; London is not about to be flooded – in fact, the Thames flood barrier has hardly been used since 2015; most wildfires are caused by humans; Atlantic hurricanes have shown no upward trend for almost 100 years. Finally, the ‘billions will die’ script of media darlings Extinction Rebellion has to be seen in the context that weather-related deaths have fallen from 500,000 in 1920 to 14,000 last year
Extremist views, often bearing little connection to reality, are the norm around climate science and net zero. Maybe the tide is about to turn.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Monbiot and Packham would certainly qualify using current terminology as “useless eaters.”
I used to have some respect for Packham, I emphasize USED to, but he’s become too politicised & jumped on the woke bandwagon, moanybot has always been a lying deceitful twat.
Yes COP 26 was all snake oil and nonsense, but cleverly framed to distract from the real business going on there in Glasgow…
Whitney Webb is good at explaining what Mark Carney and his mates were up to…
https://www.mintpressnews.com/using-the-climate-crisis-whitney-webb-discusses-global-elites-takeover-of-nature/278984/
That’s hard work given that the starting point is that we are heating up the planet.
Starting from BS does not encourage me to go further although the argument is one I have read elsewhere.
It’s a shame these PITA protesters and their agents provocateurs like Monbiot and Packham can’t stop awhile and consider what else is going on, like the complete loss of freedoms and democracy, on the way to a totalitarian dystopia.
Socialisms goal is totalitarian dystopia. Equality where everyone is equally miserable, except the narcissistic “elite” psychopathic leaders who decide what’s good for everyone else.
The ultimate aims of the Covid agenda and of eco-lunacy are identical. Climate-hysteria will be with us for some time to come.
If COP26 upset Packham it must go down as a success.
Bring on COP27 …
That’s a beaut. Thanks.
Of course not a single one of the doom mongers is willing to lead the way and change their lifestyle something you’d surely do if you truly believed that we’re killing the planet.
Exactly, after expressing my disgust at COP to my MP, he replied telling me it’s our duty to show the way to the likes of China, I said great, when you are disposing of your wealth to fight the cause and moving into one of those eco-friendly houses you can’t swing a cat in to show us the way?
No reply yet.
It’s a bit like Gates, Stanley Johnson, Schwab et al claiming the planet is overpopulated – It’s not – but none of them want to do the decent thing and lead the way by topping themselves.
Funny that.
Time to fight back, tell your kids and grandkids that their teachers are lying. The longer we allow it to carry on the harder it will be to defeat. Nobody is going to die, we’ll adapt to the small changes. I had to laugh at the photo, another group of islands due to disappear. The Maldives have just opened 5 new airports, they were supposed to be up to their waists in water by now.
According to opinion polls, the main electoral beneficiaries of COP26 have been the Green Party. The Tories hysterical virtue signalling has lent a veneer of credibility to idiotic Green alarmists and their anti-human policies. Meanwhile voters are rightly pissed-off by the chaos caused by other Tory policies: from supply chain disruption caused by unnecessary lockdowns, skyrocketing energy bills caused by a failure to invest in reliable generating capacity and the ongoing cross-channel invasion by scroungers in search of a 4-star hotel and a lifetime on benefits.
Yes I’m sure sea levels are rising. That’s why the likes of Obama et al have been buying beach side mansions and as mikec says they’ve built five new airports in the Maldives and it was meant to be submerged by now.. bullshit..
Sea Level Alarmism Unravels As Earth’s Coastlines Are Observed Expanding Since 1984 – Watts Up With That?
This garbage is no different to covid, idiotic groupthink. The same zealots won’t let anybody else get a word in edgeways with calling them lunatics or deniers. The same governments willing to destroy wealth and lifestyle of its citizens to signal its virtue over something that is completely false.
I’ve had enough of this, it’s time we starting having a bash a woke campaign. Don’t argue with them, as they are too stupid to reason. Just smash the sneering arseholes right in the face.
The longer people spend any time and effort talking about Pacific Islands to Monbiot in the Guardian, the less time they have for considering and understanding what this is really all about.
Its not about what they say its about.
Its about using covid and climate change to disrupt society and the current finacial/economic paradigm. Its about furthering resource constrained capitalism controlled by a loose alliance of governments, corporations, investors and organised through Central Banks under the auspices of the BIS. Its reinforcing a global fascism. With everything, all natural assets as well as human bodies , financialised.
The current financial system is broken has been since 2008. This is the new enlarged commodity system valued at over $4000 trillion.
It is designed to lead to a world where 90% are colder, poorer and die earlier, whist the 0.5-1% become all powerful and even richer.
The only speech at COP26 worth the airtime was the one by Sunak, where he talked about the baked in ‘environmental’ targets which now have to be met by every financial investment made on anything everywhere. And those targets are not under the control of any individual government, they have been globalised under the stewardship of the BIS.
Elections, wherever, will not change this system now. This new feudal, fascism has been outsourced under the control of the very elites who benefit from it.
So when you see idiots on bridges over the thames or police armed in Rotterdam, remember they are inadvertently working for exactly the same people for their ends and no-one elses.
China and Russia for instance are part of the same nexus, the squabbles you read about are some of the fascists trying to get bigger slices of the cake. But they are all in the same trough.
Its not about what they say it about.
“Was COP26 peak snake oil?”.
Sadly I think the answer is a resounding NO.
Given that the green blob “know” that they are right, the more that ordinary, sensible, people ignore them the louder they’ll shout, and the scarier their predictions will become to try and get the ignorant plebs to agree with them. Given that Bojo, Biden, the E.U. etc. are now fully signed up members of the neo-marxist environmental brigade the madness will go on for a long time to come. My prediction is that once it becomes obvious that the Paris target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is obviously unachievable it will simply be replaced by a target of less than 2 degrees.
Personally I think that nature, not human emissions, is the main driver of climate and we’re likely to see several decades of cooling due to lower solar activity. However I’m pessimistic that the eco-zealots will pay any attention, as there is already enough evidence to show that the climate models are wrong, and yet the calls for action just seem to grow stronger. Climate change has become a dogma, and as such is immune to real world evidence since true believers can always relay on highly dubious models. At this point the similarities to Covid become striking, and both can be used to justify removing our freedoms “for the common good”.
The UN is amazing, Tuvalu with a population a little over 10,000 people (the size of a large village in the UK) has the same voting power at the UN as India or China, both with 1 Billion plus people!
13 UN Member States have less than 50,000 people and a further 15 less than 500,000 people. In total, out of the 193 Member States, 105 of them have less than 10 million population.
Small wonder they are so keen on promoting ‘climate change’ and seeking £Billions in “reparations” from the developed nations.- numerically they have the numbers to set UN policy …..
There have been doom mongerers since 1870 telling us the earth has only got ten years before we lose everything. First it was land, then the sun, then land and sun, then humans would die, and let’s not forget the asteroids that are meant to crash into us and the mother of all earthquakes to split the world. The only difference in this Century is control of social media where the prophecies of doom are able to make so much profit out of ignorant Governments and scare the young witless.
It would be good to think we had come to what Rod Liddle calls “peak wank”, but sadly I don’t think we are there yet, and I suspect that we few countries which have swallowed it hook, line and sinker have a lot of suffering to do yet.
Covidians, certain Socialists, Climate Zealots, Remainers, anyone noticed how often the same person is all four? It’s like some weird form of groupthink where the qualification to join the club is to be able to tell appallingly bad lies with a straight face and call anyone who isn’t in the club names.
Packham typifies this Club with his ridiculous “Angry, scared and betrayed. We have been failed and scorned by the stupid, the greedy and the evil. Life is now in mortal danger. But it’s not over, it’s just down to us to do what needs to be done and we need to go to it now.”.
As with Covidians, Remainers, Socialists he doesn’t recognise the fact that most of the world, the sensible ones, can see there is simply no evidence for their nonsensical assertions.
Quite some years back the Labour party introduced 24 hour opening for hospitality. The reasoning went “It is a fact that by 2010 the climate will have changed so much that people will not be going out until 10 at night because it will simply be too hot”.
According to Al Gore, around the same time and on his way to making millions out of lies, we were all consumed in a fireball of climate change and drowned at the same time by 2010. That must have slipped by me.
I am pretty sure mountain tops are measured from sea level, so why isn’t there a massive outcry of the mountains are sinking?