The climate fiddler on the roof and me

Andrew L. Urban

I am sitting at a small table at the rooftop terrace cafe of the Noga Hilton on the famed Croisette in Cannes, The sun sparkles off the Mediterranean below. It’s May 2006 and I’m waiting to interview Al Gore, whose film, The Inconvenient Truth, is a featured premiere in the year’s film festival. In the interview#, Gore insists with messianic fervour that thanks to man made global warming, a tipping point was coming; earth is warmed and warned. 

Now, on the 20th anniversary of that consequential moment in history, the unsubstantiated claim that climate change is man made is unravelling; the prophesied tipping points have all passed and earth remains lively. The fiddle is fully exposed; see the latest IPCC admission that panic scenarios are “implausible”, which we nasty “deniers” have said all along.@ (The phrase ‘climate change’ has absorbed Al Gore’s hypothesis to load up natural climate variability with the political payload demonising fossil fuels.)

This anniversary has prompted The Australian’s exceptional and erudite columnist Henry Ergas* to describe The Inconvenient Truth “an extraordinary cultural phenomenon … “the film rapidly acquired immense authority.

“Yet with so many of its dramatic predictions in tatters, the question is no longer whether the film was right or wrong. It is how a misleading narrative acquired such power that it helped make economic self-harm the West’s supreme moral virtue.” I couldn’t have put it better myself. And haven’t.

Ergas has more.

“Apocalyptic visions had long envisaged a final struggle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan; Marxism translated that struggle into secular form. Those who opposed “scientific socialism” were worse than merely mistaken: by breaking the higher law of history, they became enemies not just of the proletariat but of humanity. The distance from that to Lenin’s demand for the extermination of “noxious bourgeois vermin” was alarmingly short.

“It was that same moral and psychological absolutism that resurfaced, long after communism’s collapse, in the secular religion proclaimed by An Inconvenient Truth. But its apocalypticism, although also clad in scientific garb, does not belong to the 19th century’s rationalist certainties; it comes suffused with the Middle Ages’ prophetic terrors.

“Medieval apocalypticism was, for example, obsessed with dating the end times. Joachim of Fiore determined that the Antichrist would appear after 42 generations of 30 years, while Pope Innocent III’s Quia maior (papal bull) performed elaborate numerological exegeses upon the Beast’s number, 666.

“Climate discourse’s own numerology mirrors that obsession: “12 years”, “eight years”, “1.5 degrees”, “350 parts per million”, “net zero by 2050”. Each figure is freighted with the urgency of revelation and the authority of numerical precision – only to be quietly superseded when the appointed hour passes uneventfully.”

It’s the dark side of climate activism that is definitely not uneventful. Ergas says “… the consequences of this Manichean outlook, with its demand for an embodiment of absolute evil, are graver yet. The apocalyptic movements of the 12th century drew an ever-tighter circle around the elect, expelling from the community of the saved heretics, schismatics and, above all, Jews – whose continued existence figured in the eschatological imagination as a fatal obstacle to the coming of the heavenly kingdom. From this sprang an uncontrollable rage that all too readily transmuted into violence.

“The climate activists share that sense of fury; what lends it still greater intensity is that fury is almost all they possess.”

Indeed. Which leads Ergas to observe that “because the positive vision is so threadbare, while the visions of devastation are so overwhelming, the movement’s emotional grammar is saturated with rage: rage at those who refuse to submit, rage at those who continue to doubt, rage at those who stand in the way.

Urban’s 2022 book

“Little wonder climate activists deride democracy. Instead of medieval apocalypticism’s Beautiful Ending, climate catastrophism offers only Dutiful Compliance – the insistence, echoing Marxism, that humanity can be saved solely through obedience to science’s supposedly inexorable laws, as interpreted by its infallible prophets. The science is in; the messy trade-offs that are democracy’s way of managing complex and contentious issues are out – with raising them akin to apostasy.

“These are, in other words, true fanatics, willing, in Voltaire’s words, “to inundate the world with blood for the sake of unintelligible sophisms”. That the Greens can be climate extremists one day and admirers of Hamas’s death cult the next is therefore hardly surprising.

“Therein, 20 years later, lies the tragedy. Science hasn’t killed apocalypticism or curbed its dangers; it has merely dressed the apocalyptic delusions in new robes. And the civilisation that believed it had escaped the “ravings of Oracles and Seers” has ended by canonising them anew – with Al Gore as their most enriched and exalted evangelist.”

#Published in The Bulletin (1880-2008), Australia’s former news & current affairs weekly.

@ For example, The Con in Consensus / The big Con by this writer, published in The Spectator Australia, 15/10/2016

*Henry Ergas AO is an economist who spent many years at the OECD in Paris before returning to Australia. He has taught at a number of universities, including Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the University of Auckland and the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Économique in Paris, served as Inaugural Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the University of Wollongong and worked as an adviser to companies and governments.