Being A Priest(ess) In The Church of Global Warming Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

Perhaps we should be thankful they're so open in their foolishness:

I was slightly surprised when Greta Thunberg announced at Davos that we had eight years left to save the planet. As long as that? Admittedly, that’s four years less than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who put it at 12, although, come to think of it, that was last January, so presumably she now thinks we’ve got 11 years left. But some doomsayers have been much less optimistic. According to Peter Wadhams, a Cambridge professor interviewed in the Guardian in 2013, Arctic ice would disappear by 2015 if we didn’t mend our ways, while Gordon Brown announced in 2009 that we had just 50 days to save the Earth. Then again, playing the long game can also catch up with you. In 2004, Observer readers were told Britain would have a ‘Siberian’ climate in 16 years’ time. We’re supposed to be in the midst of that now.

On the face of it, we should be grateful that these gloomsters make such oddly precise predictions. It’s like putting a sell-by date on their credibility. After all, when the soothsayer in question is proved wrong, they just shuffle off with their tail between their legs, never to be heard from again, right? In eight years’ time, when the planet hasn’t disappeared in a cloud of toxic gas, presumably Greta will throw up her arms and say: ‘Sorry guys. Looked like I was wrong about you ruining my childhood. I’m now going to become a flight attendant.’

But, weirdly, that never happens. No matter how often these ‘experts’ are shown to be no better at forecasting than Paul the Octopus — worse, actually — they just carry on as if nothing has happened. Take Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. ‘We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years,’ he told the New York Times in 1969. Ehrlich also predicted America would be subject to water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. Ehrlich’s ‘bomb’ failed to explode, but his career didn’t. On the contrary, he’s now the Bing Professor of Population Studies at Stanford and the president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. All I can say is, it’s lucky he didn’t become a bookmaker.

The fact that Ehrlich is still an eminent environmentalist — and Prince Charles can pose alongside Greta Thunberg in Davos in spite of claiming we had eight years left to save the planet 11 years ago — helps explain why these Mystic Megs have no hesitation about making these forecasts. It’s a great way of drawing attention to their cause and there’s literally no cost to getting it wrong. The panjandrums of the mainstream media forgive them for spinning these yarns because they know they’re doing it ‘for the right reasons’. They’re not peddling alarmist nonsense — no, they’re just exaggerating the risk. In any case, they might be right and doesn’t the ‘precautionary principle’ dictate that we should change our behavior just in case? Oddly, these same secular humanists don’t apply the logic of Pascal’s Wager to believing in God. That would be unscientific.