Essay by Eric Worrall
Climate activists appear to be losing control of the narrative, as their followers reach the very logical conclusion that nobody is going to do anything substantial to avert their imaginary climate disaster.
Why is climate ‘doomism’ going viral – and who’s fighting it?
By Marco Silva
BBC climate disinformation specialistClimate “doomers” believe the world has already lost the battle against global warming. That’s wrong – and while that view is spreading online, there are others who are fighting the viral tide.
As he walked down the street wearing a Jurassic Park cap, Charles McBryde raised his smartphone, stared at the camera, and hit the record button.
“Ok, TikTok, I need your help.”
Charles is 27 and lives in California. His quirky TikTok videos about news, history, and politics have earned him more than 150,000 followers.
In the video in question, recorded in October 2021, he decided it was time for a confession.
“I am a climate doomer,” he said. “Since about 2019, I have believed that there’s little to nothing that we can do to actually reverse climate change on a global scale.”
…
Why it’s not too late
Climate scientist Dr Friederike Otto, who has been working with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that climate change will lead to humanity’s extinction.”
…
“There is no denying that there are large changes across the globe, and that some of them are irreversible,” says Dr Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment.
“It doesn’t mean the world is going to end – but we have to adapt, and we have to stop emitting.”
…
Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-61495035
McBride’s videos are available here. If anyone can be bothered digging out the doomer video, please comment and I’ll post a link.
Even the newly elected Australian government isn’t going to do anything substantial about emissions – because green solutions just don’t work. They’ll make a few noises about closing down coal, maybe shut down a coal station or two, kill a few big companies, then panic when power prices spike, inward investment collapses and the tax money runs dry.
So the part about “but we have to adapt, and we have to stop emitting.” just isn’t going to happen. In the context of their limited understanding, the doomers are being rational, more rational than the activists.
The only question is, how many committed doomers will “catch the bus” early?
I hope I’m not being too obscure with the Jonestown reference at the top of the page – the mass murder / suicide at Jonestown stands as a grim lesson of what can happen when an apocalyptic death cult embraces the logical conclusion of their warped worldview. I believe the same thing could happen to the climate doomers, except on a much larger scale.
At any moment an insane but charismatic climate doomer could publish a final TikTok video, and trigger a wave of copycats. I doubt it will be Charles McBryde – he seems way too narcissistic to end his show early. But there are some sick people out there, and some of them have a following.
We already have unequivocal evidence that young people are acting on their climate pessimism, embracing self destructive life choices because they genuinely believe there is no hope.
Frankly I would rather climate doomers go back to embracing climate activism instead of continuing to embrace climate doomerism – at least climate activists have a mission, they have something to live for. People can learn by their mistakes, if they are still alive to do so.
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Lets hope they give up just maybe the Ukraine war has done some good
I heard there’s some loud mouth rambling on about this fantastic energy transition he thinks we’re going through. I guess moving from functional to dysfunctional is a transition, but I don’t think that’s where most people want to end up.
The war may be the straw that is breaking the Great Reset’s back. Europe was already beset with doubts and worries that renewables were not going to work and their leaders understanding they would be the ones carrying the can.There will be fracking, coal, oil and even the neomarxists are starting to say nice things about nuclear! They will spin it as a temporary bridge, but it will be here for the long haul, shifting more to nuclear with time.
Millions of redundant climate and disinformation specialists will be looking for employment.
Nah, they’ll rebrand. Remember Y2K?— on January 2, 2000, all the doomsayers collectively ignored their previous statements. Same will happen here. The only difference is more social media than 2000 which means that embarrassing tweets will be uncovered from time to time. But I’ve no doubt the social media oligarchs will obligingly disappear the embarrassments for the select.
It already happens: a year ago we could read the “I Own Nothing” piece directly on the World Economic Forum website. Then it was not only taken down from the WEF site, but the other places it had appeared (except Forbes). Moreover, the BBC then conveniently wrote an article telling us that not only did the essay never really exist, but one is a conspiracy theorist if one ever thought it did AND it didn’t mean what it said.
So, the losers in the climate doom scam will be the ordinary people who were forced to purchase expensive heat pumps/electric cars/etc that don’t work well and forced to pay exorbitant taxes to allay climate doom prophecies. (As well as idiots who invested in windmills and unreliables and didn’t sell out in time.)
“Remember Y2K?”
I really hate that example.
Yes, I DO remember it. I remember that a lot of people worked very hard for quite some time to ensure that things DID NOT break.
And yes, there certainly were “doomsayers” out there claiming the world would end or such, but the big difference, and why I hate the example, is that there actually WAS a very real problem that needed to be fixed, unlike this climate alarmism.
I was running an electric utility serving parts of Nevada and Utah during the Y2K fixation. Ahead of time I had the IT people perform due diligence stress tests on our various systems. On December 31, 1999 I had some key people stay at sensitive locations into the evening hours. Early on it became apparent to me at headquarters that the world was not ending and I sent everybody home that wasn’t scheduled for work. No strain, no panic, no excess costs.
The point was : as soon as it did not occur, nobody publicly admitted their prior concerns. Which is exactly what climate doomers will do as soon as the weather apocalypse fails to occur.
nobody publicly admitted their prior concerns
But there were REAL concerns is my point. They were fixed. There’s nothing to fix in the case of climate alarmism. It’s a very different situation.
Ahead of time I had the IT people perform due diligence stress tests on our various systems.
So you acted in advance to ensure there was not a problem with your systems. Others found that there WOULD be problems and acted in advance to prevent them.
My point, which seems to be missed (intentionally? I would hope not) is that it is a bad analogy for climate alarmism because in the Y2K case there really was cause for concern, which was alleviated by action. In the climate case there isn’t a root problem at all.
Not quite. You are missing their main statements by all involved players in early January 2000.
By and large contractors, computer companies, engineering departments and IT departments declared their work a success and life continued.
All of the expense, effort, worries were valid. The crisis was averted and now information technology moved forward with new requirements for data handling, especially dates.
News sources and salespeople for contractors and software companies harped about disasters. No one who understood the programming and hardware were really concerned.
Take payroll. Payroll is very intent on knowing exactly what work they are paying for, often right down to the minute.
Financial reports were famous for having the following date fields accurately reported:
All of which require the year. Most payroll systems must track an employee, unit, building, company, corporation financial history across several years.
Date fields that only worked on two digit year fields were in a quandary ’00’ year sorts, searches, saved to file, retrieved from file as coming before year ’99’.
If anything puts the fear of god into a Vice President or Director of Finance it’s finding out that employees may not get paid timely or accurately. Possibly until programs are rewritten.
A very quick method to piss off employees killing quality and productivity.
Also at the top of the list are the billing and payment systems that are also dependent upon accurate years.
It took several months for companies to get a basic idea of the challenge.
The unknowns were dozens of systems with hardcoded 2 digit year fields. Many of the older systems didn’t have internals that could handle more than two digits.
A concern that frightened many executives as they greatly feared what news accounts were claiming. That critical hardware would fail to operate after midnight Dec. 31, 1999.
Information technology worked hard to find, identify and correct 2 digit years into 4 digit years.
Engineering departments worked hard testing hardware to find hardwired 2 digit years.
Both worked up “Plan B” actions, including forcing some systems to fail so that system errors could be isolated and corrected.
At 5AM Jan. 1st, 2000, many if not most IT executives/professionals and engineers were breathing a huge sigh of relief.
The whole Y2K problem was identified early and dealt with well before midnight 12/31/1999.
Every major presentation that I saw declared the effort a success. A success that was only needed once and life returned to normal.
I think human nature played a part.
It didn’t happen therefore it was never going to happen.
“See, I told you it was a fuss about nothing.”
I knew several people who were involved. They were all unsure of the likely outcome initially but took all the steps they could think of to ensure the world wouldn’t come to an end including running simulations. With mixed results, I understand, which made them even more nervous!
Whatever they did (or didn’t do) the end result was a smooth transition from 31121999 to 01012000 which is all that mattered.
There is no parallel with climate. The natural laws ensure that the (pretend?) worst fears of the climate activists cannot come to pass. If they would only dig their pointy heads out from their computer screens they would know that.
But then “climate change” has nothing to do with science, does it?
No, actually it did occur. But most of the afflicted software was fixed at some great expense.
Yes, but Y2K … or more correctly stated “The 19100” bug was self inflicted. And yes, I owned a server which failed due to the 19100 bug. It had the—this is ironic-humor talk now-en sotto voce—the catastrophic effect of recalling all the backup tapes which expired more than 1 year before the year 19100, and that was all of 1999.
How soon will programmers start working on the Y10K problem?
I believe the war in Ukraine is another feature of the Great Reset, just like COVID 19 and climate change. Government bureaucrats have been given the game plan through the WEF/DAVOS crowd (WEF is just a tool) to the long-term goal of reducing the planet’s population. I do not believe that the current Ukraine conflict is organic. Just as with climate change and COVID, any attempt to easily treat the source of the problem with readily available means is forbidden by those controlling the narrative. Similarly, attempts to rationally force Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table are not high on the potential solutions list.
The patterns of non-solution to the real “problems” (climate change, COVID and now Ukraine) are the same and do not address the real problem as these “problems” were created to push the desired narrative forward.
At least the BBC now admits that their climate scare stories are written by “BBC climate disinformation specialists”. I admire their honesty.
The ultimate irony.
Really!
The irony will be completely lost on them.
Nonsense. Climatism has always been about Total DOOM!
Then the movement split into two.
1) DOOM! and we need to do *Everything* to help slow it down.
2) DOOM! and it is Too Late, nothing to be done.
Oops, bad planning……
The “Too Late doomers” were the natural enemies of the “Do Everything doomers”.
Confusion in the ranks.
(Don’t you just hate it when that happens?)
Now the “Do Everything” faction is in a desperate attempt to get the “Too Late” crowd back under control.
Could not have happened to a nicer bunch.
You’re onto something there, TonyL.
It just k!lls ‘Climate Change’ protest attendance. Why bother showing up when there’s no point to it anymore?
But I just LOVED those big climate protests, such BIG TIME hypocrisy on display, it hurt their cause a lot.
I forecast that at least another aluminium smelter will go dark during the Albo government and will not be restarted.
Big new coal power plants spawned aluminium smelters in the 1970s and 1980s and green policy will destroy them in the 2020s. They are the worst possible load for sporadic generators. A freezer full of mush is cheap to dispose of and recover compared with digging out and restarting a reduction line.
Large supermarkets that do not have emergency power soon will. So food losses during power outages will be minimal.
Reduction lines are the canary for unreliable power networks. Australia has already lost two and the remains ones are on life support.
NZAS Tiwai Point smelter is on life support and operating in deep red but is trying to rebrand itself as a low carbon plant, being mostly powered by hydro. It also produces the highest purity aluminium in the world that goes into the alloys for high stress aircraft components.
Thanks, I’ll start collecting cans.
If we wait long enough the doomers and the people not willing to have children because of their fears will die out. Idiots not producing more idiots. Problem solved
True. But in the meantime, a huge amount of damage is being done to our society and infrastructure, damage that could take vastly more time and resources to fix. Can we afford the time to let these morons self-regulate themselves out of the situation?
One of the Shakers’ last three members died Monday. The storied sect is verging on extinction. – The Washington Post
After 275 years. I really don’t want the Doomers hanging around for half that long!
How do they manage the resources, charter and bylaws?
The youngest is 60.
Some smart young souls may join, wait it out for the five years of ‘probation’, and ‘inheret’ the church.
Anybody have that much patience?
Sorry, but the schools and universities will indoctrinate everyone’s kids, not just those of climate hysterics.
Yes it requires deft skill to credibly talk out of both sides of one’s mouth at the same time.
Remember when the new chief of the CSIRO downscaled the research efforts & staffing on climate change because the researchers themselves said “the science is settled”.
They howled in disbelief that someone should take them at their word.
Not both sides of the mouth. It’s speaking from two orifices.
Yes it requires deft skill to credibly talk out of both sides of one’s mouth at the same time.
____________________________________________________
George Orwell had a term for it:
Doublethink; The holding of two contradictory beliefs in
one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them
as true or correct, without realizing the contradiction.
Doublethink
Seems to be rather common lately
Umm, global warming and climate change have ALWAYS been about doom, from the very beginning. One side says it’s too late to do anything about the doom, the other side says we must take drastic and ruinous measures to avoid the doom. The common denominator is impending doom.
The environmental movement has been a doomsday cult for more than 50 years. The population bomb, the coming ice age, rising sea levels, melting ice caps, acid rain, the ozone hole, etc. It’s the same words sung to slightly different tunes.
I’d say same tune differant lyrics
I think you’re right, I got that backwards.
I’ve been telling you that we’re doomed for years now. Right here on WUWT.
Since all humans are doomed, RoHa, that is no stretch.
All greentards should be encouraged to remove themselves from the population.
How to screw kids up
They had to mess them up to save them
Yup. Just like many in the German Green Party. Screwing kids was once a policy.
Not admitted quite so boldly today.
Scaring the children over a delusional climate change doomsday is the real trajedy and crime.
Why are Doomers so despondent? Why did the AGW activist set himself on fire on Earth Day in Washington D.C.? Because all these folks feel — emphasis on the word feel — that we are nearing the point of no hope to save the planet. Why do they feel this way? Because they have quite literally never heard the AGW skeptic side of the cold, hard science at any depth. I’d predict if they heard anything at all about skeptic climate scientists, it is that such skeptics are paid Oil money to spread disinformation …. and guess which of the usual suspects that accusation sources from.
Because they have quite literally never heard the AGW skeptic side of the cold, hard science at any depth
And if it’s ever presented to them, they simple refuse to listen.
Tony, they are presented with the cold, hard science (sans climate models) in the body of every UN IPCC CliSciFi report: The actual evidence-based science they contain makes it very clear that human GHG emissions have de minimis impacts on temperature and rainfall and no measurable impact on the severity of extreme weather events nor their frequency. It is all there to see but the politicians, NGOs, ideological activists and profiteers of all stripes lie constantly and work to hide the actual scientific truth.
Tony, they are presented with the cold, hard science (sans climate models) in the body of every UN IPCC CliSciFi report
No argument. It’s a mindset incapable of rationally assessing beliefs based on emotion. They don’t WANT to know any different.
“Since about 2019, I have believed that there’s little to nothing that we can do to actually reverse climate change on a global scale.”
Hey, I’m with Charlie, except I reached his conclusion 50+ years earlier than he did. Doom may be coming, but not via the climate. General idiocy will be our downfall. The climate is doing fine. Best to leave it alone since nothing can be done to alter it anyway. Embrace warmth. You’ll be happier.
“General idiocy will be our downfall.”
Yes.
General idiocy IS our downfall, consistently and everywhere. It is only through the heroic efforts of normal people that anything actually works.
Its not too late because nothing is actually going to happen.
However, if the climate doomsters are so fatalistic I suggest they read Nevil Shute’s novel On The Beach for inspiration on how to live out their lives.
The rest of us can just get back to normal.
Meanwhile, I think building an Ark B for the entire BBC staff sounds like a good plan, and would be money well spent. Don’t think it would take much to persuade BBC staffers to get on board, they don’t seem to be the brightest.
Any extinction rebellion protest is littered with death cult iconography. The coffins and people dressed as skeletons/death kind of give it away.
All the theatrics etc, definitely not what ordinary working class people do at all.
I agree. Some of it is like a religious ritual.
It’s very middle and upper-middle class stuff – people with the time and resources/money…
Extinction Rebellion inadvertently showed it is a class war thing at the battle of Canning Town
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P1UXYS6Bmg
As the video shows….
The idiots were damned lucky they weren’t stomped to death by enraged commuters.
“not what WORKING people do at all”. There, fixed it.
Don’t kid yourself, the doom theme is so that the general population will accept “total control” in tne near future. All that is needed are enough politicians to “believe”…
A young person pushing doomism is ignorant.
An old person pushing doomism is a denialist.
A sensible person pushes human adaption.
A sensible person looks at the data, realises there is no crisis, puts his/her feet up and has a cold beer
Now, that’s proper philosophy.
That’s what a cold beer does for you 😉
its a chicken/egg thing.
Let me fix that:
“but we have to adapt, and we have to stop
emittingemoting.”Well this is all very lovely…..
We’re all very clever people around here, we know all about computers and Sputniks, about thermodynamics, mathematics, statistics and trend-lines.
Trendlines are especially good fun ain’t they – warmists produce trendlines and sceptics produce ever more perfectly contradicting the warmists ones
Science and Civilisation is bounding forwards in ever greater leaps – we are surely destined for a Never Better Future – the trend-lines tell us so
more ‘food’
more oil
more energy
more cars
more air-cons
more natural gas
We see these trend-lines around here daily
Finally, my point here:
What if the people we’re so cheerfully taking the piss out here, all have and to varying degrees as is the way, Autistic Spectrum Disorder?
What if they are the vanguard of what’s coming?
How would you know, Do they even know themselves, not least as ‘birds of a feather etc)
If they gather into, lets say, A Consensus/Grouping, all they will see are similarly affected people around them and thus nothing will appear ‘untoward’
(Would that apply to self declared sceptics also = different sides of the same coin)
So, are you still OK to be taking the piss out of the Doomsters – is that a Clever Thing to be doing?
Your decision, I can’t change your mind.
Why even try, as we see so many times in this Climate Discussion, it is damn near impossible to change anyone’s mind about anything..
Why do you think that might be………….
(Please tell me you’re not reaching for a can of Soda-Pop while you ponder)
What about this – if this guy hasn’t got ASD from all the sugar he’s eaten already, he’s bringing it on chemically with alcohol – in the company of other similarly afflicted individuals.
And these are the Creme-de-la-creme of British Politics. In action, formulating policies and actions during the Covid haha ‘crisis’
Yeah it was a crisis all right, did anyone bother to tell the virus?
What you see in this picture is the upcoming ‘Doom’
“What if they are the vanguard of what’s coming?”
They are.
This is a long term process whereby each succeeding cohort is marginally more programmed than its predecessor. Correct think, political correctness and nowadays wokeism and the trans ideology (the new patriarchy).
For example,
“An Islington council poster announced that babies as young as three months old can be racially biased,
The Labour council’s under-5s department shared the graphic with diagrams of children from babies up to six, titled: ‘Children are never too young to talk about race.'”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10841415/Labour-run-Islington-Council-say-children-young-three-months-old-racially-biased.html
In the UK local councils control education and most schools. All the papers the poster references have been shown to be junk.
Last year it was Drag Queen storytime… Children haven’t been educated for quite some time now. They’ve been indoctrinated.
That poster is incredibly sinister and disturbing.
The one nuclear power station per week, every week, till 2050 argument has never been refuted. It has been made by some prominent crusaders, then quietly dropped. Add to that millions of EVs and heat pumps, every year till 2050, and it becomes clear that it ain’t going to happen, not even close.
No wonder Big Green buries these inconvenient facts, but eventually the facts meet the hysteria.
So, after years and years of moving the goalposts with the message
“We need to act now, in 5 years it’s too late and we are doomed” some believers in the International Church of Climate Change finally start to wonder if those goalposts should not be already behind us?
Surely Charlie and the Pope must realise that by now? To many “final” predictions with none of them happening must make even the religionists think?
This calls for settled science once and for all. A tournament with pushbikes and lances at 200 yards should do it. Let xem begin-
What do xe / xem / xyrs pronouns mean? | LGBT terms explained | Heckin’ Unicorn (heckinunicorn.com)
It will require appropriate 100 yard approaches for either side with net zero armour for the renewables-
Baldwin Street in New Zealand reinstated as the world’s steepest street | Guinness World Records
Peer reviewed by Netflix as they need a legup with the ratings.
Sorry, observa, but I didn’t click on that xe/xems link. I don’t know a darn thing about it all, but I’m certain I’ll be better off if I remain ignorant on the topic.
That’s one rabbit hole I’m not going down and they can all just GET OFF MY LAWN!
Next to all the beautiful faux net zero environmental science and management indoctrination center, it’s important to establish a psychology clinic. The angst and depression from being exposed to all the doom and gloom while demanding measures that crush the lower class is a lot for the self-aware to process. They’ll need some therapy to come around to the reality that their efforts are in large part a waste of time and money. An interesting hobby largely at others’ expense.
“I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that climate change will lead to humanity’s extinction”, said rhe idiot pretending that “climate change” is somehow a “threat” to humanity. “We have to stop emitting” said the idiot. Ok, you first.
“Ok, you first.”
Good suggestion!
Try pulling a plastic bag over their head. They will stop emitting after a few minutes.
Oh there’s a Climate Doomer
Just a-walkin’ down the street whadoi
Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do?
Moanin’ and groanin’ and shufflin’ his feet whadoi
Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do?
He looked dumb (looked dumb)
He was cryin’ (was cryin’)
He looked dumb, was cryin’
And he nearly lost his mind
Have you heard Nektar’s Recycled?
Great music – never mind the lyrics
Early prog band , I saw them twice in NY back in the 70’s Down to Earth was a pretty good album as well. Sorry for the off topic, good memories
Yes but Climate Doomism is their natural progression – oh, if only there weren’t unforeseen consequences!
Land use mismanagement is the bigger and more solvable problem. But since that’s an old problem, the tree huggers would rather whine and wail than find a usable solution I guess.
Depression is a clinical illness, not a temporary mood. Those who would commit suicide over climate change would commit suicide for one thing or another, whatever pretext might serve their psyche. They need counseling and probably drug therapy too.
The sooner the alarmists figure out that they’re getting nowhere, the better for all mankind. Instead of destructive policy changes adopted by dictatorial fiat, instead focus on improving the quality of life for the billions who are currently under-served and under privileged.