Swiss Journalist Predicts: “Climate Catastrophe Will Soon Be Forgotten” Like All Other Environmental Scare Stories

Reichmuth_WeltwocheIt’s good to see that there are a few journalists who actually take journalism seriously and question what they are being told. One publication that has been doing a good job on this is Switzerland-based Weltwoche, which has written two pieces about the latest IPCC report. See here and here.

Photo: Alex Reichmuth, Weltwoche.
Hat tip: Reader Kurt Arner

Now Weltwoche follows up with a commentary by veteran journalist Alex Reichmuth, titled: “The Perspiration of Fear” and Climate appearing in the print edition. In it he writes that the alarmist warnings of the IPCC have become a worn-out ritual, having little more than a bounce of a dead cat. Moreover, like all other environmental predictions of doom and gloom made in the past, man-made climate change will also be relegated to the dustbin of history.

IPCC has confused the public

Reichmuth writes that if anything, the climate scientists and the IPCC, in their desperate scramble to explain the unexpected changes in climate science, have been only successful in confusing the public. Last winter renowned climate institutes admitted the “climate pause” and the IPCC came under pressure to come up with an explanation for it. Climate change was no longer happening, the public was told, thus contradicting all the earlier claims of run-away warming that the IPCC had consistently preached for years and years. The science had been settled, but then it was not.  So what was the IPCC to do? Reichmuth:

Ultimately the IPCC decided that the pause could be explained as being unimportant.”

As Reichmuth describes it, the move by the IPCC resembled more a last-ditch effort to salvage the global warming scare. He writes:

Indeed only with great difficulty is the IPCC able to hide that it has a serious problem. […] If the thermometer remains stuck at its current level for a few more years, then all IPCC models calculations will become irrelevant and the basis for justifying CO2 reductions would be gone. So the IPCC decides to ignore the warming pause and claims that global warming continues and that man is responsible.”

And so the media and public get their cue to resume their panic. Few, however, are listening anymore.

In the 1980s dying forests refused to die

The call to resume the climate panic reminds Reichmuth of the 1980s forest die-off scare. Soon, because of man-made acid rain, the globe would become a barren wasteland, it was claimed – unless of course mankind stopped industry immediately. But the forests defied projections and refused to die. And as is the case today with CO2, authorities refused to acknowledge that reality and relentlessly insisted that the forest was indeed dying. Reichmuth writes, “It didn’t help. Just a few years later it become clear that the forests weren’t dying.”

Reichmuth writes that the IPCC is now threatened with the very same fate of irrelevance. Even worse the public is losing interest and few are heeding their cries of “wolf” anymore. Reichmuth points out that today only 39% of Germans (who for years had been relentlessly bombarded by dire predictions of a climate catastrophe and shielded from real dissenting views) are afraid of climate change  – that figure was 62% just seven years ago. The same trend holds for Switzerland. Reichmuth:

In 2007 the Swiss media databank reported 5200 articles that contained the word “climate change”. In 2009 the figure was down to 3700. This year at the end of September it was just over 1500. With the other environmental ‘hype stories’ a phase of declining interest was always followed by forgetting altogether”.

Scare goes from acid rains…to acid oceans

The environmentalists are on the move again to the next scare story. They went from population explosion in the 1960s, to global cooling in the 1970s, then to acid rain in the 1980s before moving on to global warming in the 1990s, and today they are gearing up to retrofit their freak show over to acid oceans.

 

16 responses to “Swiss Journalist Predicts: “Climate Catastrophe Will Soon Be Forgotten” Like All Other Environmental Scare Stories”

  1. Ian W

    “”In the 1980s dying forests refused to die – The call to resume the climate panic reminds Reichmuth of the 1980s forest die-off scare.””

    Indeed – acid rain was an unfounded scare. However, the reason that the UK is shutting down functioning coal fired power generation after being ordered to do by the EU. is because of the Large Combustion Plant Directive – the aim of the LCPD is to reduce acidification! ??

    The bureaucrats put in place because of the scare whipped up by politicians MUST retain their jobs so the acid rain story may be false – but it is causing deaths in the UK due to energy poverty in cold weather as functioning power generation plants are shut down.

    Make no mistake – the EU and the Etats Uni EPA will be enforcing carbon dioxide emissions reduction standards even if ‘catastrophic climate change’ due to CO2 emissions is proven to be a totally false scare and dropped by the politicians. Industries will be closed many hundreds of thousands go into energy poverty and die of cold for no reason apart from need for the bureaucrats to retain their jobs and perhaps to continue taxation income.

    Note that _both_ scares, like the ‘impending ice age – global cooling’ scare require the reduction in energy supply to the ‘first world’ – almost like that was the real intent.

  2. mwhite

    Given the amount of money that’s been sucked up by the “Climate Catastrophe” I do not want this to be forgotten ( I for one am feeling it in my pocket). There’s also the prospect of rolling blackouts in the future,

    ““On Wednesday, January 16, due to unplanned outages and cold weather, National Grid had to find power to supply roughly a million homes to keep the lights on.”

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/379845/Blackout-Britain-EU-environmental-directive-puts-millions-at-risk-of-power-cuts

    “Fawley is one of a number of coal and oil power stations being forced into retirement to comply with EU environmental targets.”

    In the UK generating capacity is being closed down faster than it is being replaced. Now Ed (the climate change act) Milliband has promised to freeze energy prices if he is elected prime minister in 2015, fair warning to all those who lend to the power companies that they may not be able to pay the money back.

    I hope that when the “catastrphe” is found out for what it is and those who pushed it forward are questioned their consensus and their science will have to be explained

  3. Walter H. Schneider

    “Climate Catastrophe Will Soon Be Forgotten”? Not very likely, even if the issue of global warming will no longer be considered to be so pressing that it requires the deconstruction of the world economy and geo-engineering on a scale that alters the face of the Earth.

    We will have constant reminders of the extent of the climate craze that we needed to escape from: the rusting remnant and concrete foundations of a hundred thousand and more windmills blighting landscapes all over the world.

    Mind you, the scars caused by forest-mining operations on 12,000 km^2 of North-American land required to feed the bio-mass demand of the Drax power station in the U.K. will heal somewhat faster — if permitted to heal. After all, it appears that the reasoning goes that CO2 produced by the burning of coal is poisonous and CO2 produced by the burning of wood is healthy for the environment, as being inefficient is smart, as long as that will banish the demon coal.

  4. Graeme No.3

    mwhite
    Sadly nobody has been listening. It is too late to build new power plants even if they already had building approval.
    The result is that there will be blackouts either this coming winter or next. If the coming winter is as severe as forecast it will be disastrous. Increased demand with the wind turbines (and Solar) not working will overload the grid, and down it will go.
    I note that diesel generators are being offered “generous” (read exorbitant) rates for supplying demand. Someone in the Department has panicked, and rightly so. Trying to run a grid on 5% margin is lunacy esp. if it involves variable supply from wind turbines.
    I wonder if anybody has dared tell Cameron that the energy crisis means he won’t be around to contest the 2015 election (as he thinks)?

    Still, the answer that will be and must be found is to extend the life of some of the coal and gas plants. Assuming that those greenpeace prats don’t provoke the Russians into cutting off supplies of gas. It remains to be seen if anybody in the Government can think of it.

    1. Jimbo

      Just this past winter the UK almost ran out of natural gas for heating. A few years back green, wind powered Scotland was forced to rely on French nuclear energy to avoid outages. The time is drawing near when real blackouts will turn the lights on in the public’s head.

  5. David

    Why trust journalists and popular writers, like James Delingpole. They just sensationalise everything as badly as those they are attacking?

    Acid rain was combated by a concerted effort to reduce SO2 emissions – at great cost of course. You decide if it was worth it. The ozone layer hole was similarly nipped in the bud by the reduced production of chloroflurocarbons – but again is given out as a false scare story.

    So yes, get your information from ego-centric journalists who think you should read what they have to say instead of the facts and decide for yourself if a similar problem is worth tackling or not.

    1. DirkH

      David, we also read The Skeptical Environmentalist, which is a very well sourced book that has withstood all attacks on the veracity of its data. I recommend it.

      But thanks for trying.

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  7. Jeff Todd

    I do not want this forgotten; these scare-mongers hyped AGW and told us that we were responsible for our actions. So are they; I want every penny of public money repaid out of the pockets of the Politicians/IPCC/WWF/Greenpeace Intl/CRU etc. I want compensated for the salnder & high taxes aimed at me by these groups.

  8. Chris Frey

    “Climate Catastrophe Will Soon Be Forgotten”

    I disagree! The climate Catastrophe was used as a reason for the German “Energiewende”. The effects of this apparently will not be forgotten for a long time! A very good article ist to be found here:

    http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/news-cache/die-verstaatlichung-der-energiewirtschaft/

    (Pierre, this is worth to be translated!)

    But the author is Swiss. He perhaps thinks that his country can itself untie its links to Germany. We’ll see!

    Chris Frey

  9. Berthold Klein

    The reason that this Hoax started was because the supposed scientists did not ask the basic question: Where is the credible experiment that proves that the greenhouse gas effect hypotheses exists?
    This question has not been asked by hundreds of thousands of academics in almost every college and university in the world. This question has not been answered yet. This is the greatest tragedy because this same stupidity will be repeated today, tomorrow, next year and next century.
    The relatively few individuals and groups that have asked the question and could not find an answer were ignored because people prefer to believe in fairy-tales- look at the “entertainment and sports industry”. Fantasy and fiction.
    This is just as true in government, business, industry especially advertising, and religion.
    There are very few that have looked at the following because the majority prefer to live in a world of ignorance where they are told what to believe instead of thinking.
    There is an experiment that proves that the Greenhouse gas effect does not exist. This experiment which has been technologically reviewed by Ph.D physicists . Ph.D. Chemical engineers and others Ph. D’s in other fields The experiment is found on the web-site http:// http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com click on the blog tab then on page 3 of 12. . It is titled “The Experiment that failed which can save the world trillions-Proving the greenhouse gas effect does not exist”
    The web-site http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com has been changed the new link to many relevant papers is: http://us.mg201.mail.yahoo.com/dc/launch?.partner=sbc&.gx=1&.rand=f4dv049je9jpl

    Greenhouse Theory Computer Fail: Real Evidence Slays Carbon ‘Science’

    1. Berthold Klein
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