Is anyone anywhere impressed by COP26?
Maybe those who enjoy tiresome heard-it-all-before apocalyptic-sounding climate waffle, or like travelling at someone else’s expense.
The rest are left to cringe.
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By Melanie Phillips – a British journalist, broadcaster and author whose weekly column currently appears in The Times of London.
What would happen if a doomsday cult were to take over the world? Science fiction? No. It’s happened.
How else to explain the collective lunacy of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, an absolute farce where world leaders made complete fools of themselves?
There’s been much criticism of the hypocrisy of the event, with hundreds of private jets flying into Glasgow to hector the world about reducing carbon emissions.
Far, far worse has been the total erasure of rationality in the hysterical chorus that this was the “last chance to save the planet” — and the fact that no-one in mainstream debate has challenged this as utter unscientific garbage.
Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, said in his address:
It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now.
Pledging once again to make Britain the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” he said people were
quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and an abruptness that is entirely man-made.
Was this the same Boris Johnson who in 2015 called the concern that global warming was causing rising temperatures a “primitive fear” which was “without foundation,” and who claimed in 2013 that wind turbines couldn’t “blow the skin off a rice pudding”? It was.
Speaker after speaker said COP 26 was the planet’s last chance to save itself from extinction through climate change. Do none of these people ever stop and wonder why this very same claim has been made over the years with just as much urgency —only to be made again when the climate apocalypse hasn’t happened or has been once more mysteriously postponed?
At COP26 on Monday, we were told we had until 2050 to save the planet. We were “quite literally” in the “last chance saloon,” said Prince Charles.
Addressing the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, Prince Charles had told delegates “our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control”. Which set the last chance saloon in 2016.
In 2018, climate scientists said there were 12 years to save the planet. Which took the last chance saloon to 2030.
In July 2019, the BBC’s environment correspondent Matt McGrath wrote there were now 18 months to save the planet since
the decisive, political steps to enable the cuts in carbon to take place will have to happen before the end of next year.
Continued here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
November 12, 2021
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