The Descent into Climate Madness (In Five Stages)

Rupert Darwall’s book, The Age of Global Warming: A History (2013) was a detailed, balanced and masterly account of a couple of hundred years of climate change thinking and ideology.  He names names and identifies all of the key events and players that have led us to our current predicament.

I wrote a review in Quadrant when the book was published, claiming (optimistically, indeed, ludicrously, with hindsight) that “the age of global warming was over”.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2013/07-08/the-age-of-global-warming-is-over/

The Amazon blurb reads as follows:

Rachel Carson's epoch-creating Silent Spring marked the beginnings of the environmental movement in the 1960s, its 'First Wave' peaking at the 1972 Stockholm Conference. The invention of sustainable development by Barbara Ward, along with Rachel Carson the founder of the environmental movement, created an alliance of convenience between First World environmentalism and a Third World set on rapid industrialisation. The First Wave crashed in 1973 with the Yom Kippur War and decade-long energy crisis. Revived by a warming economy of the 1980s, environmentalism found a new, political champion in 1988: Margaret Thatcher. Four years later at the Rio Earth Summit, politics settled the science. One hundred and ninety-two nations agreed that mankind was causing global warming and carbon dioxide emissions should be cut. Rio launched rounds of climate change meetings and summits, with developing nations refusing to countenance any agreement restraining their greenhouse gas emissions - their blanket exemption from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol leading to its rejection by the United States that year, and again twelve years later in Copenhagen. This therefore marked not just the collapse of the climate change negotiations, but something larger - an unprecedented humiliation for the West at the hands of the rising powers of the East.

https://www.amazon.com/Age-Global-Warming-History/dp/0704373394

I had assumed, wrongly, that argument, science, logic, evidence and rational thought would win out over barmy ideology and junk science.  Not to mention power.  It has not.  It turns out that at the time Darwall was writing his book, the age of global warming was only just beginning.  It is now well on the way to its final phase, the phase of its evolution that will coincide with the collapse of civilised human existence, at least for the plebs.  What we face is nothing less than the complete ruination of the economy, of culture, of social life, of the environment (ironically) as we have known them.  This is our descent into climate madness.

I realised the game was up, that we were at the final stage of the descent, when two things occurred. 

The first game-changer occurred when those who own and run the world, the private equity companies (like Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock), decided to put all their chips on green energy, and simultaneously to de-fund fossil fuels.  These guys actually determine global capital investment flows.  They turn the spigot on and off.  The second game-changer occurred when politicians stopped pretending to care about climate change while either doing nothing or merely paying lip service to climate “action”, and actually started to implement the things they had said they believed in.

We have descended into climate madness in stages.  And, unlike Darwall, whose story primarily tracks the thinking and actions of the climate zealots down the years – “how they did it” – I am talking about the execution of climate change policy by the political class and the acceptance of this and of the whole climate narrative by the public.

So, what are the five stages of our descent?

·         Stage One.  The pre-history of climate change.  Greenhouse gases and the Swedish Nobel prize winning scientist, Arrhenius.  Linking the theory of global warming with the industrial revolution and man-made CO2 was central to climate change 101.  All this was over a century ago.

·         Stage Two.  The realisation by the early generation environmental radicals (like Carson, Ward and the rest of the boys and girls in the band referred to by Darwall) that climate change could be the answer to the scam they had been looking for.  As the great Ivor Cummins has pointed out (in a recent interview on the Delingpod), whenever there is a “global” problem identified and a “global” solution proffered, there is inevitably a scam.  If you are looking for a threat, make it a big one.  And it doesn’t get any bigger than the climate.  They had an all-important narrative.  They also had themselves an evil enemy.  Coal and oil!  Us!  And, at the time of this realisation, in the 1970s, there was an emerging ideology, moral relativism (aka post-modernism), into which the emerging green thought-system could comfortably nest.  Climate extremism might have found it much harder to gain a foothold in earlier times where both Christian and enlightenment values provided the default global belief-system that underpinned the actions of both leaders and followers.

·         Stage Three.  The end of the Cold War, which drew a formal line under traditional, economic Marxism and ushered in the coming of age of the 1960s radicals’ game plan outlined by Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals and the florescence of cultural Marxism.  Hence the term (again, popularised by James Delingpole) “watermelons”, revolutionaries that were green on the outside and red on the inside.  Climate was to be the new vehicle for the global Marxist takeover, the trigger – later pandemics were added – for world governance.  And by the late 1980s, the long march through the institutions thought up by Antonio Gramsci much earlier (in the 1920s) and honed by the Alinsky-Dutschke class of the 1960s was well and truly along the road.  Old style leftism had a brand new coat of paint, one that would appeal massively and instantly to the emerging uneducated, naïve, believe-anything protester class.

·         Stage Four.  The alignment by the climateers of their ideology with science, hence the notion of “the science”.  In an age of scientism, where science had replaced God, being able to call on science for support for one’s positions was critical and provided instant credibility.  At this stage, however, it still mattered to serious people and to at least some politicians and citizens that “the science” was fiercely contested, and that the counter-arguments of climate sceptic greats like Anthony Watts, Ian Plimer, Judith Curry, Marc Morano, Bishop Hill, Benny Peiser, Nigel Lawson, Bob Carter, Alan Moran and George Pell were of serious weight.  These men and their arguments made a difference, but only for a time.  They turned out merely to be placing fingers in the dyke.  Also, during this phase, governments were still content to pay lip-service to climate policy and not to go full climate-madness.  Attend endless COP conferences, say the right words, try to strike a balance, have aspirational targets, that sort of thing.  For the climate zealots never, ever gave up and started to tell yet bigger lies.

·         Stage Five.  The final stage of the descent.  Ban cars, ban gas appliances, close coal mines permanently, carpet bomb the place with wind farms, come after personal behaviour.  The great ramp-up and execution of the climate plan.  The adoption by the globalists of heightened rhetoric.  Hence the deployment of language like “climate emergency” and (for God’s sake) “global boiling”.  And seemingly compelling, policy-momentum-generating ideas like “net zero”.  The climate ideologues’ final breakthrough came when, as per my outline above, they persuaded the two big global players, corporates and governments, to get on board with their doomsaying ideology.  Either as ideologically complicit with the big plan, or simply too confused and weak to resist.  And when we say “governments”, we are now talking of the age of the UniParty, where mainstream political parties have largely adopted as gospel globalist/progressive values and policies.  By this time the climateers themselves had assumed power positions in many of the key institutions that occupy the commanding heights of authority across the globe.  They are now actually making the decisions that matter.  A generation of Manchurian candidates nurtured when young, then deployed.  Dare we mention here the World Economic Forum (which boasts of having penetrated ze cabinets), created in 1971 as the European Management Forum, itself a close relative of the Club of Rome, created in 1968?  And the new elites have been able to create and to keep going an ideas factory – the universities – by endlessly funding (and only funding) climate research.  The academics are mostly on the team, anyway, and in any case, they need the grant money to prosper.  Add to these the rhetoric factory, the tame media, bought and paid for by those who, like Bill Gates, write books about the climate “emergency” when they need a spell from generating pandemic panic.  All in all, a seriously grand scam.  Driven by fear generation.  By now, whether the punters actually believe it hardly matters.  And the will to keep fighting back among the thinking, awake sceptics, for example by continuing to be scientific, has either waned or simply now never finds a platform.  Because the climate zealots also control all the platforms, and nothing is easier than to silence or otherwise counter “disinformation”.  As I say, a profoundly successful scam.

This is a potted history only, but it captures the important pivot-points, the growing power of malign actors bent on destroying civilisation, and the helpfully complicit, indeed, captured, decision-makers in the government and corporate worlds.  These malign actors have had a winning hand, played exceedingly well.  They have had an ideology that has suited the times, political momentum, a carefully created age of ignorance, killer, benign-sounding appeal-words (like “sustainable”), fear-inducing psychological weaponry, Marxist tools and techniques, strategically placed, paid-up allies, supine opposition scarcely worthy of the name, and the unbelievable persistence of committed activism.

But will knowing how they did it help us at all?  Or is it all too late?

As the renowned Aussie verse-maker John O’Brien, speaking through his character Hanrahan, once said, “we’ll all be rooned”.  And, on our current trajectory, whether it is driven by lunatic greenies on the left of the aisle like Chris Bowen or just-as-bad Liberals like Turnbull or Matt Kean, we will, indeed, be rooned.  Hanrahan might well have been a climate change plant.  As the poet had it:

“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
In accents most forlorn,
Outside the church, ere Mass began,
One frosty Sunday morn.

The congregation stood about,
Coat-collars to the ears,
And talked of stock, and crops, and drought,
As it had done for years.

“It’s looking crook,” said Daniel Croke;
“Bedad, it’s cruke, me lad,
For never since the banks went broke
Has seasons been so bad.”

“It’s dry, all right,” said young O’Neil,
With which astute remark
He squatted down upon his heel
And chewed a piece of bark.

And so around the chorus ran
“It’s keepin’ dry, no doubt.”
“We’ll all be rooned,” said Hanrahan,
“Before the year is out.”

No Dorothea Mackellar climate realism here.  Yes, we will all be rooned, and I fear it is beyond the time for a climate comeback by the forces for rationality and realism.

Paul Collits

24 August 2023