Climate change: Resignation sets in

Delegates to this week’s climate-change summit in Cancún, Mexico, already have achieved an agreement, said Geoffrey Lean in the London Telegraph. They share a general “sense of foreboding”—both about the effort to tackle climate change and the fate of the planet itself. With the global economic slump, the “Climategate” scandal, and the resurgence of the climate-change-denying Republican Party in the U.S., political support for action on global warming has eroded sharply over the past two years. Meanwhile, scientists’ grim predictions of catastrophic ecological change are starting to come true, even sooner than expected. This year may be the warmest on record, and just as climate scientists have predicted, the planet was battered by catastrophic floods, unprecedented heat waves, and other weather extremes.

It’s all over, said The Washington Times in an editorial. We refer, of course, not to human civilization but to the once-fashionable liberal cult led by Al Gore, with its insistence that we’re facing an “impending climate catastrophe.” No reasonable person believes “climate theology’s high priests” anymore, especially since they made clear that salvation can be obtained only by strangling struggling economies, imposing new taxes on energy, and surrendering national sovereignty to global overlords. Climate change was a “global scam” from the very beginning, said Investor’s Business Daily in an editorial. A senior member of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change let slip the perpetrators’ real motive last week when he said the goal of any international treaty should be “redistributing the world’s wealth” from richer countries to poorer ones. Developed nations, the U.N. official said, “have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community,” and must do penance by paying a minimum of $100 billion annually to poorer nations.

It will never happen, said Walter Russell Mead in TheAmericanInterest.com. Climate change may be real, but the “Great Gurus of Green” were truly deluded in thinking they could get 192 countries to sign on to a treaty curbing their carbon emissions. “The fight to limit global warming to easily tolerated levels is thus over,” said The Economist in an editorial. The only question now about the warming planet is “how to live with it.” Sooner or later, the same governments that failed to act in concert to prevent climate change will have no choice but to cooperate in dealing with rising sea levels, droughts and food shortages, and “the craziest experiment mankind has ever conducted.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up