Climate change

When will the climate change lobby finally realise that it is undermining its own arguments through hyperbole? Yesterday, the Lancet published its latest climate change ‘indicators’, accompanied by a comment piece in the Guardian by Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and now chair of the Lancet Countdown advisory board.  The piece, headed 'Climate change isn’t just hurting the planet – it’s a public health emergency' makes the assertion that climate change is affecting 'the health of you, your family, your neighbours – each and every one of us.

What is the point of the World Bank? You probably think of it, if at all, as a benign institution, a kind of giant, multilateral aid agency, whose job it is to bring liquidity to developing nations and help them grow out of poverty. Until not so long ago, that was indeed its function. Created alongside the International Monetary Fund at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, the bank did sterling work in its early years helping countries like France recover from the war; and later, giving mostly third world countries the vital seed money needed to help attract investors to risky capital projects. Its multiplier effect on investment can be extraordinary. In 2013, the World Bank gave Kosovo $40 million towards building a lignite power station.

Funnily enough, you don’t come across too many pieces in the Guardian blaming black people for crime or women for bad driving. The newspaper would perhaps consider itself a pioneer in trying to drive out racial and gender stereotypes from daily life. It seems a different matter, though, when it comes to the inadequacies of white men, or, more specifically, elderly white men, to throw in a bit of ageism as well. An extraordinary piece in today’s Guardian tries to link what it calls 'climate denial' to race, gender and age.

Here they come, the eco-ghouls, feasting on another natural disaster. This time it’s the floods in Houston. No sooner had Hurricane Harvey caused terrifying waters to consume entire streets and trailer parks than the eco-set was rushing in to try to make moral mileage out of it all. This is climate change in action, they decreed. This is man’s fault, they insist. Our hubris caused this watery horror, they claim, sounding positively Biblical, like Old Testament patriarchs warning the sinful populace that God will punish it with floods. There’s nothing like a natural disaster to remind us how backward environmentalist thinking is. They do it all the time.

Readers of The Spectator will be familiar with the argument that climate change, like Britpop, ended in 1998. Raised on a diet of Matt Ridley and James Delingpole, you may have convinced yourself that climate scientists, for their own selfish reasons, continue to peddle a theory that is unsupported by real-world evidence. You may also have picked up the idea that the ‘green blob’, as it has been called in these pages, is somehow suppressing the news that global warming is a dead parrot. That was the case made by Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Forum in a Spectator blog in February last year.

Saturday evening in Durham. My in-laws and I had just begun our usual postprandial shout about Donald Trump when my niece appeared at the door, pale and serious. ‘There’s been another terrorist attack in London,’ she said. ‘I’m scared.’ The veins of the men in my husband’s family run with a sort of event-activated coolant. No one asked what had happened or how many were dead. My father-in-law said: ‘Don’t be daft. What’s there to be scared of?’ His brother added: ‘You’re more likely to be killed by cows.’ This, though not strictly true, is less ludicrous than you might imagine. Some 90 Brits were killed by terrorist attacks in the 15 years from 2000, whereas 74 were killed by cows. The cows did the trick.

‘Why not think about Gender Studies?’ asked an advertorial aimed at prospective students in the newspaper I was reading. Actually, I can think of lots of reasons, starting with: what kind of employer in his right mind (or her right mind, come to that) would be insane enough to take on a graduate with an intellectually worthless degree indicative of shrill resentment, bolshiness, blue hair, lax personal hygiene and weaponised entitlement? But two US academics, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, recently came up with an even better one. They managed to get published in a social sciences journal a paper arguing that the penis is not in fact a male reproductive organ but merely a social construct and that, furthermore, penises are responsible for causing climate change.

On this week's edition of The Spectator Podcast, we tackle a number of the most contentious issues around: whether the young royals are becoming too open with the press, if wind power will ever be an effective source of energy, and the question of whether Arsène Wenger should stay or go. First, in recent weeks, Princes William and Harry have both opened up to the world about their struggle to cope in the wake of their mother's tragic death. But Freddy Gray, in his cover piece, finds this candour off-putting, urging them not to turn the monarchy into a reality TV show. He joins the podcast along with Telegraph columnist Bryony Gordon, who conducted the first interview with Prince Harry where he spoke up about his issues with mental illness.

Each year, this column has the melancholy duty of reminding the public of the Prince of Wales’s prediction, made in Brazil in March 2009, that there were only 100 months left to prevent ‘irretrievable climate collapse’. Those 100 months will have elapsed at the end of next month, so it looks as if we are all doomed. The general election on 8 June will therefore be pretty pointless. It is noticeable, however, that the Prince has not, in recent years, repeated his exact dating of the catastrophe, muttering, in 2015, that it might be 35 years. Even more striking was his co-authorship, at the beginning of this year, of the Ladybird Book of Climate Change.

With Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen through to the final in France, people of a conservative disposition might feel themselves spoilt for choice. You can have either the believer in free markets and open societies or the upholder of sovereignty and national identity. In both cases, the left doesn’t get a look-in. But what if it isn’t like that at all? What if Macron, far from opposing the big state, is just a more technocratic version of the usual dirigiste from ENA? What if Le Pen, far from wanting a nation’s genius expressed in its vigorous parliamentary democracy, is just a spokesman for joyless resentment, looking for handouts for angry white people?

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, wrote a letter to Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, with formal notification of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. If no agreement is made sooner, Britain would cease to be a member in two years. The other 27 member states had celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. Asked by the BBC if Mrs May would be the ‘elephant in the room’ at the shindig, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, said: ‘She’s not an elephant.

Who do you think was responsible for Europe’s biggest environmental disaster of the past three decades; one that caused more widespread damage and killed more people than even the nuclear accident at Chernobyl? Was it a) greedy and selfish capitalists, probably linked to Big Oil, riding roughshod over the stringent health and safety regulations our wise, caring politicians have designed to protect us and our natural environment? Or b) an alliance of fluffy green activists, campaigning journalists and virtue-signalling politicians, united on a noble mission to save the planet from the greatest environmental threat it has ever known? If you guessed b) then you may appreciate why we climate sceptics are experiencing such schadenfreude right now.