Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian has declared 2019 the year they defeated “climate denial”. But nobody in the green movement has any idea what comes next.
Climate change denial was defeated in 2019. But what comes next won’t be easier
Defeating the climate crisis is just the beginning of the struggle – and tough political choices will have to be made
Will 2019 be remembered as the year in which climate change denial was defeated? The global climate strike, Greta Thunberg’s meteoric rise to international prominence, as well as several high-profile international conferences and reports – all contributed in putting climate skeptics on the back foot.
Even Donald Trump, who previously claimed that the climate crisis was a “hoax” invented by China to hold back American industry, has recently begun to brag about all his administration has done to address it. Following suit, the rest of his party is scrambling to develop a coherent environmental platform, more in line with their electoral base’s shifting views.
But the next steps in the global fight against the climate crisis remain far from clear. In the speech she delivered to US Congress in September, Thunberg maintained: “No matter how political the background to this crisis may be, we must not allow it to become a partisan political question. The climate and ecological crisis is beyond party politics. And our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy is physics.”
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We already see this new politics taking shape in emergent debates over competing proposals for addressing the climate crisis. Bernie Sanders’ and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s respective versions of the Green New Deal are very different from the proposal for a European Green Deal recently put forward by the new president of the European commission, Ursula von der Leyen.
The first approach wants to connect the issue of the climate crisis with social justice, and advocates for a massive expansion in the role of the state to manage the transition to renewable energy. The second approach treats the issue of the climate crisis in isolation from other social and political issues, and proposes market rather than state mechanisms to address it.
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These decisions cannot be taken by purely technical or scientific means. On the contrary, the fact that the environmental movement has so far remained the preserve of a small technocratic elite has done more to invite populist backlashes than to further its own goals.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/29/the-climate-movement-is-about-to-get-more-political-and-thats-a-good-thing
The climate movement didn’t win in 2019, they won a long time ago. With a handful of exceptions like President Trump, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and President Bolsonaro of Brazil, for the last decade at least there has been an almost seamless genuine global political consensus on the need to address the climate crisis.
Why hasn’t this political consensus translated into real climate action?
When Greta Thunberg said “Our main enemy is physics.”, for once she was spot on. The renewable solutions the climate movement advocates are impossible. Other greens are aware of this problem; Bill Gates tried and failed to solve the problems. David Attenborough advocates a renewable “Apollo Programme”, to attempt to solve problems which he knows are currently insurmountable. Trump hater Michael Moore tried to investigate what was stopping the green revolution; Moore found a dark swamp of lies and corporate greed, in the last place he expected.
Eventually voters will tire of believing in a climate crisis which never manifests. But until then, I see the main role of climate skeptics as trying to contain the economic damage caused by ruinously expensive political climate follies.
When trillions of dollars are at stake, doubt, even a small doubt, kills the sale.
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The vast majority of people do not see or feel anything different in the climate that hasn’t happened before. They’re tired of the hype and wish it would all go away. The failure of any government to successfully launch a carbon tax is the writing on the wall for Climate Alarmism because it deprives the perpetrators of their ultimate goal…. wealth redistribution and control of economies.
“The failure of any government to successfully launch a carbon tax”
See: Canada
I wish it had failed but it did not.
“our main enemy right now is not our political opponents. Our main enemy is physics”
And statistics
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/11/16/agw-issues/
And reality.
Statistics has been declared persona non-grata in the climate change community.
Actually their biggest opponent is History, which is why they keep trying to rewrite it.
LOL! The Guardian declares victory! They think they defeated skeptics because they censor all comments from them on their forum. The country with the largest economy on earth becomes a net exporter of fossil fuels and opts out of the so called “Paris Accords” and is led by a skeptic and the Guardian declares victory over skeptics. What’s next? Will the guardian declare the remainers to have been the winners of the Brexit fight?
“They think they defeated skeptics because they censor all comments from them on their forum.”
The Guardian ought to lift their ban on skeptics and then they would realize they haven’t won anything.
Only losers (alarmists) ban the other side (skeptics) from the argument.
If the alarmists had a viable climate change argument, they wouldn’t need to ban skeptic comments, they could just humiliate the skeptics with the facts. The problem is the alarmists have no facts and don’t like that being pointed out, and that’s why they ban skeptics. Alarmists are Losers. Running and hiding from the facts. Covering their ears like a child so they don’t hear something that will disturb their preconceived notions.
Perhaps someone could ask Anthony what the membership and viewing figures are for this site?
I mean if we ignore the fact that no sceptic ‘denies climate’ in ANY way, then what they are trying to do is declare victory over sceptics who defy their Religion… right?
So that would mean we sceptical types are vanishing from the scene. Instead of getting more numerous.
This is just the corruption of PR. We see it in polls where, IF you can get to see the questions, it is clear they are ‘leading the witness’ by the quality of questions asked, the wording and the order in which they ask them.
This is just another leg of how to fail in PR.
What they are doing is trying to convince the non-aligned that ‘everybody’ has their AGW beliefs and so they hope to bring those undecideds into alignment with the fascists’ agenda. Most people will vote according to how they perceive those around them will vote.
Which is why polls have moved away from trying to track the intentions and instead try to create them.
And also why they are now failing spectacularly in their prophesies.
So, that’s why COP 25 was such a rousing success. Their work was done!
Moore found a dark swamp of lies and corporate greed, in the last place he expected.
That was in August 2019 and since then crickets. Looks like the militant greens got to him just like they got to the Africans who want fossil fueled power stations.
‘Eventually voters will tire of believing in a climate crisis which never manifests.’
That remains to be seen, but there are plenty of political mcguffins with considerable staying power that frequently seem to be put down but then rear their heads once again with each rising vegetation: “capitalism is evil/socialism is the answer,” “the population bomb,” “Big Medicine/Pharma is ripping us all off,” and so on.
There are often enough voters roped in that you can get a Barack Obama elected to the highest office in the land, running on long-since discredited declarations against “corporate greed” and big government as the answer to all that ails us.
I wouldn’t count “we have only a few years left till it’s too late” out just yet.
I didn’t say they would go away, they’ll move onto a new scare. Same solution, different problem.
Indeed. Just as the “coming ice age” required man to reduce his industrial activities/embrace expanded government control of our lives only for “Global Warming” to take it’s place, with the same solution: Man reducing his industrial activities/embracing expanded government control of our lives.
Defeat?
Student holidays in the square all over the world who know nothing about the climate with a girl who became famous only because she was placed in front of the cameras?
Philanthropist-funded antisocial activists?
Politically speaking they have been badly defeated so far.
The only thing we have seen is that the United Nations is in crisis.
Guterres makes faces of s ** t with his statements about the end of the world.
The US Democrats are in a credibility crisis and are now abusing the American Constitution to create a desperate personal impeachment.
The Guardian likes to win easy.
When President Nixon met First Secretary khrushchev for a round of golf, Nixon handily beat khrushchev. The next day, Pravda reported that khrushchev had come second and that Nixon had come second-last. When a deeply socialist newspaper is called “Truth”, you know that the truth is the last thing they will be reporting.
So when a deeply socialist newspaper is called “The Guardian”, you know that the truth is the last thing that they’ll be guarding…
Hold the Green Blight accountable for economic damage… resource mismanagement, environmental corruption, and ecological equivocation.
… and negligent homicide.
The belief in the theory or not was never the problem. It’s the world domination, destruction of capitalism, reverting to living like they did in the Middle Ages and handing over all one’s cash to countries that use it to further murderous regimes that is the problem. Nothing changes until a rational, reasonable solution is put forth, even if it is true CO2 is raising temperatures. Bulldozing the planet to save it is never going to sell, at least not until every child is so stupid they are incapable of independent thought and the adults that cared are all deceased. We’re not that close right now—there are too many “anti-climate-cult” demonstrations and nothing really changes. For every Greta, there’s a Yellow Vest, etc. As cuts and insanity increase with the Cult, so will the resistance. It’s not the science, it’s the politics.
Carlo claiming victory, doing his best Iraqi Information Minister impersonation.
Nice one Grauniad, the straw man hung drawn, quartered and burned at the stake.
Nobody actually denies ‘climate change’ occurs, ice ages, little ice ages, Maunder minima and Roman or Mediaeval warmings etc and I don’t imagine anyone actually denies climate so defeat for these imaginary ‘deniers’ is more a work of semantics as against one of science.
But that is about the level of the great Green Blob and its acolytes.
Many alarmists seem to deny it. Their view is that any change is bad, and caused by humans. That, is climate denial.
I am a climate change catastrophe denier (which is a perfectly good word and, in my case, more accurate than “skeptic”) and yes, climate change denial has been banished from most media outlets. Denying that fossil fuel use will cause a climate catastrophe is now like denying that all races are equal, or that homosexuals have the right to marry, or that people should be forbidden from smoking in public. You’re just not allowed to say it. If you do, people don’t even get angry with you. They just roll their eyes at each other, secure in the knowledge that everyone here knows that you’re stupid and wicked.
But fellow climate change catastrophe deniers, time is on our side. Ten years from now, when global sea level has risen another inch (oh, the horror!) and millions of people still live in Texas and Florida, having neither drowned nor starved nor baked to death, and when Exxon is still immensely profitable, people are going to figure that they’ve been had. And you just watch the great wind power experiments in Germany and Ontario come a cropper.
Even Justin Trudeau knows that he can’t raise the carbon tax. (Why can’t any of these people pronounce the word “dioxide”?) Climate change mitigation is itself mitigated by economic and political reality.
I was born in 1952, and for much of my life I was told that global nuclear war was imminent. As years went by, and then decades, and no nuclear wars happened, that particular monster under the bed was found to be imaginary. And that’s what will happen with anthropogenic climate change. You just watch.
Note that the Guardian journos are obeying the editorial diktat by calling ‘global warming’ ‘global heating’. Etc On the weather page they record today’s CO2 level and state350ppm to be the ‘safe level’. Ludicrous but nice to know. When will we be back down there. I wonder.
Article was in the Guardian. Enough said. Few people have any knowledge of history. Climate change in the past: Greenland settled around 1100AD with cattle and dairy farms, disastrous weather shifts as it moved from Medieval warm period in the 1300s to Little Ice Age, disastrous floods, blazing summers or bitter winters, all recorded in chronicles. Also young people recruited then by the Church to proclaim disasters due to human sin (Extinction Rebellion, St Greta etc). Climate change and disasters have always happened, due to solar system patterns, sun, cosmic rays etc etc etc. IPCC has declared its main aim is not environment but redristu=ibution of money via “carbon taxes” etc.
Not surprising. Leftists believe in the power of words to alter reality. A man can become a woman by simply saying “I am a woman.” Hillary Clinton can become the smartest woman on the planet. Socialized medicine can lower costs and improve care. Banning the internal combustion engine will save the planet. Earth is in dire peril from too much carbon dioxide.
Reality sucks. It’s so HARD. Video games are so much more fun. Words have magic powers that result in good things happening immediately. It’s EASY.
The Guardian: “Climate Denial was Defeated in 2019”
The Guardian.
Wrong about Everything
All the Time
still wainting for a definition of climate denial..
from there…
The first 3 items on BBC R4 9 am news today were all climate change related.
That sort of narrative is constantly present now and indicates climate change is mainstream accepted science and recognised as an urgent problem.
The events and actions of 2019 – not least the Australian fires – firmly established there’s a climate emergency and that the science is sound.
No use you contrarians barking into the wind any longer: the world’s govts, financiers and industries are proceeding along the path of climate action… the ship has sailed
Clueless again Griff. How many fires were started deliberately and how many were started in a national park that has no fuel load management?
Sailed to where Griff? Renewables don’t actually work, so all they can do is waste money.
We know for a fact that science is no participant in the climate frenzy, Griff.
The insistent narrative indicates climate change is mainstream accepted BS and deliberately foisted as an urgent problem.
Adventitious events do not establish the soundness of science.
Your climate confreres of the lie, the chops-licking socialist tyrants-in-waiting, the cynically opportunistic politicians, and the pseudo-scientists pushing their false narrative are all headed for a big fall.
Some of the latter deserve serious prison time because their deliberate lies are directly responsible for thousands of excess winter deaths.
And you colluded in that, Griff.
And yet Australia isn’t going to change anything shows you what we care about your climate emergency 🙂
Link if you need proof
https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/scott-morrison-rules-out-changes-to-governments-climate-change-policies-amid-bushfire-crisis/news-story/eca3f65457902d834e033ec30f153c4c
I guess the greens can try and beat the issue up before the next election due before 2022 and see if they can actually manage to increase there vote … I have money for they lose ground especially if XR keeps protesting 🙂
Actually we probably do have a response we will export record coal and gas in 2020.
‘Guardian’ is becoming a synonym for ‘delusion’.
My advice to WattsUp readers: you’ll have a better 2020 if you just stop reading the Guardian or articles reporting what it prints… you’ll be much calmer and your blood pressure will be lower.
Ha ha ha, that is funny, but actually Guardian shows how demented CO2 sniffers really are, which is a source of amusement for many.
laugher is the best medicine for reaching “calmer” with “lower blood pressure”, so if anything you should be encouraging us to read more of the unintended comedy that they try to pass off as news.
What parting of mocking and laughing at did you fail to understand?
Griff The Guardian is the climate comedy segment.
Isn’t WUWT a fantastic website, Griff? Year after year you post here and disagree with what the articles and most posters are saying and yet you are not banned for saying what you want to say.
Yet try doing so at the Guardian and your account is disabled. Five times in my case with my longest stint being 6 weeks and my shortest being 5 days and all for disagreement. I finally stopped creating another account at the Guardian because I realised the posters consisted of gatekeepers like rockyrex, Erik Frederiksen, Jules Bilgewater and such who had been there for years, many low status attack dogs and finally doomsters attracted to the Guardian Monbiotic narrative who really believed that the world was going to end somewhere this century in enormous conflagrations and tsunamis. It just wasn’t worth it. Many posters over the years with good sceptical arguments have suddenly disappeared. I believe HotScot went the same way for persistently asking for empirical evidence of AGW and the warming properties of CO2.
This is the the best time for life on this planet that has ever been and still you want to moan.
Get a life or maybe you should get another planet.
Maybe the Guardian bans contrarians because it is scared of the truth whereas WUWT does not because it is not scared of lies.
On the reverse of that try posting a contrary view on the Gaurdian comments.
Yeah they are a bastion of Freedom of expression 🙂
“watt comes next ”
Perhaps educating the great unwashed in climate history ???
The entire subject has sod all to do with climate.
The climate isn’t changing, it’s still raining somewhere, snowing elsewhere, and blowing a hooly somewhere else.
The alarmists were wailing about temperature change, until they realised it wasn’t as bad as they thought, so began promoting it as something touchy-feely and much bigger, which can never be defined, pinned down or solved.
So, was born ‘climate change’.
HotScot. Well said.
There is weather which anyone, anytime, anywhere can experience and record it.
There is a human construct called ‘climate’ which we define as average weather over a given period in a specific region.
The definition of climate already contains the property that is can change over time.
We only need the terms weather and climate. Climate change is a bogeyman term and is an unnecessary distraction from reality.
GRauniad must be really desperate if they’re publishing stuff that silly. Thunberg is a one-off. Someone else will take her place and lead this non-existent Crusade, with no idea where they’re going.
I’m hoping for a nice, normal summer with lots of dragonflies active in the air. I would love to see a swarm of them, and maybe some grasshoppers, too, invading an XR protest, but that’s just me.
This rather lame effort to throw the entire world into a panic attack over nothing, and destroy a thriving economy (except for those already destroyed) is not working out very well for them , is it? As so many have pointed out, if you take away the electronic junk, THEY won’t have access to it, either. It’s easy enough to just shut it down, and THEY are as dimwitted about how it works as anyone else who takes it for granted.