A Free-Market Energy Blog

‘The Tragi-comic Climate Doomsday Cult’ (Melanie Phillips on COP26)

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- December 16, 2021

“If anything embodies and signals the end of the age of reason it is this climate cult, in the grip of which the west has gone through Alice’s looking-glass into a surreal post-science, post-truth world.

No wonder Russia and China didn’t even bother to turn up to COP26. Their contempt for the west must be bottomless as they look upon its accelerating economic and cultural green suicide — and rub their hands.” 

I recently read a piece by Melanie Phillips that spoke volumes about the two-week snooze show hosted by the United Nations last month in Glasgow. “The Tragi-comic Climate Doomsday Cult” (November 2, 2021) begins:

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?  

And continues:

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.

Boris Johnson Theatrics

She turns to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s 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. 

Phillips then asks an obvious question:

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?

Prince Charles

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.

BBC

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.”

McGrath reported:

“The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder and now director emeritus of the Potsdam Climate Institute. 

The sense that the end of next year is the last chance saloon for climate change is becoming clearer all the time.

“I am firmly of the view that the next 18 months will decide our ability to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need for our survival,” said Prince Charles, speaking at a reception for Commonwealth foreign ministers recently.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury

Evidence of how this issue is frying people’s brains (if not the world) was provided by the mess that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, got himself into when he  compared climate change to the Holocaust. The Mail reported him saying:

“People will speak of them (current world leaders) in far stronger terms than we speak today of the politicians of the 30s, of the politicians who ignored what was happening in Nazi Germany because this will kill people all around the world for generations, and we will have no means of averting it”.

Asked whether that meant failure to act on climate change would be worse than people allowing genocide to happen, he replied: “It will allow a genocide on an infinitely greater scale. 

“I’m not sure there’s grades of genocide, but there’s width of genocide, and this will be genocide indirectly, by negligence, recklessness, that will in the end come back to us or to our children and grandchildren”.

Oh dear. Realising virtually immediately that he had made a grievously inappropriate comparison and diminished the genocide of the Jews, the archbishop quickly apologised and retracted his words. But the fact that he had said them shows the extent to which “climate change” has simply unbalanced people and erased all sense of proportion and reason.

The Queen

Shockingly, even the Queen has endorsed this mania. Praising the commitment of the late Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Prince William in “encouraging people to protect our fragile planet.”

She said:

“It is the hope of many that the legacy of this summit — written in history books yet to be printed — will describe you as the leaders who did not pass up the opportunity; and that you answered the call of those future generations. That you left this conference as a community of nations with a determination, a desire, and a plan, to address the impact of climate change; and to recognise that the time for words has now moved to the time for action.”

The Queen was representing the government’s position — the role she is supposed to play. However, she seemed to be personally endorsing “net zero”. It’s bad enough that Prince Charles bangs on about this. The Queen, however, is supposed to be above politics, and we must never know what she thinks — a role she has played to absolute perfection throughout her long reign. Until now. 

But then, a key part of this lunacy is the belief that “climate change” is above not just politics but all normal discussion— that there can be no argument against it. The issue is beyond debate because the science is said to be “settled”. 

But science is never settled. The climate change cult is akin rather to religious faith — more than that, to the type of religious faith that brooks no dissent. 

The Queen was representing the government’s position — the role she is supposed to play. However, she seemed to be personally endorsing “net zero”. It’s bad enough that Prince Charles bangs on about this. The Queen, however, is supposed to be above politics, and we must never know what she thinks — a role she has played to absolute perfection throughout her long reign. Until now. 

For another look at COP26’s failure, see here.

4 Comments


  1. Albert Ellul  

    I purchased and read Melanie Phillips’ book ‘My Journey From Leftism to Sanity’. It is a great book which every leftist must read, nay, every person must read. It shows the hypocrisy of the left and the dangerous situation that the Left has put the West in. The hate.

    The globalist climate narrative is an attack on civilisation conducted by the corrupt UN. The UN general council is made up of a majority of tyrannical/despotic/dictatorial member states that hate Israel and the Judeo-Christian heritage and teachings which have made Europe and the US what they are today.

    However, many are realising that we have been lied to, many scientists have silently abandoned the climate lie and the truth of this fact lies in the other very obvious fact: That having lost the scientists, the globalists had to rope in a semi-demented under developed vegan-raised teenager, elevated her to goddess status and let her loose on the children of the world. This is so North-Koreanesque.

    The lie is crumbling while planet Earth is under the grip of the onset of a 70 year-long cold period.

    Reply

  2. John W. Garrett  

    In the forty-four (44) years since satellite-based measurement of the global lower atmosphere commenced in 1979, the global temperature has risen 0.08° C. (that’s eight hundredths of a degree, folks) over the 1991-2020 mean global average temperature.

    Source:
    https://www.drroyspencer.com/2021/12/uah-global-temperature-update-for-november-2021-0-08-deg-c/

    That’s not exactly what I’d call an “existential threat.”

    Reply

  3. Nick Schroeder  

    The Earth is cooler with the albedo/atmosphere not warmer because at this distance from the Sun space is 394 K, 121 C, 250 F and NOT 5 K. Remove the atmos/GHGs and the Earth becomes much like the Moon. That’s NOT what the GreenHouseEffect theory says. See UCLA Diviner mission’s site, Nikolov “Airless celestial bodies,” Kramm (U of AK) “Moon as analog for Earth,” the Int’l Space Station HVAC refrigerant design criteria and the AC and chilled underwear of an astronaut’s space suit.
    The K-T atmospheric energy balance diagram (TFK_bams09.pdf (ucar.edu)) and all of its clones contain a couple of egregious arithmetic and thermodynamic errors. The term 63 W/m^2 appears twice and the 396 upwelling Black Body calculation does not exist.
    1,368 W/m^2 arrives at the Earth. This discular value is divided by 4 to spread/average 342 over the entire spherical ToA 24/7. Dumb, btw. About 100 are reflected back into space by the 30% albedo and 80 are absorbed by the atmosphere leaving 160 net/net making it to the surface.
    According to the LoT 1 160 is ALL!!! that can leave. 160 in = 70 + 80 + 63 out. The incoming solar energy is balanced with and allocated to these three outputs. The balance is complete, there is no more!!!
    Where does the 396 upwelling come from? It’s 54 more than the original from the Sun, 156 more than the net albedo and 236 more than the net 160 to the surface and 396 = 333 + includes a whole ‘nother second 63! The 333 is 100% efficient perpetual loop from cold to hot without adding work all of which violates LoT 2.
    The 396 is the theoretical, “What if?” calculation that serves as the denominator of the emissivity ratio, i.e. 63/396 = 0.16. This is why IR instruments that assume 1.0 assume wrong.
    This entire 396/333/63 GHG loop can be removed the graphic and the balance is unaffected!!
    NO GHE, no GHG warming, no man/CO2 driven climate change or global warming.
    .

    Reply

  4. Mart  

    It has never been about global green house gas control, it has always been about get control of the global population through there policies from the UN dictated from the R. this new world order.

    Reply

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