Claim: Climate Change is “An intergenerational crime against humanity”

Essay by Eric Worrall

The persistent and damaging academic campaign of climate fearmongering is the “intergenerational crime” which history will remember.

‘An intergenerational crime against humanity’: what will it take for political leaders to start taking climate change seriously?

Published: June 4, 2024 6.08am AEST
Joëlle Gergis
Honorary Climate Research Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

In February 2024, I attended the annual conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society – the peak group for scientists working in all branches of weather and climate research. Over the past decade, the mood of our gatherings has become increasingly sombre. Some presenters have taken to apologising in advance for their confronting results, with some attempting to soften the blow by including funny animated gifs or photos of soothing sunsets to comfort the audience. 

It’s not hard to understand why. This year we had a plenary address by a distinguished IPCC veteran. The speaker began by saying that the world has “Buckley’s chance” of achieving the 1.5°C target, and even 2°C is going to be a stretch. If emissions continue at the current rate, the 1.5°C threshold could be breached as soon as 2028.

As global warming continues, Australia’s climate is fast becoming more extreme and unpredictable, edging us closer towards breaching thresholds that will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to adapt to. This is especially the case when there are simultaneous disasters unfolding in different regions, or a rapid succession of back-to-back disasters that undermine the ability of communities to recover. If there is not enough time between destructive events, the damage begins to compound. We see the continued degradation of our natural environment and the weakening of social resilience that will eventually lead to the permanent displacement of people from their homes and ongoing impacts on our economy.

How many disasters does it take to wake people up to the fact that Australia’s climate is becoming more extreme, with today’s destruction set to be dwarfed by things to come? Do people realise that adapting to climate change won’t be possible in some parts of the country? Exactly how much do we need to lose before our political leaders decide to take this seriously?

It makes me wonder if people in decades to come will look back at the world’s collective failure to shut down the fossil fuel industry in time and see it for what it really is: an intergenerational crime against humanity.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/an-intergenerational-crime-against-humanity-what-will-it-take-for-political-leaders-to-start-taking-climate-change-seriously-231383

These sad rants from members of once respected scientific institutions are barely worth publishing.

The reality is there is zero paleo evidence that a warmer world is a less habitable world. Our monkey ancestors’ first appearance in the fossil record was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a natural period of global warming so extreme, some scientists have postulated it was caused by a close encounter with another star. Those monkeys spread throughout Eurasia, feasting on the abundant food provided by the hothouse PETM, only retreating when the warm period ended and encroaching cold drove them from their new homes. Fish were more abundant during the hothouse PETM. Greenland was a temperate forest. Antarctica had a thriving ecosystem.

Even if a PETM level of warming occurred (5-8C hotter than today), it is unlikely we would even have to move any of our cities. Sea level rise is no threat to a high tech civilisation. A sizeable part of Singapore is land reclaimed from the ocean. Half of the Netherlands would be under water without their centuries old system of dikes and sea walls. As far back as the mid 1800s our ancestors were performing giant civil engineering works, elevating the cities of Chicago and Seattle an entire floor level to beat the flood risk. Venice in Italy didn’t give up their city when it sank into the mud, they kept building up, and created one of the wonders of the world.

In my opinion, the only intergenerational climate crime today is all the trusted scientists frightening millions of kids with their wild claims, frightening some of them into giving up on life and destroying themselves with hard drugs.

How many of the USA’s horror show annual Fentanyl deaths were kids who got their start in addiction because all their teachers told them they would never have a chance to live a fulfilling adult life, because climate change was going to destroy the world?

Global warming is not an “intergenerational crime against humanity”. The real intergenerational crime against humanity is the constant climate fear mongering, which is convincing young and impressionable minds the future holds no hope for them.

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Curious George
June 4, 2024 10:05 am

Climate has never changed. Glaciations are only a myth. Long live Science!

Reply to  Curious George
June 4, 2024 12:18 pm

no dinosaurs in a hothouse either! Satan lies!

Reply to  Curious George
June 4, 2024 12:22 pm

hdhoese
June 4, 2024 10:23 am

Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44304-024-00011-0?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email   

“The sharp discontinuity in the counts of $1-2 billion events starting in 2008 is suggestive of a change in disaster accounting methods, however, the lack of transparency into the creation of the dataset makes it impossible to know the reasons that may underlie this discontinuity.”
Nature apparently takes everything, even have an “Anthropocene newsletter — what matters in anthropocene research, free to your inbox weekly.”

Reply to  hdhoese
June 4, 2024 12:37 pm

Referring to “Billion Dollar Disasters” as a “dataset” makes it sound more “sciency” than it really is. The same is true of the anomaly “datasets” composed of “adjusted” numbers.

Rud Istvan
June 4, 2024 10:35 am

Gergis is the one who had to have her bogus hockey stick alarm paper permanently retracted on 10/18/2012. Noted here at WUWT at the time. She is still at it with more bogus alarm.

Mr.
Reply to  Rud Istvan
June 4, 2024 11:40 am

Don’t tell me – she was using made-up numbers.
Now THAT’S never happened before in climate “science” 🙂

Curious George
Reply to  Rud Istvan
June 4, 2024 12:24 pm

Bogus alarm? False alarm.

Reply to  Curious George
June 4, 2024 5:22 pm

Or, as Bob Dylan put it: “the phony false alarm”

June 4, 2024 11:03 am

It leads one to contemplate how distorted a society can become. I read a passage from an account of the Aztec religion which relates a startling connection to “saving the world” and how far it may go. It reported: “Aztecs believed that the gods, especially the monstrous Huitzilopochtli, must have a constant supply of freshly torn-out human hearts or life-warm blood. Failure to contribute these and other products of human sacrifice meant the destruction of the world”. And that, my friends, is how bad it can get. Humanity has been there more than once.

Reply to  Steve Lohr
June 4, 2024 12:00 pm

Your reference to the Aztecs is appropriate given that the Left’s latest fad emerging from the post-modern academy is ‘de-colonization’, meaning the elimination of all Western cultural influences from, well, everything, as well as the return of all inhabitable lands to the descendants of their previous indigenous owners.

I think the proper response to people who think this is a good idea is to ask them whether they’d rather live within a culture that has figured out the wheel, mathematics and how to produce an abundance of goods and services in a world of scarcity, or within a culture that knows none of this, but thinks it’s a good idea to sacrifice humans because it didn’t rain last week?

Reply to  Frank from NoVA
June 4, 2024 4:00 pm

Well, time for genetic engineers to bring back Neanderthals and give Eurasia back to them!

Mr.
Reply to  Steve Lohr
June 4, 2024 12:57 pm

I’m a huge fan of the Aztecs.

Billy Thorpe and The Aztecs that is.

Reply to  Steve Lohr
June 4, 2024 9:06 pm

You remind me of the movie: “Kings of the Sun.” It’s an interesting movie with actor Yul Brynner.

June 4, 2024 11:31 am

How many disasters does it take to wake people up to the fact that Australia’s climate is becoming more extreme, with today’s destruction set to be dwarfed by things to come?

What, exactly, are your predictions, and will you agree to quit your scaremongering if they fail to materialize?

Reply to  PariahDog
June 4, 2024 2:09 pm

Can they name a period in history when there weren’t any natural disasters? No weather events that weren’t as “extreme”? As frequent?
Just because there were no cellphones to record them or even few if any people where they happened where they happened, doesn’t mean they didn’t.
(I’m sure Oog or his descendants didn’t have a cellphone to record the weather events at the end of the big Ice Age.)

Reply to  Gunga Din
June 4, 2024 4:02 pm

Anyone who has taken a good course in basic geology knows that the Earth has experienced endless extreme weather.

June 4, 2024 11:41 am

Where do I send the invoice for the fee for using the photo of me, the one nearest the corner?

Mr.
Reply to  Oldseadog
June 4, 2024 1:08 pm

If that’s a pic of you Oldseadog, you’re standing as the Libertarian Party 2024 candidate for the US presidency?

Cornel-West
Reply to  Mr.
June 5, 2024 12:20 pm

Nosir, I don’t have any cufflinks like that.

Brian0127
June 4, 2024 11:44 am

Typical climate alarmism, if the initial conjecture doesn’t work, then exaggerate.

Brian0127
June 4, 2024 11:44 am

Typical climate alarmism, if the initial conjecture doesn’t work, then exaggerate.

Mr.
June 4, 2024 11:46 am

Nature and evolution programs all living species to embrace and thrive in conditions of ABUNDANCE in all aspects of our lives, and move away from SCARCITY.

A slightly warmer planet will provide more conditions for ABUNDANCE.

Gergis et al are ignorant of human needs.

Reply to  Mr.
June 5, 2024 2:54 am

“A slightly warmer planet”

Which may be temporary. People should keep this in mind.

I’ll bet some people back in the 1930’s were commenting about a slightly warmer planet at the time. Then the temperatures cooled by about 2.0C.

strativarius
June 4, 2024 12:11 pm

a distinguished IPCC veteran. 

Is that a joke?

Reply to  strativarius
June 4, 2024 2:21 pm

If I’m not mistaken, more that one of the authors of IPCC reports were disgusted at how the “summaries” had distorted what they actually said.

Reply to  Gunga Din
June 4, 2024 4:05 pm

More of them should come out of the closet and announce it to the world.

Reply to  strativarius
June 5, 2024 2:56 am

“Is that a joke?”

I don’t know, but it made me laugh. 🙂

Does this IPCC veteran have a name?

Bob
June 4, 2024 12:29 pm

We all know who is responsible for this nonsense. If government were removed from the CAGW issue all of this would go away.

sherro01
June 4, 2024 12:54 pm

The author Gergis has form from retraction of a co-authored PAGES2K paper in which scientific misconduct can be alleged. There are several Climate Audit articles by Steve McIntyre that establish the circumstances, particularly misdescription of trending or detrended data.
A co-author Karoly then tried to claim he, not McIntyre, discovered the error. Who knows, I do not, but someone has lied. Why should we automatically assume that Gergis and Karoly are the honest guys, just because they are part of the academic Establishment? In which we have adoration for a guy named Pascoe with Cornwall ancestry who claims to be aboriginal and is paid for such with a special aboriginal position when no evidence exists of aboriginality, i.e. fraud can be alleged?
The PAGES2K past papers create hockey stick type temperature time series in a few locations, which are then proposed as global indicators of climate crisis. Sadly, few of the time series from these locations have the sought hockey stick shape, which appears only after mathematical combination using their tailor-made manipulations. This is not proper science, this is Readers’ Digest advertising material for the unsuspecting masses.
I have no doubt about the veracity of what I have just written. I have studied it from its start several years ago. I weep at the degradation of proper science especially by senior academics at Australia’s big universities where the deliberate lie is now preferred over rigorous science. They exist today on money from degree factories for foreign students whose respect for Australia is far from clear. They should, traditionally, be concerned with the advancement of knowledge by research into matters that benefit mankind. Goodbye altruism, hello advertising for money. Geoff S

elmerulmer
June 4, 2024 1:55 pm

I read an article recently about a thaw slump in Siberia-nice tadpole shape with a long tail and much larger main body with pictures showing the tadpole tripled in size in 50 years. Hmmm? That looks exactly like an alluvial fan. I wonder what the terrain and elevations are in this site. Am I looking at an ordinary subsidence event, and also what is the geologic record on Siberian thaw slumps from the Medieval WP, wouldn’t that be a better argument. And for that matter, from a carbon sequestration perspective, are thaw slumps more or less likely to sequester carbon. Sure there is a release of methane and CO2 during a slump, but on the other hand the slump creates bogs and enriched soil that reclaims and sequesters carbon far more readily than permafrost might allow. I dunno, but would like a medieval warm period replay to see what the data shows. Is there a good link on permafrost and thaw slump in the MWP?

Edward Katz
June 4, 2024 2:26 pm

I get a good laugh from these alarmists who claim that our grandchildren and further descendants will denounce us and even desecrate our graves because we didn’t take the appropriate measures to prevent climate change and all the disasters caused by it. According to that logic, seniors should be denouncing their parents and grandparents for burning coal for heating and powering their vehicles with unleaded gas, both of which started or continued the global warming that is causing the so-called climate crisis. Except we’re not blaming anyone and our grandchildren aren’t making any big lifestyle changes to do their parts to combat a non-existent problem. So whenever the alarmists launch their doomsday is nigh song-and-dance routines, the only guarantees they can expect is a hearty horse laugh and snorts of derision.

Reply to  Edward Katz
June 4, 2024 2:54 pm

Future children and grandchildren will be forced to make life-style changes, mainly thanks to the responses to the non-existent climate emergency..

… and they won’t be for the better. !

Idiotic agendas like Net-Zero and the disruption of the reliability of electricity grids will make life MUCH HARDER for the next generations.

Reply to  bnice2000
June 4, 2024 9:10 pm

If we got rid of Bribe-den–it would help.

Reply to  Jim Masterson
June 4, 2024 10:47 pm

Trump would slow the rate of societal degradation in the US, for sure.

The UK is in deep sh*t because each party is worse than the other.

Germany may be luck and sane enough to elect some centrist realists.

Australia will thankfully go down very slowly because Albosleazy and Bow-wow are so incredibly inept at doing anything.

Reply to  bnice2000
June 5, 2024 3:03 am

“and the disruption of the reliability of electricity grids will make life MUCH HARDER for the next generations”

Our electricity grids are going to be a problem for the current generation if Net Zero continues. It was reported yesterday that electricity prices are up by 25 percent in the United States since Biden took office.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  Tom Abbott
June 6, 2024 9:36 am

Biden blames that on Trump.
Biden blames everything that affect his election poles on Trump.

Biden lies trump Trump lies. ;-))

Rick C
June 4, 2024 3:49 pm

The real intergenerational threat is the mountain of debt we are piling up by barrowing and wasting trillions of dollars on the climate non-problem. Humanity survived for tens of thousands of years without any notion of “predicting future climate”. Now that we have super computers and some unproven hypothesis of how one minor factor might affect temperature we think we can predict weather 100 years in the future. Our great grand children will most likely be unaware of this obsession with computer models but they may well blame us for saddling them with ruinous debt, if the country manages to survive that long.

I wonder how much more it will cost to recover from the economic collapse that the attempt to transition to renewables will surely cause.

David Goeden
Reply to  Rick C
June 4, 2024 4:18 pm

And we are to pretend that the U.S. Gov. credit card is unlimited and does not cause inflation.

Sparta Nova 4
Reply to  Rick C
June 6, 2024 9:38 am

Computers don’t lie was the wisdom of the 1980s.
If it’s written, it’s been verified and is correct was the wisdom of the 60s

Now?

June 4, 2024 3:57 pm

“Do people realise that adapting to climate change won’t be possible in some parts of the country”

Adapting to problems is what life is all about and mature adults understand this. Children and immature adults don’t. Most such problems are far worse than a few degrees warming- especially when you realize the benefits of that slight warming.

Reply to  Joseph Zorzin
June 5, 2024 3:10 am

I’m going to wait until my climate changes before I take any steps to adapt to it. My climate has not changed in my entire lifetime, and I don’t expect it will do so in the future, so I’m not thinking about having to adapt to anything.

observa
June 4, 2024 9:10 pm

Good you stinking slimy woke censors-
Elon Musk’s big win over Australia (msn.com)

Neil D
June 4, 2024 10:38 pm

The intergenerational crime in Australia is the destruction of our economy and power grid by Green Labor governments. Our grandchildren will be paying to reconstruct with nuclear, coal and gas. They will have to keep selling coal and gas to rebuild the economy and a nuclear power grid.

Reply to  Neil D
June 5, 2024 3:12 am

“The intergenerational crime in Australia is the destruction of our economy and power grid by Green Labor governments.”

That’s the bottom line, and it doesn’t only apply to Australia, it applies to all the Net Zero foolishness around the Western world.

June 4, 2024 11:18 pm

Socialism is an intergenerational crime against humanity.

Reply to  Leo Smith
June 5, 2024 3:13 am

Yes, it is.

Socialism is a cancer on human society.

June 5, 2024 2:45 am

From the article: “How many disasters does it take to wake people up to the fact that Australia’s climate is becoming more extreme,”

This person is seeing things that are not there. The visions of unprecedented weather disasters are all in her head.

There is no evidence that Australia’s climate, or the climate of any other part of the world is getting more extreme. That’s just a fact. A fact this person is apparently unaware of. So she is misleading her readers.

Duane
June 5, 2024 3:02 am

The only plausible climate change that would be extremely harmful to the human race to the extent that it is non-adaptable would be not another 2-5 tenths of a degree warming, but rather, another glaciation that would coat the earth’s northern landmasses from about 45-50 deg north and northward … like all the other glaciations for the last 2.6 million years. Billions of humans will have to occupy a far smaller extent of land, with massive reductions in food supply that will cause mass (billions level) starvation that would effectively depopulate much of today’s planet. An outcome that no doubt millions of leftwingnut enviros would applaud, as long as they could escape south and have plenty to eat.

And by the way, storms grow MORE intense in a colder, dryer world, not in a warmer wetter world. What we would call “extreme” weather today would become the norm in a glaciated world.

Someone
Reply to  Duane
June 5, 2024 7:55 am

It will be like Dark Ages, only on 100x scale.

Reply to  Duane
June 5, 2024 9:48 am

The ameliorating factor with a slide into another glacial period is that the drop in sea level will expose more land for human occupancy. The slow slide into permanent glaciation in the north would allow people generations to migrate south and adapt. Speaking as a Canadian, most of the formerly glaciated area is still sparsely populated.

Sean Galbally
June 5, 2024 12:26 pm

By “Taking climate seriously” It can mean two things. 1 That it is not yet universally accepted that man has little effect on the climate. It is primarily the sun. Carbon dioxide is a good gas essential to the life of animals and crops. It is presently near its lowest atmospheric level in history. 2 Climate has always changed and always will. There is no climate crisis as no remarkable changes are occurring. However we should adapt to the climate we have, as we have always done. So essentially, decision makers MUST openly accept both of these truths.

June 5, 2024 6:07 pm

Over the past decade, the mood of our gatherings has become increasingly sombre.

I’d stop going and take some anti-depressants instead. Sounds like a pity party to me, all concerning a statistical construct with large uncertainties.

Gary Pate
June 5, 2024 10:51 pm

I certainly hope we get 1.5 degrees warmer that the end of the Little Ice Age by 2028. It is nothing but upside to the environment. Some higher C02 levels above the historically low levels the planet just got out of it would be awesome, at least for Mother Earth.

Green Peace & the other human haters like the UN will continue to cry wolf.

Let’s starve the wolf callers…

G Michael
June 6, 2024 6:12 pm

A little creative “science”, eh? It seems the ENTIRE world has turned into one gigantic lie. How about we all go back to living our lives and quit borrowing trouble? Wouldn’t that be nice?