Plus ça change, plus ç’est la même chose

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Here in England this spring, there was dry, sunny weather through most of March, followed by gentle showers in April. And here is the opening couplet of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Tales of Caunterbury, written more than six centuries ago in 1387:

From the medieval climate optimum to the modern climate optimum, the weather in these islands has changed scarcely at all. The drought of March, the sweet April showers, the birdsong day and night, the bursting forth of primroses, bluebells, daffodils and other spring flowers, all are today just as Chaucer described them in the Middle Ages.

The wine-dark sea

One can even go back to Homer, in the 8^th Century BC, who talked of the Mediterranean as “the wine-dark sea”. And here am I, almost three millennia later, recently recovered from a long illness caused by defective medication with no active ingredient in it, having climbed to the 1230ft summit of the Akamas peninsula in Cyprus, doing a Canute and challenging the wine-dark sea not to rise. The sea was wine-dark in Homer’s time. It is still wine-dark today.

Where, then, are the drastic changes in climate and consequent catastrophes and cataclysms so luridly predicted by the climate Communists? Where are the mass extinctions? Why is the climate much as it was in the Middle Ages? Why are ten times as many dying of cold as of heat? Why are crop yields at record highs? Why is the planet greening so fast?

Cold, not heat, is the real killer

Silvio Canto Jr., at the splendid American Thinker blog, reminds us that “Earth Day” began on Lenin’s birthday, 22 April. He sets out some examples of the half-witted predictions made by the totalitarian far Left in the early 1970s, when the “green holy day” started:

Paul Ehrlich, in a 1969 essay entitled Eco-Catastrophe!, wrote: “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born. By [1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”

In April 1970 he wrote in Mademoiselle: “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years”.

In the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, he sketched out his most alarmist scenario, telling readers that between 1980 and 1989 some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in what he called the “Great Die-Off.”

In the May 1970 issue of Audubon, he wrote that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” He said that Americans born since 1946 now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.6 years.

That year he predicted that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone”. He predicted that 200,000 Americans would die by 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.

Five years later he predicted that “Since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so [i.e., by 2005], it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”

Kenneth Watt, an ecologist, said: “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate … that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ’er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I’m very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Global oil production in 2024, at about 95 million barrels per day, was double the global oil output of 48 million barrels per day at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970.

He gave a speech predicting a pending Ice Age: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an Ice Age.”

He also told Time that “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”

Barry Commoner, a Washington University biologist, wrote in the Earth Day issue of Environment: “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”

He also predicted that decaying organic pollutants would consume all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, suffocating freshwater fish.

George Wald, a Harvard biologist, estimated that “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years [by 1985 or 2000] unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”

The New York Times, on its editorial page the day after the first Earth Day, wrote: “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”

Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, wrote in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness: “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”

Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, wrote in 1970: “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China, the Near East and Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions… By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” The prediction of famine in South America has come to pass only in Venezuela and only due to socialism, not due to environmental reasons.

Life Magazine reported in January 1970: “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.”

Harrison Brown, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated that humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000, while lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Senator Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look: “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

None of these lurid fantasies, mere pretexts for totalitarian control measures, has materialized.

While I have been ill, I have been quietly working on our team’s climatological research. For an update on our result, now published as an extended abstract after peer review, search YouTube for “Tom Nelson Monckton”.

I have also had long and detailed conversations with two Fellows of the Royal Society, who are justifiably concerned at the Society’s propensity to promulgate only the official narrative on questions such as global warming and are preparing to do something about it.

We have already notched up a useful initial victory. Several Communist Fellows had decided that now that Elon Musk is for some reason no longer a hero of the Left they should call a meeting of the Royal Society to strip him of his Fellowship.

Elon Musk (image by Grok3)

Removing a Fellow would only be permissible if he had first been duly warned, and if he had had his chance to be heard, and if he were not named at any meeting until those preconditions in natural justice had been duly complied with.

However, the Communists at the meeting could not resist naming the new target for their perpetual hatred. In doing so, they unwittingly and witlessly debarred the Society from taking any further steps against Musk, either now or in the future.

For it is a settled principle of administrative law, dating back to the Courts of Equity in the 14^th century, that in any judicial or quasi-judicial proceeding every stage of the process must be fair and just. If there is unfairness at any stage, then the process is tainted at every stage. That principle is also embodied in the European Human Rights Convention.

Once the Communists at the meeting had named Musk, they destroyed forever their attempt at dislodging him from the Fellowship.

The question now arises whether another Fellow, recently named by a judge in the United States as having overstated the financial damage he had suffered in consequence of an alleged libel, should have his Fellowship withdrawn. He should never have been granted a Fellowship in the first place, for the science for which he became infamous was at best inept (see the Wegman Report for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006). Now, he may lose his Fellowship.

Meanwhile, the two sound Fellows and I have been working quietly to persuade the Reform Party that it should strengthen its opposition to the utter destruction of the British economy being wrought by the Department for Energy Security and Nut Zero.

Nigel Farage has now declared that Reform’s opposition to the economic hara-kiri being wrought by our far-Left government will be on a par with his earlier opposition to the sullen Brussels tyranny-by-clerk. Brexit is done. On to Zexit! Nigel’s propensity to upset the establishment’s rotten applecart should not be underestimated. Good times are ahead.

Meanwhile, enjoy the springtime as Chaucer described it –

Whan that Aprile with his shoures swotè,

The droghte of March hath perced to the rootè,

And bathèd every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swetè breeth

Inspirèd hath in every holt and heeth

The tendrè croppès, and the yongè sonnè

Hath in the Ram his halfè cours yronnè,

And smalè fowelès maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open eye …