If you have listened to Irish Radio today then you will, without doubt, have heard the newsreader inform you in sombre tones about the latest awful verdict from the climate experts: That the chance to stop the world from exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming in this century has been lost. 2.2 to 2.5 degrees, they say, are now likely.
With that, come warnings of apocalyptic weather. Or as we say here in North Tipperary, an average day.
By itself, there’s nothing objectionable in what the scientists have said. They may be right, or they may be wrong, but telling us what they think is going to happen is their job.
However, the notion that the world was ever going to impoverish itself voluntarily to fend off the spectre of a disaster decades away was always nonsensical, and based on no understanding whatever of human nature.
People don’t care about disasters decades away. The evidence on that is clear and observable in other fields of politics.
Some such disasters are vastly more predictable, and still people don’t care: Tell a Donald Trump supporter that the USA’s $40trillion national debt is unsustainable and that the USA is a decade or two at most away from a historic fiscal crisis, and they’ll shrug and accuse you of Trump Derangement Syndrome. At best they’ll shrug and blame Obama and Biden.
And when that crisis comes, by the way, the people living through it will blame contemporary politicians, despite most of the harm having been done in the period since the George W Bush Tax Cuts of 2001, with each successive President making it worse.
Perhaps more controversially, other disasters can be reasonably foreseen: The UK Government, for example, is running at present a “puberty blocker trial” which – by the Government’s own admission – is an experiment on hundreds of British kids to see what happens to them when their natural puberty is stopped in order to make it easier to transition them to the opposite gender later, complete with surgical mutilations and all the rest.
You and I and the dogs on the street, dear reader, can predict with some certainty that there’ll be a scandal about this in 20 years when the participants – sorry, victims – of this barbarism find themselves middle aged and mutilated, and start suing the state and appearing on chat shows where that generation’s progressive activists will applaud them and stare stonily at their elders who thought they were being kind.
But it’s happening anyway.
Back to Climate. The laughable thing about today’s report is that it is accompanied by the usual blather that the problem – even if it cannot be prevented – can still be reversed if humankind would only listen to the climate people and slash global emissions by some eye-watering percentage over the next 20 years.
This is not going to happen. It will not happen for the same reason that an Irish Government would get no traction by saying that it was going to cut €50 a week from the pension today and increase the retirement age to 70, to prevent a pensions crisis in twenty years.
The average pensioner would, entirely correctly, note that they’ll be dead in twenty years, and poor today. So, no Government will act on that.
But the thing is that Climate is not an Irish problem. It is a global problem. And therefore our national impulse to be the best boys in the class tends to take over. We’re not that eager to fix our own domestic issues, but by golly and for Jehovah, we’ll take the lead on fixing a global problem we can’t really impact.
So in the end, we’re likely to get the worst of both worlds here. Ireland is on course to suffer all the impacts of climate change, assuming the boffins are right (which remains an assumption, albeit one we should take very seriously) while simultaneously suffering all the disadvantages of trying to prevent it.
We get the higher energy prices and the hurricanes. China just gets the hurricanes.
Of course, a cynic would note that Climate is the only problem that can only be fixed by enacting essentially socialist policies, which makes it a convenient excuse for people who wanted to enact socialist policies anyway. Combine that with best boy in the class syndrome, and you can explain most of Irish environmental policy.
But for all that you’re now paying through the nose for things that used to be cheap, you’re going to get the hurricanes anyway.
Maybe the Trump fans have it right. Live it up while the living is good.
To anyone interested in the so called 'Climate Crisis *tm:
Look at the metrics that are supposed to indicate it, NOT the projections according to models.
So, they say we are in a climate crisis. Metrics: droughts, floods, storms. General global crop failure.
The latest IPCC report says: no significant change in both number and severity.
Tropical revolving storms in the china sea and western Pacific are called Typhoons.