Climate Clickbait

You’ve probably heard the expression “drinking the Kool Aid”, but do you know where it comes from?

In the 1980s, an American communist cult called the People’s Temple, lead by the nutty Jim Jones, fled California for the jungles of Guyana to escape the anti-socialist fervour that gripped the Western world in the midst of the Cold War.

Jones promised a “socialist paradise” and a “sanctuary” to for those who joined him in this new settlement they called Jonestown. They built houses, schools, and temples. Hundreds of people arrived from around the world with their families to start a new life in this communist utopia.

But as anyone who has read a page of history will tell you, the reality of communism has a knack for falling short of the heady ideals.

The settlers worked 11-hour days for 6 days a week. The buildings quickly fell into disrepair, and the jungle soil proved a reluctant farming partner. Leaving was not an option and disobedience was kept in check by torture and armed guards. 

Pressure mounted on Jones and his cronies. Concerned relatives of Jonestown residents back in the US had begun to put pressure on the government to act. With the net closing in, Jones gathered his congregation and warned them that, if captured, “hostile forces would convert children to fascism” – a fate worse than death, he decried.

Jones offered only one escape: a drink from a tub of Flavor-Aid poisoned with cyanide. Over 900 people died in what is the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until 9/11. The cowardly Jones took his own life with a bullet.

The tragedy of Jonestown is a story of manipulation, false ideals, and catastrophic hysteria. A cautionary tale of paranoia and lies with devastating consequences.

These same characteristics are unfolding today in the public discussion around climate, fueled not by a psychopathic preacher, but by our modern arbiter of info: the news.

Before I go any further, let me be clear: I believe in made-man climate change. I believe it’s a problem. And I believe we need to fix it. Ok? Cool.

But what I don’t believe is what many mainstream media outlets and your aunt Sally would lead you to believe: that the end is neigh. That we’re on the verge of irreversible, unmanageable, biblical destruction that will change the world as we know it if we don’t take immediate drastic action.

This new-age fear has become so pervasive it even has its own name: climate doomism, and it’s spreading among kids faster than herpes in a high school.

I know what you’re thinking… come on Harry, climate change is obviously a problem and the news is right to bring it to people’s attention.

And I’d agree with that. What I don’t agree with are the sensationalist, irresponsible, fear-mongering pieces being incessantly foisted upon a susceptible public. Let me give you just a handful of the many examples:

• July 2023: The Guardian ran a headline saying the “Gulf Stream could collapse as early as 2025”. Despite many scientists calling this out as being impossible (the Guardian meant a much smaller circulation called the AMOC), the headline remains live today.
  

• September 2022: The NYT wrote a piece suggesting that hurricanes were getting more frequent due to climate change. To try and prove their point, they made a chart using official data from NOAA. But instead of showing the data back to when records began, they started their chart in 1980. Guess what, showing it from 1980 showed a slight increase in hurricanes, but if you look at all the data it shows a decrease in hurricanes over the long term. NOAA themselves say “there is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes”.
  

• November 2021: The BBC’s Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt claimed in a feature that the human “the death toll is rising around the world” due to climate change. The facts are very clear that human weather-related deaths have fallen dramatically over the past 100 years due to our better ability to adapt to and predict weather. FYI, Rowlatt’s wife has joined Extinction Rebellion protests. I thought the beeb was meant to be impartial?

And some older predictions that surprisingly haven’t come to pass:

• 2008 - “It has been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010”, Srgjan Kerim, President of the UN General Assembly
  

• 2006 - “Within the decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro” - Al Gore.
  

• 1989 - “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000” the UN Environment Program
  

• 1973 - “The ravenous American appetite for minerals will lead to severe shortages in the next few decades”, The New York Times
  

• 1970 - "Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.", George Wald, Harvard biologist

Sure, past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future results but at the very least this track record of panicked predictions and misinformation should teach us to be deeply suspicious of what we read. I’m not saying it’s all wrong, I’m saying that it shouldn’t be swallowed as gospel and that the news should be held to a higher standard of fidelity.

We live in a time where every wildfire is climate change. Every flood and famine is laid at the doorstep of rising CO2 emissions. Nuance has been lost and replaced with an alarmist agenda determined to convince you that we’re up shit’s creak without a paddle.

Sensationalism in the news isn’t surprising. Journalists are in the business of entertainment not education. They are after eyeballs, clicks, and ad revenue. Studies have proven that doom and gloom grab the attention of our lizard brains more than flowers and rainbows and so that’s what they run with.

Besides there being value in truth for truth’s sake, the media wields huge influence. Our herd mentality is strong, and the headlines shepherd the way. What they say matters. What they say drives behavior. We all know this.

In a recent survey of 10,000 young people, 56% of respondents agreed that “humanity is doomed” and 76% thought the future was “frightening”. Remember that deranged young girl sobbing above a motorway because she was so terrified about climate change? There are many many more like her and I feel sorry for them. They are ill. They are depressed. They are crippled with anxiety thanks to being force fed a diet of hysteria and hopelessness.

I had a drink yesterday with a friend who said he and his wife were considering not having children because they’re worried about the climate-impacted world they might grow up in. Every metric of human progress: poverty, life expectancy, hunger, education, GDP, you name it, are better than they’ve ever been.

There is literally no better time in human history to be alive. Yet the power of manipulative news is convincing well-educated young adults to resist the most of primal and powerful of natural urges: to procreate. If that isn’t evidence of how nuts the discourse has become, I don’t know what is.

This all wouldn’t be so bad if it stopped there. Live and let live. But where news hysteria becomes problematic for us all is when it feeds through to government policy. News drives sentiment, and sentiment seeps into glossy manifestos, trite speeches, and our everyday lives.

Again, there are countless examples of this. Most recently it can be found in the much-loathed new Ultra Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) fees in London. At a grander scale, it is found in the blinkered drive for net-zero across Europe that’s driving up our energy bills, de-stabilizing our power grids, and kneecapping our industries.

Europe is at risk of bankrupting itself on a misinformed green crusade that will be futile anyway in the grand scheme of things while China (with ~1/3rd of global GHG emissions and climbing) is building giant fleets of new coal power stations and gladly selling us our EVs and our solar panels.

And there’s plenty more than just higher bills and stuttering economies coming your way. Politicians want to force you to buy an EV or install a heat pump. Some are calling to limit the number of flights you can take or the amount of meat you can eat. There’s a credit card in Sweden that tracks the CO2 footprint of your expenditure and blocks your card once you’ve hit a limit…You’ll feel the heat from climate change measures long before you feel it from climate change itself.

And that doesn’t even touch on the destructive impact that a hydrocarbon shortage would have on the billions emerging from poverty in the developing world…

Make no mistake about it. Net-zero will not be cheap, it will not be pretty. You and I will pay for it, one way or another, while naïve journalists with little regard for balanced debate continue to print the panic that keeps us clicking.

It’s time for us to collectively take a step back. To start asking questions about pros, cons, costs, benefits, and trade-offs. Yes, climate change is a big hairy problem and its risks need to be minimized, but hysteria and doomism will dish us up a cure that’s worse than the disease.

Despite what the News at 10 tells you the world isn’t going to end in a fiery inferno anytime soon. Human ingenuity and technology will help us adapt to a gradually changing climate and limit its damage. Our self-destructive climate policies are Kool-Aid. And I don’t wanna drink.