The late morning sun danced off the Mediterranean as I took a chair facing Al Gore on the rooftop terrace of the Hilton in Cannes. I was there to interview the ascending messiah, in the foothills of the apocalypse known as AGW. He was to receive awards and accolades for his 2006 film in which (as writer) he addressed An Inconvenient Truth, screened just before we met, at the world’s most prestigious film festival, the altar of cinema.

The West took the message and spread it with fervour, using the film as a platform. Ambassadors were recruited to help sell the gloom, touring schools with a full propaganda kit of slide shows with alarmist claims echoing the film. It was (is!) the first mass hypnosis on a near-global scale. China and Russia (and much of the Middle East) remained untouched by the alarmist onslaught. When your enemy is digging a hole, don’t interrupt…

It wasn’t long, October 2007, that an opposing alarm was sounded in Britain, when a high court judge highlighted what he said were ‘nine scientific errors’ in the film.

The judge made his remarks when assessing a case brought by a Kent school principal and a member of a political group, the New Party, opposed to a government plan to show the film in secondary schools.

The judge ruled that the film can still be shown in schools, as part of a climate change resources pack, but only if it is accompanied by fresh guidance notes to balance Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views. The ‘apocalyptic vision’ presented in the film was not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change, he said.

The mistakes identified mainly deal with the predicted impacts of climate change and include claims that a sea-level rise of up to 6m would be caused by melting in either west Antarctica or Greenland ‘in the near future’. The judge said: ‘This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s “wake-up call”.’ He accepted that melting of the ice would release this amount of water, ‘but only after, and over, millennia’.

Gore, famously within an inch of the US Presidency in 2000, was emphatic; the climate was threatening. ‘I know this about politics. The political system has one thing in common with the climate system: it too, is non-linear. It can appear to change only gradually. But it can cross a tipping point, beyond which it moves dramatically,’ he said.

Ironically, the film quotes Mark Twain’s wisecrack, ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so,’ with the unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant.

The salesman’s tricks in An Inconvenient Truth supercharged the already hyped scare campaign which had begun on June 23, 1988. To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session hosting NASA’s Jim Hansen as a guest speaker on the subject, Hansen’s Democrat ally Senator Tim Wirth scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer. In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras could show everyone sweating in the heat. Wirth later told Deborah Amos (NPR News) how he did it:

‘What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot… The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.’

Nobody questioned why it was NASA spreading the warming message, nor why it was in the political arena instead of a scientific setting.

Throughout the West, living standards, the economy, and yes, even the universally cherished environment itself, have been beaten down, throttled, and endangered by the still unproven theory (unproven theory correct!) that fossil fuel emissions drive warming and threaten the planet. Plants, of course, disagree.

But then, the message has always been borne on the wings of political activism, from Jim Hansen and Tim Wirth to Al Gore and latterly in Australia, the evangelical Chris Bowen. I use the word advisedly: climate change as a political movement is more like a secular religion, as has been noted many times before. It can also be described as ‘a cultural disease haunting Western society’, in the words of Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. In his new book, The Grip of Culture, Andy West ‘overturns the existing literature, developing a powerful new model of public attitudes based on the interaction of traditional religion and a new culture – a new faith – of climate catastrophism, which is instinctively accepted or rejected. At its centre is a series of measurements of public opinion, culled from major international polls, which make a strong case that society is now in the grip of a major new religion’, according to the back cover synopsis.

It is a supreme irony that climate alarmists justify their activism by reference to ‘the science’ while steadfastly refusing to pay heed to scientific reports that challenge their beliefs, or to debate the subject with climate scientists – those not captured by the ruling orthodoxy. And there are a great many of them.

Nick Cater writes in his July 24, 2023, column in The Australian:

‘There are only 83,000 hectares of wet sclerophyll forest left in North Queensland. Ark Energy is just a ministerial tick away from ripping into a thousand to construct an industrial wind turbine development.’

Killing the environment to save the environment, eh?

In Struggle Street (pace Alan Jones), the energy bill hills have grown into mountains. Eat or heat? is the winter question. Small businesses face extinction. 

Encouraged by the alarmism, zealous but disinformed protestors who want to Just Stop Oil rampage through cities and art galleries, disrupting city life, adding stress to urbanites (including this Urban).

The chaos of energy policies, here and elsewhere, is the direct result of attempts to ‘save the planet’ by alarmist scenarios that have children terrified, young couples refusing to have children, and corporates falling over themselves to turn from profit to politics, abandoning their purpose. Don’t they see they are helping politicians to be the useful idiots assisting China to ruin the world – weakening it on the way to controlling it? Without firing a shot; Sun Tzu would approve.

Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing)

Get 10 issues for just $10

Subscribe to The Spectator Australia today for the next 10 magazine issues, plus full online access, for just $10.

SUBSCRIBE 10 issues for $10 REGISTER 3 articles a month

Already a subscriber? Log in