RUTHFULLY YOURS

The high priests of global warming have lost their prestige. They’re still chanting the same old mantras. But no one’s listening, no one cares.

Something extraordinary is happening in the great Climate Wars. I had a taste of it just the other day on an LBC talk show. The producer had only booked me in for a ten-minute slot, in case the listeners weren’t interested in my boring new book about that tediously hackneyed subject Man Made Global Warming. But the switchboards were jammed and the station ended up keeping me in for a full hour to reply to all the calls.

There was one big problem though: “We can hardly find ANYONE who disagrees with you,” whispered the show’s host, Julia Hartley-Brewer. This was true. By the end, things had got so desperate that I found myself accidentally picking fights with callers who were on my side. An easy mistake to make for someone on my (sceptical) side of the debate: we card-carrying Satanic “deniers” are so used to being vilified at every turn it really feels kind of weird suddenly to be in tune with the popular mood.

And I’m not the only one to have noticed. A climate sceptical blogger called Pointman has written a superb post on the subject(which is well worth reading in full). The enemy – that’s the alarmists who’ve been making most of the running in the last two decades – is in serious disarray. As Pointman puts it: “All reason has fled. There’s a real feeling of April 1945, Berlin, der Fuhrerbunker and its mad occupants, barking unrealistic orders down phones and moving long ago destroyed units around on maps, as if it really meant something.”

It’s a good point and an accurate analogy. The kind of analogy, unfortunately, which will undoubtedly have the usual greenie/lefty suspects wheeling out their favourite Godwin’s Law defence: ie if you ever mention the Nazis it invalidates you argument because, er, it does because someone called Godwin made a “law” saying it does…..

Yup, I’m weariedly familiar with the Godwin’s law weasel-out. Just as I’m familiar with: the “Appeal to Authority” (eg “the Royal Society/the National Academy of Sciences says”; “98 per cent of the world’s climate scientists agree…..”); the crude ad hom: (“James Delingpole is a C***”; “James Delingpole is in the pay of Big Koch”, etc); the straw man (“How can you deny climate change is happening when four of the ten hottest years happened this decade?”). The Warmists use them all the time.

What all these tricks have in common is this: they’re not arguments; they don’t address any of the points we sceptics (or “realists” as we prefer to term ourselves) painstakingly make in article after article, blog after blog; they’re simply rhetorical tropes designed to confuse, obfuscate, distract, wear down, bruise, irritate, hurt, clog up the comments section and give the illusion of moral and intellectual victory. Above all, though, their purpose is to distract from what you might call the climate alarmists’ Polar Bear In The Room: the world stopped warming in 1998, even as CO2 emissions continued to rise; not only that but none of the computer modelers’ doomsday “projections” of runaway climate catastrophe have been even closely matched by observed real world data.

Or, if you prefer to hear this truth served up with world-weary scientific uber-authority, here’s MIT atmospheric physicist Professor Richard Lindzen addressing the House of Commons in February: “Perhaps we should stop accepting the term ‘skeptic’ because ‘skepticism’ implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the cause over 20 years makes the case even less plausible, as does the evidence from Climategate and other instances of overt cheating.”

Ouch!

In the past – till very recently in fact – the powerful, hugely well-funded alarmist lobby has been able to skate over these inconvenient truths by relying on the propaganda techniques outlined above, as well as on the complicity of the political establishment. Not even the Climategate revelations were quite enough to derail the global warming alarmist gravy train.

So what has changed now? One factor, undoubtedly, has been the fall-out from Fakegate or Gleickgate – the failed attempt by prominent environmental activist Peter Gleick to smear the Heartland Institute (the US think tank best known for its annual climate sceptics’ conference) using stolen or faked documents. The attempted smear was bad enough (imagine the media outrage if climate realists had tried something similar!) but where the stunt really backfired was as a consequence of its handling by left-liberal news organisations like the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

All of them leapt into report the story gleefully without bothering to check whether or not it was true. And when evidence began to emerge that it wasn’t true, they compounded their error by seeking to defend Gleick’s duplicity and criminal actions regardless. Numerous left-liberal commentators argued that Gleick was in fact a hero whose crime was entirely justified in seeking to expose the manifest evils of this sinister, right-wing think tank.

Problem was, even this argument wasn’t borne out the facts. As far as environmental think tanks go, Heartland is little more than a Mom & Pop operation, run on the relative shoestring budget of $4.7 million (only a proportion of which goes towards “climate change” issues). Now compare this with the budgets of left-leaning environmentalist pressure groups such as the Sierra Club ($84.8 million), Natural Resources Defense Council ($97 million), or the World Wildlife Fund ($177.7 million). And that’s before you take into account US government spending on climate change issues, which according to calculations by blogger Jo Nova exceeds spending on sceptical science by 3500 to one.

During the last two decades global warming alarmist propaganda has depended on Hitler’s Big Lie principle (whoops: Godwin’s Law. So shoot me). But that principle, as first Hitler discovered and now the AGW lobby is discovering too, is flawed. In fact there are only so many times you can tell a whopping great lie (be it on the solidity of AGW theory or that climate sceptics are lavishly funded by Big Oil) before the people see through it. And once the people discover that they have been consistently lied to (and cheated out of a great deal of money to boot) they don’t like it one bit.

Coming soon – indeed it has already started – is the mother of all backlashes against the AGW alarmism industry. It will happen on lines predicted over a century ago by Gustave Le Bon in his seminal 1895 work, The Crowd.

Le Bon (whose analysis of crowd mentality influenced Freud, Hitler and Mussolini) argued that the secret of demagoguery was to repeat an idea over and over again in order to create a “contagion” which would infect the popular mind and hold the culture in its grip. This is what, until very recently, happened with the global warming religion.

But this contagion can only keep going, Le Bon argues, so long as those spreading it possess “prestige” in the eyes of the mob. Once that “prestige” is lost, the crowd turns brutally against those seers and experts and leaders in whom it once had such faith. Suddenly it sees them for the liars and cheats and manipulators they really are.

This is what is happening now in the great climate debate. Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann’s new book is not selling; George Monbiot is mocked as a conspiracy theorist; the Royal Society’s Sir Paul Nurse climate science ignorance is eviscerated in a report by the Global Warming Policy Foundation; Yale economics professor William D Nordhaus publishes an essay in the New York Review of Books called Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong – and is almost instantaneously and comprehensively rebutted at Watts Up With That?

The high priests of global warming have lost their prestige. They’re still chanting the same old mantras. But no one’s listening, no one cares.

James Delingpole’s Watermelons: How Environmentalists Are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy And Stealing Your Children’s Future is published by Publius in the US; by Biteback in the UK; and by Connor Court in Australia under the title Killing The Earth To Save It. (Author image: Donna Laframboise )