‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’

That quote, attributed to Samuel Clemens’ alter ego Mark Twain, sums up so much of ‘collective wisdom’ in the world today. Some claim the quote originated before his time but he’s one of my favourite boyhood authors so I’ll go with him; nowhere is it more apt than with the Western world’s current obsession with ‘climate change’.

According to recent calls by the Australian Greens, alarmist scientists, and globalist leaders from the United Nations and World Economic Forum, we should all become ‘climate activists’ to save the world from ‘an era of global boiling’.

We saw the most recent result last week when thousands of school students took part in a climate action strike under the guise of ‘a sick day for a sick planet’. The sickest aspect was a ‘sick note’ provided university professors which stated:

The student is ‘unfit’ to attend school as the government’s inaction on climate change has caused ‘increased anxiety’ among other ‘symptoms’.

Elevated stress on seeing the impacts of the climate emergency now in Australia and worldwide … feelings of despair due to the disregard of leaders who won’t have to endure the future they’ll leave behind.

What perpetual alarmists don’t acknowledge is the reality that repeated warnings of ‘catastrophic climate change’ – pushed by educators, governments, and a mainly compliant media hungry for headlines – are responsible for the ‘increased anxiety’ rather than any tangible evidence of a rapidly warming climate. All this is based on dodgy computer modelling and an unproven hypothesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are responsible, rather than natural cyclical changes.

Despite the headlines, nothing we have seen in the past decade is ‘unprecedented’. As Dorothea Mackellar eloquently pointed out in My Country, we are a land of droughts and flooding rains. There have been bigger floods, worse droughts, higher temperatures, and more severe cyclones than any witnessed by young Millennials or their parents, despite efforts by some to expunge historical records and ‘homogenise’ temperature readings that stand out from an accepted average.

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million and it has been much higher in eons past, where plants, animals, and coral reefs survived and thrived. From Wikipedia:

Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were as high as 4,000 ppm during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago, and as low as 180 ppm during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years. Reconstructed temperature records for the last 420 million years indicate that atmospheric CO2 concentrations peaked at approximately 2,000 ppm during the Devonian (400 Ma) period, and again in the Triassic (220–200 Ma) period and was four times current levels during the Jurassic period (201–145 Ma).

And according to an article in the US website PJ Media earlier this year:

‘Recently published data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows that there has not been global warming for the past eight years. And NASA satellite data reportedly confirms that evidence, showing no global warming for eight years and five months… But leftists are quick to warn people against drawing the obvious conclusion that the world isn’t about to become a burning ball of fire.

‘Recently published evidence also showed that there was actually a near-record low of major hurricanes in 2022, indicating that weather isn’t getting progressively and exponentially worse globally, despite the climate frenzy of the media and governments. And the Northeast is currently experiencing record cold in a harsh winter…’

So, before we buy a few tubes of superglue to anchor ourselves to a busy city street or catch a flight to Paris or London where we can deface Van Gough and Picasso’s priceless artworks to ‘save the planet’, it’s worth taking a step back to ponder some other dire warnings:

Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia, in 2000 said, ‘Within a few years, winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.’

Less than a decade later, former US Vice President Al Gore made various contentious predictions for the near future. A High Court judge ruled his movie An Inconvenient Truth contained nine significant errors and could only be shown in schools if accompanied by fresh guidance.

Former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd warned ‘Climate Change is the great moral challenge of our time’ before jetting off to a climate change talk-fest in Copenhagen where delegates had to scramble home before the airport was snowed under.

Professor Tim Flannery of the Climate Council in 2007 claimed: ‘Even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams…’ Oops…

Back in the 1970s scientists seemed unable to agree on whether we were entering a new ice age or global warming was about to ramp up. Here are just a few of the many dire warnings made after the first Earth Day in 1970:

Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that ‘civilisation will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind’.

‘We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,’ according to Washington University biologist Barry Commoner.

The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, ‘Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.’

But when it comes to alarmist predictions, this one takes the prize: ‘… As all the ice at the two poles melt, a stupendous volume of water will be released. Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace … the Sahara Desert will be a great inland sea … New York will be marked by taller skyscrapers … the climate will be as when dinosaurs roamed the Earth…’

This piece again from the New York Times is dated – May 15, 1932.

Well, it hasn’t happened in the last 90 years, I don’t think King Charles and Queen Camilla will have to vacate Buckingham Palace any time soon, and we’ll still have to walk a couple of hundred metres from our home to let our dogs enjoy our beautiful beach for the foreseeable future. So I won’t be buying any superglue unless something really needs mending.

John Mikkelsen is a former editor of three Queensland regional newspapers, columnist, freelance writer and author of the Amazon Books Memoir, Don’t Call Me Nev.