Human folly is all too common. But in a long life I have never come across anything remotely as bad as the current climate scare. The government’s COP26 targets are ambitious (and eye-wateringly expensive). Amid the debate, one important question seems to be missing. Are we really facing an existential threat? Or might the climate change ‘crisis’ in fact be quasi-religious hysteria, based on ignorance?
It is true that, since the industrial revolution, when we began to use fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and gas — as our source of energy, this has led to a steady, albeit gradual, increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The know-nothings (notably but by no means exclusively the BBC) customarily refer to this as pollution. In reality, it is the very reverse: so far from carbon dioxide being pollution, it is the stuff of life. It is the food of plants, and without plants there would be little animal life and no human life.
The principal effect of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is to stimulate plant growth, known as the fertilisation effect. Careful studies have shown that the planet is indeed becoming greener thanks to increased CO2. And yet we’re told that we need to prevent any further increase in CO2 in order to become ‘green’.
A secondary effect of increased CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere is to warm the planet slightly. This is no bad thing: many more people die each year from cold-related illnesses than from heat-related ones. And the warming is very slight indeed. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an offshoot of the United Nations, the Earth is warming at a rate of at most one-sixth of a degree per decade, a barely perceptible amount.
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