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You can sum up the world in just one word today: hot. Powerful heatwaves have struck every continent over the past year. At least 10 countries have recorded daily temperatures above 50C in more than one place. Wildfires are scorching unusually large areas of the globe and coral reefs have been hit by the fourth global bleaching event on record.
Luckily, there is no need to hurry up and tackle the climate change fuelling these extremes — only alarmist climate ideologues think otherwise. So goes the latest climate claptrap, the misleading, misinformed or just plain baffling utterances that continue to gush forth in the face of an increasingly evident problem.
More than 18 months have passed since this column last looked at climate twaddle and while it is hard to say if the problem is shrinking or growing, it definitely continues to surprise.
Exhibit one: Elon Musk, once a voice of reason on climate change, if not an especially modest one. “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth,” the tech billionaire boasted last year. In 2017, he called global warming “the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI”.
But last week, in a conversation on his X platform with Donald Trump, Musk said the climate risk wasn’t actually as high as many thought before launching into a mystifying explanation for why there was loads of time left to tackle it.
If the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere keeps rising from today’s average levels of around 420 parts per million to above 1,000 ppm, “you start getting headaches and nausea”, he told Trump. But since we’re only adding about 2 ppm of CO₂ a year, “we still have quite a bit of time” and “we don’t need to rush”.
This is claptrap of the highest order. The heat, flooding and fire disasters we’re seeing with the amount of warming that accumulated CO₂ has already driven will be paltry compared to what would happen if levels rose to anything like 1,000 ppm. And actually, decades of failing to rush to stem carbon emissions mean they must now come down rapidly to avoid irreversible changes in an array of natural systems that humans rely on. Headaches are the least of our problems.
Musk’s analysis is like saying that if you spend years eating a bucket of ice cream for breakfast, lunch and dinner you will get brain freeze. This may be technically true but it’s nothing compared with the wider carnage.
The thought of Musk becoming a source of climate advice to a re-elected Trump is sobering. So is Project 2025, a contentious 900-plus page blueprint that conservative think-tanks hope a second Trump administration would use to overhaul the US government.
It is groaning with climate claptrap and although Trump has tried to distance himself from it, the plan includes contributions from allies and members of his administration.
That includes the section saying “break up NOAA”, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that houses the National Weather Service, the National Ocean Service and other scientific agencies.
“Together, these form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity,” says Project 2025.
This is a bewildering description of a group supplying important information such as weather forecasts, hurricane tracking and climate data. And if it’s such a threat to US prosperity, you have to wonder why so many other nations have agencies providing similar services.
Alas, perplexing levels of climate guff persist well beyond the US.
In Europe, newspapers have published so many rubbish claims that heat pumps (a greener alternative to gas boilers) are too feeble, too noisy and too awkward to install that a minor industry of technical and research experts has now emerged to debunk them.
And in Australia, former prime minister Tony Abbott delivered a gold medal performance last week when he wrote in a newspaper article that “nothing Australia does will make any difference to climate (assuming that mankind’s CO₂ emissions really are the main climate villain)”.
Unfortunately, they really are, as the world’s most reliable climate science reports keep telling us.
One day, climate change will no longer generate all this misleading bilge. But it is very hard to know when, so in the meantime it’s best to keep a close eye on the most egregious effluent producers.
pilita.clark@ft.com
