Last week in this space, as the Glasgow climate change conference (COP26) was wrapping up, I pointed out once again what a colossal scam most of the climate fear campaign is. A 1 C increase in very approximately estimated world temperature in 120 years does not remotely justify the widespread hysteria on this subject in Western Europe and North America.
Countless predictions of imminent climate disaster over the last 50 years have proved to be utter piffle. Yet the frenzy does not abate. Organized groups of schoolchildren march about accusing the world’s adults of inflicting ecological strangulation upon them. (We should bring back corporal punishment before we shut down the oil industry.)
The Glasgow conference ended in a more ghastly charade than even I had imagined. The eminent American historian Walter Russell Mead, writing for the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 17, referred to the 19th-century British historian Thomas Carlyle’s reference to an “Age of Shams” in France before the revolution of 1789, when the noble and clerical elites had a perception of current realities in France that were soon exposed as having absolutely no basis in fact.
Mead wrote : “If there is one thing the world should take away from the Glasgow COP26 summit, it’s that the most dangerous greenhouse-gas emissions come from the front ends of politicians, not the back ends of cows.
For the rest of this column: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-ghostly-charade-in-glasgow-and-the-wests-self-flagellation-over-the-climate