‘The game is up for climate change believers’

The Herald -- the New Zealand Herald – Granny Herald --- published an astonishing piece yesterday. Head there now and read it, before you read the snippets below.  It’s called: ‘The game is up for climate change believers.’

That’s right. In the Herald.

Filched from the UK Telegraph, and presumably published while the present NZH editor was on leave, the op-ed by former Telegraph editor Charles Moore purports to be a review of a “tremendous book” by Rupert Darwell. It is that, and more – it outlines, in a way you’d never expect to see in the Royal New Zealand Herald, “what has been inflicted on us over the past 30 years or so in the name of saving the planet”—of which warmism is only one symptom.

Like most of those on both sides of the debate, Rupert Darwall is not a scientist. He is a wonderfully lucid historian of intellectual and political movements, which is just the job to explain what has been inflicted on us...
    The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won't last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America's natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome's work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: "The world has cancer and the cancer is man.").
    These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s …

We are paying now for the organisation begun then.