When it comes to rank hyperbole, no political movement on Earth can ever hope to match the stuff that comes out of the climate-alarm community. They have treated us to so many dire warnings about having just 10 years or 7 years or 12 years or 5 years to ward off certain impending doom since the global warming movement sprung to life in the 1980s that it has all long since become so much background noise to most ordinary citizens.
That in and of itself is a problem, given that, while we “normals” out here in flyover county laughingly dismiss their latest bit of nonsense, the activists and their coordinating policymakers keep doubling- and tripling-down on their freedom and energy-security destroying initiatives. Laugh all you want, but this is all deadly serious business. There are trillions of dollars at stake.
A great example of the seemingly limitless stream of hyperbole came this week from United Nations executive climate secretary Simon Stiell, who told an audience at the Chatham House think tank in London that previous predictions of having just 12, or 10, or 7 years to act were overly generous. In fact, in Steill’s version of climate reality, the global community is now down to just two short years to reverse the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to stave off catastrophic climate change of some sort or another.
“We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans now,” Stiell said, adding: “Who exactly has two years to save the world? The answer is every person on this planet. More and more people want climate action right across societies and political spectrums.”
So, people “want climate action” and that means we must have it. Exactly why, he doesn’t say, and to avoid exactly what, he can’t say, because saying exactly what we must avoid would pin the agenda down to prove something tangible by citing actual observations rather than the outcomes of computer modeling exercises.
Still, Mr. Stiell seems absolutely certain about the rightness of his cause, which is unsurprising since he reports to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Guterres, of course, is the guy who has gifted us in recent years with hyperbolic rhetorical claims that too much plant food in the air has placed the world on a “highway to hell,” and made a state of “global boiling” inevitable unless we all act according to his wishes. And now comes Stiell to assure us we only have two years to act, because, after all, someone had to produce a timetable to back up the boss’s childish gibberish.
It is all quite tiresome, and yet it is also so deadly serious, given that every ‘solution’ brought forth by the climate alarm industry involves the diminution of national sovereignty, economic growth, and human freedom. Stiell himself provided a great example of this reality in his speech with a proposal for the G20 collective to forcibly redirect trillions of dollars “from the energy and infrastructure of the past,” to the unreliable, weather-dependent “solutions” he prefers.
Stiell also called for “a quantum leap this year in climate finance” in which developed nations would transfer billions of dollars of wealth to developing countries to help them deal with the $400 billion they will collectively spend on debt servicing costs in 2024. No doubt, the UN plan would be for the United States to foot the major portion of that exercise, even though it will spend $1 trillion to service its own national debt this year. This all makes sense to globalist kleptocrats.
But Stiell’s fright rhetoric may not have its intended impact, even among climate scientists in academia. “‘Two years to save the world’ is meaningless rhetoric,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “At best, it’s likely to be ignored, at worst, it will be counterproductive.”
Regardless of the reaction it ultimately engenders, Stiell’s hyperbolic nonsense fits right in with the narrative his boss has been pushing. It sure will be interesting to see how many years he and Guterres say we have left come 2027.
