Climate change

Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He is the inventor of the hockey stick chart, which shows a sharp increase in late 20th century global temperatures, like the blade of an ice hockey stick. It put rocket boosters on the climate change scare and was used as an excuse by policymakers to send green taxes, tariffs and regulations soaring. Mann was an obscure academic who had just been given his PhD at the University of Massachusetts when his graph was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Within months – fêted everywhere from the New York Times to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – he’d become the poster boy for the alleged global warming apocalypse.

In what could find itself deemed a new “war of Northern Aggression,” West Virginia and twenty-one other states are looking to defend themselves against New York for what they allege are climate-related crimes. A new lawsuit targets New York’s recently passed “Climate Change Superfund Act.” ABC27 reports the law requires polluters “to pay for environmental damage based on how many tons of fossil fuels they emitted during a specific period of time.” States could be on the hook for as much as $75 billion in fines for emissions going back years. At the time of the act’s passage, State Senator Liz Krueger, co-sponsor of the bill, said, “The Climate Change Superfund Act is now law, and New York has fired a shot that will be heard round the world.

Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the postmodernist-derived idea that reality can be radically reconstructed through control of what is, and is not, communicated. Its various fantasies – and the public-sector interests that depend upon them – necessarily involve suppressing our powers of rational cognition.

January is the ideal month for gaining a sense of perspective. I’m increasingly convinced that the ‘climate emergency’ is another social mania we’ll look back on with: ‘J-eez, what was that about?’ Why? The paradigm displays the classic anthropocentrism of our era. As organised religion declines, we replace God with humanity. Arrogating to our species the power to dial global temperature up or down is typically arrogant (see: pride, goeth, fall). Claiming that something is all your fault is as vain as claiming it’s to your credit. Regarding ‘the planet’ as a frightened fluff ball that requires our protection is the ultimate hubris. ‘The planet’ can squash us like bugs. Or with bugs, which sounds especially gross.

I had a friend whose approach to entrepreneurialism was to take two separate things that seemed stupidly popular and somehow find a way to combine them. He thought karaoke was ridiculous; his friend thought 24-hour rolling news channels were daft. The two of them created a 24-hour karaoke channel in Asia – and sold it at a sizeable profit. The idea of gynogenic climate change holds that the planet is warming up, but that it is women who are to blame Following this model, I wondered if it might be a useful thought-experiment to contrive political theories which are annoying to people on both the left and the right.