I don’t know how they managed 100 years ago when 10 times as many people died from climate related disasters. The Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels have made us much safer from the climate and all natural disasters. When there is a disaster today that causes tremendous hardship, it’s almost always in very poor counties – and these counties are poor because they don’t have access to cheap, reliable energy.

Conversely, our wealth and privilege have made us weaker and less resilient. When people don’t face true adversity, they start worrying about little things – things they couldn’t afford to worry about when they were poor.

A neighbour’s 16 year old son told me that 1 degree C was a huge increase. His teacher had explained that the Earth’s average temperature was 15 degrees C, so 1 degree was nearly 7%.
I explained that, if somewhere had an average temperature of zero degrees C, then 1 degree would be a rise of infinity %! He got that.
I also explained that the Earth’s average temperature was 288 degrees Kelvin, so 1 degree C (also Kelvin), was a tiny %. He took my word for it.
What hope is there when that nonsense is being taught.

Every generation in history has preached an “end of the world is nigh” scenario. In past centuries it was religious-style armageddon. In the 60’s or 70’s it was nuclear armageddon; in the 10’s and 20’s it is climate armageddon. The basic problem seems to be that human beings cannot conceive of a world after they have passed away, so it must come to an end in one way or another.

Where to be green, famously, is to be communist red below the surface (hence the interest in and from modern China), this relatively new ideology has had an absolutely deleterious effect on the young, further driving their alienation which is giving rise to body dysmorphia (gender confusion today, rather than the food disorders and self-harm of yesterday).

Very good article. But can I please take issue with the ‘climate change is real’ statement used as a proxy for ‘man-made climate change requires us to decarbonise’? Of course the climate changes, always has always will. Chivers should apply the same scepticism about peer-reviewed research that he displays in this article to the decarbonisation pseudo-religion.

This is an excellent review. I take climate change quite seriously and write about as an energy expert.

“Alarmism” is among the tropes used to dismiss those who point out the gravity of climate change. It is a legitimate charge that does nothing to reduce the seriousness of the problem.

It seems that Aldern is more of an alarmist than many but the flaws in his journalistic honesty that you point out are more concerning. They lend weight to the alarmism trope.

I’d enjoy you writing a post on the psychology of climate change reactions!

Frankly, we’re all being crushed by the “weight of academic authority”, since some of the stupidest people in positions of power – even if it’s just publishing – have been educated into imbecility.

There’s not a d*mn thing any human can do about the climate (spraying aerosols into clouds in San Francisco will surely be a FAFO event for the clowns over there, and I’m fine with that). It should be obvious to everyone that most of what we’re experiencing in the way of “crises” is phony. My husband and his brother had a cynical little phrase they always used to sum up things like this: If I can make a buck, I will.

The most likely climate outcome for the next 50 years is a boring extrapolation of what has happened in about the last 50 years, when warming emerged from the natural noise. The global temperature will continue to warm by about 0.2C per decade, and the sea level will continue to rise by about 1 inch per decade. You can think of more esoteric outcomes, but they have a high uncertainty, and usually exploited to increase anxiety.

Luxury worry.
Young people in the 19th century living and working in industrial cities, with outbreaks of cholera or TB, poor safety in factories and public buildings (the Victoria Hall disaster), had many legitimate causes for worry.
Some did commit suicide, throwing themselves into the Thames, or, if in France, the Seine (L’Inconnu de la Seine).
Examine a page of registrations of deaths, say, in the 1880s. A quarter are for those under the age of twelve. What would the little girl called Cinderella have been like had she grown up, rather than having died at the age of 0 years. She didn’t have the luxury of time, never mind the luxury of material possessions, scientifically-correct medicine and surgery, an abundance of food, to worry.
Perhaps there was a study of worry done by someone in the 19th century. But if people did worry, they still had children, large families of them, whether they worried or not.
And here’s another thing. Children need reassurance. They do not need to be loaded up with adult concerns that even the adults cannot solve. To do so may eventually be regarded as a form of child abuse. As the late Neil Postman argued, a person young in years is only a child if they are separated from the adult world. No Climate please, we’re still children.
At the same time, revolutions are advanced by separating children from their parents. Notorious are the examples from the USSR and the Third Reich. If children can be persuaded that their parents have screwed their future, they will put politics into their hearts, displacing the love of and loyalty to their parents. Politicised worry.

The very nature of the climate – as it is for all of nature – is to change. The only real question is: what can be reasonably done to slow it down or to not make it any worse? The key word is, “reasonably.”

Would these panicked babies really prefer to be transported back to 1800 or 1600? Or 20000 BC?

At the heart of our climate of anxiety (as opposed to anxiety of climate) which is a very real thing, is the fact we are mammals with a mammal brain that survived and thrived because we respond to any new information with anxiety and fear until we process it (thus avoiding being eaten by the predator in the bushes). Consider that today we are presented with as much new information/events in a single day as medieval people dealt with in a lifetime and that the multiplicity of information channels rely on catastrophying content in order to nudge it up the attention chart and you have your answer why this climate of anxiety exists. Climate crisis is just another manifestation. The brain is growing new layers to try and speed up processing but it will take generations. In the meantime ….

What a great example of Intersectionality.