It’s common knowledge at this point that pretty much every prediction ever made by climate activists has turned out to be completely false. But, for the most part, all along, there’s one thing these activists have been smart enough to do. They’ve typically made predictions that were pretty far out into the future. They didn’t say anything that could be proven wrong within a couple of months. They knew enough to create some distance between their prediction, and the day you could theoretically point to that prediction and say, “Well, that didn’t pan out.”
There are a lot of examples of this phenomenon. There’s Leonard Nimoy, a.k.a. Mr. Spock, claiming in a 1978 television special that, “during the lifetime of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our planet into a polar desert.” That TV special was called “The Coming Ice Age.” Of course, by the time Mr. Spock’s prediction was falsifiable, he was near death, so no one was going to hold him accountable, or say “I told you so” while he was on his deathbed.
Then there was that infamous 1989 article from the Associated Press, citing a “senior U.N. environmental official,” saying, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” Again, they’re putting some distance between the prediction, and the time you can prove them wrong.
A NASA scientist did the same thing in 2006, when he told NBC News that, “the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe.”
More recently, Greta Thunberg got in on the action in 2018, when she claimed, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”
In all of these cases, the climate predictions weren’t even close to being true. Reality disproved all of them. But it took time for these predictions to “age out” and become clearly false. Most cultists are smart enough to design their claims so that they sound highly alarming at the time. And then, by the time you can validate these claims years later, most people have forgotten all about the whole thing.
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A couple of months ago, there was a very notable exception to this general rule. There was a cult leader who slipped up, and made a prediction that could be proven wrong very quickly.
I’m talking about this prediction from our climate czar, John Kerry. Here he was this summer:
John Kerry sounds like he's in a cult:
"It’ll be the hottest year and we all know that because the science is telling it to us and because Mother Earth is responding.” pic.twitter.com/wfZzqlZCD9
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) July 10, 2023
If you try to fact-check that claim from Kerry, you’ll find a bunch of articles declaring he was right. They’ll say this is indeed the hottest year ever, and that’s because “Mother Earth” doesn’t like your truck, or your grill, or the way you vote. None of these articles will mention the recent volcanic eruption in the Pacific Ocean, which blasted a huge plume of water vapor into the atmosphere. They won’t tell you how that likely trapped heat and raised the global temperatures. Instead, they’ll blame you for all the heat.
What’s funny about this premise is, if we accept it as completely true for the sake of argument, then humans must also be responsible for the extremely cold temperatures that are also being recorded this year.
It turns out it hasn’t been hot everywhere, contrary to what John Kerry says. Take a look at what’s happening in Europe right now. According to an article from yesterday in Reuters, for example, “Temperatures in Siberia dip to minus 56 Celsius as record snow blankets Moscow. … In the Russian capital, some of the biggest snowfalls ever seen on December 3 left swathes of Moscow blanketed in drifts of more than 35 cm of snow in just one day.”
Most of Central and Eastern Europe was like this last week. They have never seen snow like this in recorded history. This is supposedly the hottest year ever recorded, and they’re experiencing record snowfall.
But it gets better. If you want decisive proof that irony is still alive, despite every effort by climate activists to quash it forever, here it is. The snow was so bad last week that in Munich, the airport was completely covered in snow. Private planes were immobilized and in some cases, frozen in what looks like the take-off position, because snow stacked up on their tail sections. And reportedly, some of these planes were supposed to head to the COP-28 climate summit, which is underway right now in Dubai. You could not script this any better. Here’s what the airport looked like in Munich a couple of day ago:
NEW: Private jets getting ready to leave for a ‘Climate Change’ conference in Dubai are frozen on the runway in Munich as 60% of Europe is covered in snow.
Let me say that again: Rich people getting ready to board their gas guzzling jets to fly to a ‘Climate Change’ (formerly… pic.twitter.com/PBLcy2xhbM
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 2, 2023
So private jets are frozen on their way to the climate summit, where the owners of the jets wanted to lecture you about the evil of global warming. It’s kind of like a dietician being late to a weight loss seminar because his car broke down in the Taco Bell drive-thru. The climate evangelists have gone full-circle, once again, headlong into self-parody.
In the interest of full disclosure, even though it kind of ruins the joke, I should clarify that we don’t know for a fact that this particular plane in that video was heading to the COP-28 summit. According to some Internet sleuths, who looked at this aircraft and its registration number, it was parked for several days before this storm arrived. But we can assume, given the wide impact of this torrential snowstorm all across Europe, that some travel plans for this COP-28 summit were indeed disrupted.
And that is, among other things, both deeply ironic and profoundly hilarious.
It’s also not the first time something like this has happened. Back in March of 2009, when these nutjobs still used the term “global warming” instead of “climate change,” they held a big rally in the nation’s capital. They were there to complain about how hot the world was getting. (Because, apparently, warming climates is always a bad thing, even though it often makes it easier to farm in huge portions of the world, and has many other benefits, but never mind that.)
These climate activists gathered in Washington, D.C. to send the message that the world was getting way too hot. And right on cue, a historic snowstorm completely shut down the whole protest. Watch:
The solar panels on the Greenpeace truck, which read “America can stop global warming,” were frozen over. It’s a remarkable clip, for so many reasons. For example, you also heard the now-familiar retort from one of the climate activists in that clip. She insists that, “Weather is different from climate. Just because you have a snowstorm doesn’t mean the warming isn’t happening.”
That’s an important line, and a familiar one. It’s also totally false. The literary dictionary definition of “climate” is: “The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.” Saying weather is different from climate is like saying water is different from H2O. It doesn’t make sense. And you can tell the woman doesn’t really believe it. You can tell she has no idea what it’s supposed to mean, because she laughs about it a few seconds later. But it lets her reconcile the fact that her beliefs are being contradicted by reality, right in front of her. It gives her something to say, in a desperate attempt to avoid complete humiliation.
That clip, in retrospect, belongs in a time capsule. It marked one of the last times climate activists would ever talk about global warming with a straight face again. They transitioned, very soon afterwards, to exclusively talking about “climate change,” instead of global warming. And the reason is obvious. “Climate change” gives them a catch-all they can always blame, in any context. They don’t have to risk any more embarrassing photo ops, where they’re whining about global warming as they’re getting pummeled by snow. When the villain is “climate change,” then you can complain whether it’s hot, or snowy, or anywhere in between. That’s the advantage of talking about “climate” instead of “warming.” Climate change is proven no matter what happens. It is unfalsifiable, which is also why it’s false.
So this is how it’s gone. From ice age, to global warming, to climate change. Getting broader and less specific which each change.
According to NASA, “… global warming became the dominant popular term in June 1988, when NASA scientist James E. Hansen had testified to Congress about climate, specifically referring to global warming.”
Then, people started to notice it was getting colder than it had ever been. In 1994, for example, the midwestern and eastern portions of this country experienced a cold wave that caused more than 100 deaths. The country saw its coldest temperatures in nearly a century. And so once again, the lexicon had to change. As CNN reports, the term ‘climate change,’ “became more popular in the 2000s.”
The point of all these changes isn’t just to save face. With every change, activists give themselves more latitude to justify all of their other political goals in the name of “saving the environment.”
At the COP-28 summit the other day, John Kerry pledged to shut down all coal power plants everywhere in the world (except, presumably, China, which is constantly opening new coal plants every week, and which doesn’t remotely care what John Kerry says about anything). Kerry’s plan would destroy the world economy. It would do precisely nothing to stop the climate from changing. But you’re supposed to think that it’s a reasonable thing to do, because we’re in a “climate emergency.” Everything is on the table.
Hillary Clinton has been doing her part to sound the alarm about this fake emergency. Recently she insisted that climate change is somehow killing people due to extreme heat. Watch:
NOW – Hillary Clinton: "We're seeing and beginning to pay attention and to count and record the deaths that are related to climate." pic.twitter.com/6hVv4qFB1T
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) December 4, 2023
Just as a factual matter, none of this is true. It’s not even close. Extreme cold kills far more people than extreme heat. To give just one data point, according to the Lancet, there were roughly 800 deaths due to heat in England and Wales between 2000 and 2019. By contrast, there were more than 60,000 deaths associated with extreme cold. And Forbes reports that in this country, “the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality Database, which is based on actual death certificates, indicates that roughly twice as many people die of cold in a given year than of heat.”
This is kind of obvious, when you think about it. Someone exposed to cold can develop hypothermia literally within minutes. In most cases, the heat will not effect you that quickly, or at all. Even in 90 degree temperatures, if you find a shady spot and have enough water to drink, you can lay around outside all day and be perfectly fine.
But the point of what Hillary Clinton was saying wasn’t really about extreme heat, or extreme cold. Her goal is to convince you that a lot of people are dying due to the “climate.” Effectively, that’s like saying a lot of people are dying due to the fact that they live on planet Earth. It’s completely meaningless. Talking about “deaths related to climate” is like talking about “deaths related to physical existence.” It’s a category so broad as to be incoherent. But you’re just supposed to buy into it, and smile and wave as hordes of so-called “climate refugees” flood into this country. That’s all Hillary Clinton cares about.
Our public health establishment, meanwhile, wants to use “climate change” to explain away the next fake pandemic, which they can use to gain even more control over your life. Here’s the TV expert Doctor Peter Hotez, explaining that climate change could be responsible for the next COVID:
Peak Clown World: Peter Hotez Explains Why We’re Seeing So Many Pandemics:
First, listen for yourself.
Then consider the following:
Both pre-planned pandemics and… pic.twitter.com/6Kzm4hBzfc
— Blake (@_BlakeHabyan) December 1, 2023
Whatever your political affiliation, there’s always the temptation to make arguments like this. Two decades ago, the establishment Right made the same arguments about the “war on terror.” They told us terrorism was an existential threat and we therefore had to sign away our rights to FISA courts, which very soon, would be used by the FBI to harass and imprison their political opponents.
Now the Left is using “climate change” in much the same way. It’s an unkillable, ever-evolving enemy, and in order to combat it, we’re told we need to destroy everything that’s important to civilization.
To that end, the Department of Agriculture in Ireland recently considered a plan to kill 200,000 cows to reduce emissions. They’re thinking about literal animal sacrifices to save the climate, even though — by the climate alarmists’ own standards, Ireland barely emits any CO2 into the atmosphere at all.
If there’s any distinction between climate alarmists and most cultists, it’s that you can only string cultists along for so long. Historically, most cults disband once the cult predicts a doomsday, and gives a specific date, and then the date passes without any asteroid impact or anything like that. But the climate cult is different. They can make prediction after prediction, and even though they’re all wrong, they get to keep making more predictions. They get to keep flying in private jets to climate conferences where they lecture us on how to behave — what cars to drive, what food to eat, what stoves to use, and so on.
And in the meantime, the corporate press will defend them. A reporter for Axios, responding to criticism that all of these private jets might harm the environment, wrote this on social media: “To all those complaining about world leaders flying to attend a meeting on climate change, you’re not saying anything original. Fact is, ya can’t do a zoom call with 190 countries, and face to face talks move the needle the most.”
The Axios reporter never explains why a big Zoom call wouldn’t be possible, exactly. He also never explains why some of these world leaders can’t fly on commercial planes. You’re just supposed to accept it, because ultimately, they have power and you don’t. That’s the actual explanation.
And a couple of years ago, at another climate summit, John Kerry himself made that explicit. Watch:
Arrest, charge, prosecute and indict John Kerry for the crimes of perjury and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
John Kerry: “I've personally never owned a private jet"
John Kerry “It’s the only choice for someone like me.” pic.twitter.com/JWWvMuL38b
— 🇺🇸RealRobert🇺🇸 (@Real_RobN) July 14, 2023
“It’s the only choice for somebody like me,” says Kerry. He’s just too important to follow the rules that you’re supposed to obey. That’s because the rules really have nothing to do with the climate, or with global warming, or any of that. The point of all the regulations is to establish that people like John Kerry are superior.
In the end, that’s what all of this has always been about.