The end of the world is nigh. No, make that nigher. This was, in effect, the warning made last week at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) by Simon Stiell, often described as the UN’s “climate chief”. Stiell, a former minister in the government of Grenada, and now executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told his audience in London: “We have two years to save the world.”
The fact that you may not have been aware of his apocalyptic warning (though The Times ran it on page 10 of Thursday’s paper under the headline “Two years to save the planet, UN chief says”) only underlines how devalued such claims of imminent planetary doom now are. They never come from the experts involved, since none of the scientific reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned of human or planetary extinction as a result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Rising temperatures and higher sea levels, yes, but nothing remotely on the scale of the catastrophe so frequently invoked by the politicians and lobbyists.
In his speech Stiell declared: “Who has two years to save the world? Every person on this planet”, adding that this would be best achieved by all of us “cutting fossil fuel production”. I suspect the moderator of the Chatham House event, who gasped “Amazing!” when this peroration ended, was unaware that Stiell had been part of the government of Grenada that passed a Hydrocarbon Exploration Incentive Bill, and served under a prime minister, Keith Mitchell, who declared before the country’s general election in 2018: “We can now confirm that we have found oil and gas in huge commercial quantities. Grenada is now on its way to becoming a major oil-producing country … This, sisters and brothers, is a game-changer.”
Good luck to them, if it had been true: there’s every reason the voters of Grenada would wish to share in the riches from oil already heading the way of neighbouring Guyana. But this is (on a much smaller scale) redolent of the visit to the UK a few months ago by the outgoing US special envoy on climate change, John Kerry, who, when asked about the Conservative government’s licensing of new oil and gas fields in the North Sea, lectured that “we do not need new field exploration and development”. Fun fact: the US has doubled its oil and gas output in the past 15 years, overtaking Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s leading hydrocarbon producer.
It was another unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate, Al Gore, who gained greatest attention as the propagator of warnings of manmade climate apocalypse. This whole business was most clearly exposed in a paper for the International Journal of Global Warming in 2021 by David Rode and Paul Fischbeck of Carnegie Mellon University. Entitled “Apocalypse now? Communicating extreme forecasts”, it contained a graph plotting such forecasts, their advocates and the due date. The most persistent of them was Prince (now King) Charles, who, for example, warned in March 2009 that only 100 months remained to avert “irretrievable climate collapse”. That moment came and went in 2017; but in October 2021 Charles popped up again on the eve of the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow, telling world leaders: “Quite literally, it is the last-chance saloon.” That is, before the next last-chance saloon.
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Rode and Fischbeck concluded: “We propose an approach that de-emphasises making extreme predictions (that can only be observed in their failure) and instead emphasises making a set of smaller, shorter-term, ‘building block’ predictions that can be used to better motivate a public acceptance of climate science that has been plagued with growing scepticism.”
Last week’s hyperbolic warning by the UN’s “climate chief” was — more acerbically — denounced by Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences at Princeton and co-author of Discerning Experts: the Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy. He said of Stiell’s Chatham House speech: “‘Two years to save the world’ is meaningless rhetoric — at best it’s likely to be ignored; at worst it will be counterproductive.”
But the most consistent expert critic of these political and princely prognostications of portentous “tipping points” has been Professor Mike Hulme, founder of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. It was in 2006 that Hulme delivered this rebuke to those warning of imminent catastrophic climate change: “The increasing use of this term and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic’, ‘irreversible’ and ‘rapid’ has altered the public discourse [which] is now characterised by phrases such as ‘irreversible tipping point in the Earth’s climate’ and ‘we are at the point of no return’.” Hulme went on to compare such definitive diatribes to Tony Blair’s warnings about the imminent threat from Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (which a few years earlier had been exposed as false).
Last year Hulme, who has been in this field since his 1985 doctoral thesis, “Secular Climatic and Hydrological Change in Central Sudan”, returned to the theme in his book Climate Change Isn’t Everything: “Climate kills and climate change is real … [but] climate change is not like a comet approaching Earth. There is no good historical evidence that it will lead to human extinction or the collapse of human civilisation … climate is not and never has been static. It is a changing condition to which all life continually adapts as a natural response. Human societies continually adapt.”
But, as Hulme also observed, the scaremongering has led to “panic, fear and disengagement among people as ‘the end’ is imagined to be approaching”. This can be seen in the way mortal fear of climate change has grown and intensified among children and young adults, to the extent of damaging their mental health. It has also been reflected in the increasing number of young people declaring that they won’t have any children themselves, because of a (delusional) terror that any offspring would be born onto a planet that would entirely combust during their lifetimes.
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Paradoxically, this Armageddon-based reluctance to procreate is widespread in countries like this one, but not at all in sub-Saharan Africa, where rising temperatures would be much more of a threat to human survival. As the data scientist Hannah Ritchie, author of Not the End of the World, observes: “For the poorest countries, being richer and more resilient is key.”
For example, by the UN climate chief’s country, Grenada, developing its own hydrocarbon resources — and leaving sermons about the apocalypse at the church door, where they belong.
