Climate Week Is Over, But The Warming Cranks Are Still Out There
Doughnut Day makes more sense.
Another Climate Week has come and gone, with Earth no cooler than it was before. But there is plenty to celebrate. Opportunities for virtue signaling, graft, prostituting science, and burning down capitalism have never been so vast.
Launched in New York City in 2009, and now aligned with the execrable United Nations, Climate Week, according to organizers’ telling, is “an ambitious platform for our mission to drive climate action,” and “fast.” It’s such a wonderful moment, that a particularly dim fellow set himself on fire Friday at the Laver Cup tennis tournament in London to protest the use of private jets in the United Kingdom. The Sun reported that “it’s believed the yob” who was momentarily aflame “was a climate change protester.”
Virtue signaling is generally a “luxury belief” that holds no cost. In this case, it came with some pain, and probably some regret. But virtue signaling is an important activity in the fight against global warming, even if it means that self-flambeing is in order.
The man was eventually dragged off the court. But the cameras got a good look at him, and what was seen, says author Michael Shellenberger, “is the face of climate narcissism.”
“Apocalyptic environmentalism is a manifestation of exhibitionist narcissism,” says Shellenberger. “Adherents, like this young activist, demand to be recognized for their supposedly unique insight into the ‘climate emergency.’ And they demand to be rewarded with cultural, economic, and political power,” which, we might add, they too often get.
The many other exhibitionists – all of them shallow thinkers, most of them hypocrites – include the lunatics who have glued themselves to streets, basketball courts, and artwork, and chained themselves to gates and doors; grandstanders who block traffic and shut down subway trains (and often get the rough treatment they richly deserve); and the neighborhood peacocks so eager to post their “In This House We Believe …” signs.
The climate activist club is also filled with grifters. Think first of Al Gore, who, says Fox News host Jesse Watters, “makes money like a stick-up artist,” telling “the American people give me all your cash or you are going to die. And the climate business pays big bucks. He’s worth something like $300 million.”
Then there’s the United Nations climate program, which “is ripping you off,” says Foreign Policy, citing in 2019 “nearly a decade of mismanagement and alleged misappropriation of millions of dollars in international funds.”
It’s not a new grift. Almost a decade ago HotAir was warning us about the “the elites, aka, politicians, who see an opportunity to both expand government power and create revenue literally out of thin air. The fight is over who will get the money.”
“And the science? It’s never settled, even though Gore and others have claimed it is. Nor is there a consensus among researchers that man’s releases of greenhouse gases are an existential threat to human life and the health of the planet.
Those “deniers,” who the climate alarmists have smeared, and want to see arrested, actually include a large number of credentialed and credible scientists. The Daily Telegraph reviewer of historian Ruper Darwall’s “The Age of Global Warming” noted that the author complains that scientists “have been too ready to embrace the ‘subjectivity’ of the future, and too often have a ‘cultural aversion to learning from the past,’” meaning that a fact-based discipline has become a pulpit for political propaganda.
The climate scare is also an important piece of artillery in the war on capitalism. Various climate zealots see it as “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” a means “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” and key to “major structural changes in economic growth and development.”
And let’s not forget the deranged rantings that global warming has stirred up. Consider the recent “findings” of researchers who say that extreme temperatures fuel online hate speech. Sure, we all can get a little grumpy when we’re too hot or too cold. But to say with any degree of certainty that “protecting our climate from excessive global warming” is “critical to our mental health,” and we therefore have to curb emissions “very rapidly and drastically,” is a primary fruitcake ingredient.
We wish this “academic” report was an anomaly. But it’s consistent with the nonsensical, cartoonish efforts from these people. For years they’ve tried to convince the public that man-made global warming has left behind a trail of ills, including acne scars, kidney stones, beer that doesn’t taste right, longer days, increased UFO sightings in the U.K. – to name just a few examples from a long list that has surely grown since it was first published more than a decade ago.
Human history has been filled with crackpots, cheats, liars, attention seekers, and fearmongers. Today these sorts have coalesced around the global warming narrative. They’ll do anything, they’ll say anything. If the rest of us don’t resist, they’ll take us back a couple of centuries.
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