Has any man wanted to be The Messiah more than Al Gore?

It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

. . . [W]hat a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have to worry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as a criminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clear warnings that their fate was in our hands. We could instead celebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving that every major National Academy of Sciences report on climate change had simply made a huge mistake.

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. . . .

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption. After all has been said and so little done, the truth about the climate crisis—inconvenient as ever—must still be faced.

Oh, Al, Al, Al . . . how my heart doth bleed for you! Oh how I wish that anthropogenic global warming were real so that you could fulfill your most desirous wish of saving humanity from itself . . . nay! of SAVING THE WORLD! It just doesn’t seem fair that someone as doggone sincere as you not get the chance to be the world’s Superman and Christ.

You’re right on one point, though, Al: we have overcome existential threats before. And we will overcome you and your self-righteous goodists in due time . . . just as our grandparents overcame the Nazis who believed that they, too, were saving the world. (Sorry for the comparison, Al, but you started it by quoting Winnie.)

Fear not, however, Al: Hitler was evil; you are simply a fool.

It appears reports of a Himalayan meltdown have been greatly exaggerated (which shouldn’t really come as a surprise):

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

It’s funny how those who proclaim AGW the loudest tend to be the same souls who ridicule as hysterical anyone who’s alarmed by Islamic terrorism.

How about we cut out all hysteria? After all, hysteria is simply a political tool used in ideological warfare.

As my yanqui friends tuck themselves in with bellies gorged for the evening, as yuletide hopes begin to dwindle like so many living room fires, I would be remiss not to mention that human nature will destroy mankind long before climate change will.

No matter how many rules and regulations you write, no matter how much technology and science you dedicate, nothing’s going to change human or “mother” nature.

So sleep tight and try not to worry so much. There’s nothing you can do to save this world. Now that’s real yuletide hope.

From Dominic Lawson in the Times:

After two weeks of increasingly ill-tempered negotiations, one of the European delegates at the Copenhagen summit “to save the planet” had clearly reached breaking point; or perhaps it was the ingratitude of the people he was trying to save that caused this negotiator to tell the BBC’s science correspondent, Susan Watts, that millions of Africans now “deserve” to be incinerated.

Watts was reporting a conversation she had had with an unnamed “European negotiator” after South Africa decided to join the quartet of America, India, China and Brazil in putting its name to a statement rejecting any binding emissions targets, and thus comprehensively sabotaging the entire conference. “South Africa has signed up to this!” the delegate told Watts. “They’re going to fry—and they’ll deserve it.”

. . . I know that for those thousands of “climate activists” who descended on Copenhagen, the idea of air-conditioning in African homes is something almost too revolting to contemplate; but then they have never understood that, for the real inhabitants of the developing world, the American example of achieving health and comfort through technology and subverting harsh nature for human ends is something to be emulated, not shunned.

I’ve nothing else to add.

FirstShowing’s Ethan Anderton discusses with enthusiasm the new sci-fi thriller The Panopticon (a spec script by Lost story editor Craig Rosenberg), but does warn:

A saving-the-world plotline might seem a bit heavy handed nowadays . . .

Um, Ethan, you mind telling that to the dunderheads in Copenhagen?

There truly is no new thing under the sun . . . only the names and temperatures have been changed. In his spiked article, Maurizio Morabito discusses the impending climate catastrophe of 40 years ago:

Forgotten for 35 years, the CIA report, A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems frequently mentions a scientific acceptance of global cooling. It also reveals how most climate fears have never really left us, regardless of the underlying temperature trend.

Having seen the CIA report mentioned in a 1976 Washington Post piece, but with no copy of it on the internet, I obtained the microfiche document from the British Library. The content of the report’s 36 pages is striking. It may have been written in 1974, but the depictions are uncannily familiar: climate change, it says, will lead to floods and famines, and leaders in climatology are issuing stark warnings about threats to ‘the stability of most states’. The only thing to differentiate it from today’s scaremongering is the fact that the CIA in 1974 was concerned about global cooling, not warming. The report even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.

The document is embarrasing to read. The ‘new climatic era’ is described in 1974 as a harbinger of famine, starvation, refugees, floods, droughts, crop failures, monsoons and the cause of all kinds of meteorological phenomena. As expected, potential benefits are downplayed and potential harms highlighted: the Sahara is expected to expand, and world grain reserves may last less than one month, the report claimed. There is even a cursory list of past civilisations destroyed by climatic episodes: The Indus, the Hittites, the Mycenaean and the Empire of Mali.

According to the CIA, these climate models are being refined (as always) and the energy balance of the atmosphere is perfectly explicable without a single reference to greenhouse gases. Thanks to government intervention (of course), many famous scientists, until then victims of ‘personality clashes’, have managed to establish a ‘scientific consensus’ about ‘global climate change’, including vague threats about a ‘greater variability’ in climate and serious economic problems around the world. And not only that; they all agree on a series of proposals about the creation of new government agencies. This is exactly the agreed scientific position as reported at the time by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post and so on.

Every generation needs a global crisis to sustain the messianic hopes and dreams of its leaders.

Thanks, Greenpeace International: I needed a good laugh.

I, too, would like to issue a future apology to all my readers in 2020—for not doing more to stop the lunatics from taking over the asylum . . . but you know how difficult it is to convince the masses when their glorious leaders look so damned sincere basking in the golden glow of the saviour spotlight.

So what global catastrophe are the goodists trying to prevent this decade? The Utter Annihilation of the Universe As We Know It? Why not? They gotta keep thinking big if they’re gonna keep taking your money and your faith.