Climate: The Movie is a Perfect Cure for Climate Anxiety

In my Spectator column today I have lavished praise on Climate: The Movie, the new documentary by Martin Durkin in which a host of distinguished scientists systematically dismantle the idea that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’. What better way to alleviate the anxiety of young people about climate change? It should be shown at every school in the country. Here’s an extract:

One of the reasons it’s so hard to challenge the narrative about climate change is because it supposedly reflects the ‘settled’ scientific consensus. We’re told that 97% of climate scientists agree that global warming – or ‘global boiling’, as it’s now called – is caused by humans burning fossil fuels and releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. Climate: The Movie confronts this argument head on, not by disputing the 97% figure, but by interviewing William Happer, a spry 84-year-old former physics professor at Princeton.

“There’s this mischievous idea that’s promoted that scientific truth is determined by consensus,” he tells Durkin. “In real science, there are always arguments, no science is ever settled. It is absurd when people say the science of climate is settled. There’s no such thing as settled science, especially when it comes to climate.”

To underline this, the film features a cast of distinguished scientists, including the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics, who gleefully take on all the sacred cows of the environmental lobby. Are you under the impression the Earth has never been hotter? Not so, says Steve Koonin, a former scientific adviser to President Obama and now a professor at NYU. The geological record shows that for the past 500 million years the Earth was considerably warmer than it is now. In fact, we’re still in the late Cenozoic ice age, according to Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace. (Yes, he’s now in the sceptic camp.) “We’re at the tail end of a 50 million-year cooling period and they’re saying it’s too hot?” he asks.

But surely there’s no disputing that CO₂, a greenhouse gas, is responsible for the one degree uptick in average global temperatures since the beginning of the industrial revolution? Oh yes there is, says the Nobel Laureate John Clauser, who points out that if rising CO₂ levels were the cause of the temperature increase, you’d expect the former to occur before the latter. But evidence from drilling into ancient ice cores reveals CO₂ only increases after the temperature starts to rise, usually following a lag of 100 years. Levels of this trace gas are far lower today (about 423 parts per million) than they were 500 million years ago (7,000 parts per million), and if CO₂ is causing global warming, then why has the temperature barely risen since we started pumping out CO₂ on an industrial scale in the 1940s? “I assert that there is no connection whatsoever between CO₂ and climate change,” says Clauser. “It’s all a crock of crap in my opinion.”

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