Fact or fiction

Fact or Fiction: Climate change chumps

Environmental disintegration beckons. Accordingly, the world is trying, sort of, to prevent it. But at least we’re all on the same page, yeah? Ha, right. Never mind the almost inconceivably enormous mountain of evidence pointing towards catastrophic planetary heating as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions, many politicians don’t buy it. Here are five examples. One of them is untrue. Can you guess which one? It’s like a game.

1. Sun clots

The man who’s somehow our prime minister, Boris Johnson, has been talking tough, if characteristically loosely, about environmental action of late. But always the case it never was. Back in 2015, the underthe-table thigh-grabber wrote approvingly of noted lunatic and climate change (and Covid!) denier, Piers Corbyn, who’s long blamed sunspots for weatherly variations on Earth. “I’m speaking only as a layman who observes that there’s plenty of snow in our winters these days, and who wonders whether it might be time for government to start taking seriously the possibility — however remote — that Corbyn is right.” [‘Snow’ here could be an oblique reference to wintering with Michael Gove.]

2. King of thick

It’s inconceivable an article such as this could be written without mention of America’s “favourite ever president”, Donald Trump. A less articulate Piers Corbyn, Trump has called CC a hoax, a scam, and a Chinese-devised scheme to somehow take over the world. Inexplicably, the uber-imbecile was a signatory to a 2009 letter to then-president Barrack Obama that demanded action on CC! However, by 2010 he’d flipped into full denial mode, as evidenced by a polar vortex of tweets (back when he was allowed to do such things), such as “This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullsh*t has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice.” ‘Bullsh*t’ indeed.

3. Et tu, Mogge?

Haunted fairground of an MP, Jacob Rees-Smog, sorry, Mogg, is a CC denier – he couldn’t reasonably be expected to be anything else, could he? But what’s the spindly oddity actually said about our impending doom? Writing in 2014, he whimpered: “It’s widely accepted that carbon dioxide emissions have risen but the effect on the climate remains much debated while the computer modelling that’s been done to date hasn’t proved especially accurate. Common sense dictates that if the Meteorological Office cannot forecast the next season’s weather with any success it is ambitious to predict what will happen decades ahead.” Which even a simpleton and CC novice like myself knows is Grade A gibberish.

4. Crackpot jackpot

Skeleton wearing a face it’s stolen and put on in a hurry, Nigel Lawson, has churned out yards of CC denial drivel over years, with a zest and regularity that must make him a dreamboat for any reading fossil fuel firms. The onetime Tory chancellor believes CC is an “economic” issue and had this to say last year: “I think that climate change is not a threat, it is happening very gently at a fraction of a degree per decade which is something we can perfectly well live with.” I love the “we”, coming from a walking husk.

5. Dim under

Australian prime ministerialhopeful Bruce Daniels had some strange things to say on the 2011 campaign trail. At a rally in Darwin, Daniels told an amazed crowd that CC was a “Marxist plot… having lost the argument to inflict global communism upon us they regrouped and invented CO2 as the new enemy. They mean to control us”. He then suggested that the herds on his Alice Springs wallaby farm were an excellent barometer for the truth. “My wallabies have been leaping appreciably higher year-on-year since 2002. That’s only possible if the air pressure is high – which means temperatures, if anything, are falling not rising”. About half of Australia has subsequently burnt to the ground in a series of unprecedented bush fires. Daniels came 9th in the election.

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