I’ve found the cure for climate anxiety

A new documentary, Climate: The Movie, by the maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin, is becoming a phenomenon, though it’s received almost no publicity in the mainstream media. It rejects the idea that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’, so that’s hardly surprising. But it has already racked up millions of views online and been translated into ten languages. I watched it on YouTube on Monday and can confirm it’s a dazzlingly entertaining film that distils the case against climate alarmism into a succinct 80 minutes.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to challenge the narrative about climate change is because it supposedly reflects the ‘settled’ scientific consensus. We’re told that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that global warming – or ‘global boiling’, as it’s now called – is caused by humans burning fossil fuels and releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere. Climate: The Movie confronts this argument head on, not by disputing the 97 per cent figure, but by interviewing William Happer, a spry 84-year-old former physics professor at Princeton.

‘There’s this mischievous idea that’s promoted that scientific truth is determined by consensus,’ he tells Durkin. ‘In real science, there are always arguments, no science is ever settled. It is absurd when people say the science of climate is settled. There’s no such thing as settled science, especially when it comes to climate.’

To underline this, the film features a cast of distinguished scientists, including the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for physics, who gleefully take on all the sacred cows of the environmental lobby. Are you under the impression the Earth has never been hotter? Not so, says Steve Koonin, a former scientific adviser to President Obama and now a professor at NYU. The geological record shows that for the past 500 million years the Earth was considerably warmer than it is now.