Global Gaslighting, Not Warming By James Reed

UN Chief guru, António Guterres, when the northern temperatures were high and fires were burning places down, wasted no time in proclaiming that global warming had been replaced by “global boiling.” It was all rhetoric as it does not follow that human-caused climate change is doing this. If this warming was so, then expect ever-higher temperatures to follow. What does seem to be operating, as detailed in blog posts last week, is massive amounts of water vapour entering the atmosphere from under-water volcanic eruptions. Nothing much can be done about that, but unlike the carbon dioxide fetish, the phenomenon is temporary. The weather will get back to “normal,” as far as a dynamic system goes.

As detailed below in a great piece from Spiked.com, what we are seeing from the elites is global gaslighting and high deception, not human-caused global warming. That the establishment simply assumed that this was human-caused climate change, and immediately used this to push agendas such as farming bans, meat elimination, and the abandonment of fossil fuels, gives the game away.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/08/09/the-real-crisis-is-global-gaslighting/

“They’re lying to us. Forget global boiling, the crazy term invented by UN chief António Guterres a couple of weeks ago. Forget global warming, even. It’s global gaslighting we should be worried about. If gaslighting, in the words of the Oxford dictionary, is ‘the process of making somebody believe untrue things in order to control them’, then that lunatic Standard cover was classic gaslighting. The planet is not on fire. Earth is not burning. These are untruths. This is delirium, not journalism; fearmongering, not fact-gathering. And the aim, it seems to me, is to try to control us; to frighten us with pseudo-Biblical prophesies of hellfire and doom until we obediently bow down to the eco-ideology.

Adding insult to injury, the Standard frontpage had pics of Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Rishi Sunak next to its crackpot query, ‘WHO WILL STOP EARTH BURNING?’. Let’s leave to one side that President Biden doesn’t seem to know what planet he’s on half the time, never mind being able to save one; and that Rishi can’t even control Britain’s borders, far less the climate of our entire mortal coil; and that Xi and Modi are surely more concerned with their pursuit of economic development than with indulging the End Times hysteria of the Notting Hill set that writes and publishes the Standard. The more pressing point is this: no one needs to stop Earth from burning because Earth isn’t burning. You can’t put out a fire that doesn’t exist. As Bjorn Lomborg said last week, the idea that the ‘world is ablaze’ is pure bunkum.

The mainstream media may have been awash with images of wildfires in Greece, Cyprus and Portugal over the past fortnight, and newsreaders might be wringing their manicured hands over the blistering temperatures in southern Europe and the stern homilies for wicked humanity contained in such heat, but the fact is that less of our planet is on fire than was the case 20 years ago. In the early 2000s, around three per cent of the Earth’s land caught fire. It’s been trending downward since. In 2022 just 2.2 per cent of land caught fire – a ‘record low’. Yes, in places like Canada more land has been consumed by nature’s flames, but in much of the rest of the world, including Africa and Europe, we’ve seen ‘lower burning’, Lomborg reports.

You won’t hear this on the nightly news. They’re too busy making breathless predictions about the fiery end of our species to communicate the cool – pun intended – facts about wildfires. What’s more, the Greek government suspects that a majority of the more than 600 fires Greece has suffered in recent weeks were started by ‘human hand’. In short, arsonists are to blame, not sinful, industrious humanity. Yes, it has been very hot in parts of Europe, and yes this has caused difficulties for many people. Properties have burned, homes have been lost. But extreme heat – and its bastard offspring: fire – has been a part of the human experience forever. One example: the current heat in Spain of 40-plus degrees is being talked about as a Dante-like ordeal, yet in Spain in 1933 temperatures reached 42.5C. It was like a ‘steaming cauldron’, news reports said.

Heat has always been with us. What’s different today is our apocalyptic interpretation of heat as Gaia’s violent punishment of flying, driving, shopping, eating, polluting, horrible mankind. It isn’t the weather that’s changed so much as our willingness to see weather as a reprimand by the gods for our exploitation of nature’s resources. In a normal era, wildfire is just wildfire; in our misanthropic, modernity-regretting times, wildfire is payback. As funnyman turned mouthpiece for the morally unstable middle classes Stewart Lee put it, you should be ‘weeping and p**sing and sh**ting yourself’ over the ‘burning’ of Europe. And if you aren’t? If you’re actually quite relaxed, and possibly even logging on to the Ryanair app to book a jaunt to Almeria? Then clearly you’re one of the deniers; one of the wicked ones; one of the true arsonists of our poor planet.