The UN's climate alarmism has gone too far | The Spectator
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has declared that ‘the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived’. As if that were not enough, Guterres declared that ‘the air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable’.
Something is raging out of control but it isn’t the temperature: last week’s famous ‘heat domes’ have subsided, with only a few patches of southern Europe over 30ºC this afternoon. It is hyperbole over the climate.
What does Guterres – who appeared to be breathing normally as he delivered his speech – hope to achieve by using language that tries to make out that life on Earth is no longer sustainable?
We are in an arms race of extreme language, with everyone falling over each other to outdo each other. The world falls in on anyone who seeks to pooh-pooh the narrative around global warming – climate scepticism was one of the reasons Coutts cited for closing Nigel Farage’s bank account – yet no one ever seems to get into trouble for exaggeration.
Just as with Covid, there is a price to be paid for scaring people. For the past week, we have been shown footage of holidaymakers fleeing from fires on Rhodes, the impression given that the island has become permanently uninhabitable. Yet, as the island’s deputy mayor said today, actually only one hotel has been burned down. As it attempts to recover from the fire, Rhodes’s tourist industry has been greatly harmed, certainly for this season and possibly well beyond. Despite the apocalyptic language, as I wrote here the other day, wildfires are not on the rise globally, in spite of hotter and drier conditions in some places.
There is a wider point: if you are going to tell people they are effectively doomed, and a depressing number of children and young people appear to believe this. A 2021 poll by the University of Bath of 10,000 16 to 25-year-olds around the world found that 56 per cent of them agreed with the statement that humanity is doomed. What, then, is the incentive to do anything about it? You might as well sit in a deckchair and listen to the band rather than seek a place in a lifeboat. That is the attitude that Guterres and his like are breeding.
Three years ago, I wrote a satirical novel, The Denial, in which a future government kept renaming the Department of Climate Change so that it became, in turn, the Department of Climate Crisis, the Department of Climate Emergency, the Department of Climate Cataclysm, Department for the Climate Apocalypse, and the Department of the Climate Armageddon. (It also, incidentally, saw a character debanked for his views on climate change). Guterres has brought that hysterical world a little bit closer.