Ross Clark: Stop terrorising the young with climate doom
APRIL 1, 2023
By Paul Homewood
We are not going to drown, starve or die of thirst because of climate change. Rather, the most immediate danger lies in exaggerating the threats and rendering an entire generation incapacitated by fear.
Who are the greatest victims of climate change? People flooded out of their homes? Subsistence farmers affected by drought? I would suggest an alternative group: the 56 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds who, according to a 2021 poll, think humanity is doomed by a changing climate. You can see it in tearful schoolchildren boycotting lessons, in Just Stop Oil activists earnestly telling us that billions of people are going to starve, in those who say they will never have children because, in the words of one 27-year-old woman quoted in The Guardian, “I feel I can’t in all conscience bring a child into this world and force them to try and survive what may be apocalyptic conditions”.
Having been a child for the second half of the Cold War I know all about growing up with the threat of doom hanging over us. But I don’t recall my contemporaries traumatised by the prospect of nuclear war. We indulged in black humour, and some went on CND marches and shouted things, but I never saw anyone reduced to a gibbering wreck, as some seem to be over climate change.
The young who feel doomed are not direct victims of climate change, of course, but the hysteria surrounding it. They have been fed daily predictions of doom by people they feel they can trust. Who can blame them after listening, for example, to the climate security secretary, Grant Shapps, who yesterday launched the government’s latest net zero plans by asserting that “polluting sources of energy are destroying our planet”; or to the UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, as he launched the “synthesis report” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) last week: “The climate timebomb is ticking,” he said. “Humanity is on thin ice and that ice is melting fast.” Language that until recently was only uttered by activists has become commonplace among political leaders.
What had provoked Guterres’s catastrophising? The IPCC synthesis report contained no new science — the scientific report was published 18 months ago. This was the edited highlights, skewed towards the bad news. That bad news was then hyped by Guterres and further exaggerated in some of the reporting. One headline claiming “scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate change” turned out to have come from a Greenpeace spokesman.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2023/04/01/ross-clark-stop-terrorising-the-young-with-climate-doom/
