The climate witch trials. By Brendan O’Neill.
Questioning the climate-change narrative is now the ultimate form of heresy. …
Witch-hunts in mid-millennial Europe were inextricably linked with concerns over climate change. This was the era of the Little Ice Age, the period that roughly spanned from 1300 to 1850 during which the Northern Hemisphere experienced exceptionally cold winters. The impact of the Little Ice Age was devastating. The frigid weather violently disrupted harvests in Europe, especially the grain harvest. Following particularly cold periods in the 1500s, it took 180 years for grain harvests to return to their previous levels.
The green line controls the blue line??
The result, in the words of German historian Philipp Blom, was ‘a long-term, continent-wide agricultural crisis’. And this led to a staggering spike in witch-hunts. Blom describes how in northern Europe in particular, ‘the accumulation of bad harvests and the constant fear of famine and illness’ led to the rise of ‘a particularly cruel collective hysteria: witch trials’. Thousands of women, and occasionally men, were burnt for their alleged role in stoking contrary weather, in causing climate change. …
It is no coincidence that around 110,000 witch trials took place in Europe during those most climatically unstable of centuries, with around half of those trials ending in conviction and execution. …
Johann Weyer, the 16th-century Dutch physician who opposed witch-hunting, describes one woman being forced to admit essentially that she had brought about climate change: ‘[A] poor old woman was driven by torture to confess — as she was just about to be offered to Vulcan’s flames — that she had caused the incredible severity of the previous winter (1565), and the extreme cold, and the lasting ice.’ …
The modern era is coming out of the Enlightenment — uh oh:
Today, in our supposedly enlightened era, the rush to blame sinning and selfish individuals for ‘contrary winds’, or ‘weather of mass destruction’, as we call it now, is as intense as it was in the Little Ice Age. Weather witch-finding is alive and well.
Sure, we don’t threaten to hurl climate changers into ‘Vulcan’s flames’. We do not ‘thrawn’ them with rope, inducing a ‘pain most grievous’, as was done to poor Mrs Sampson. We don’t even say the word witch anymore. No, we prefer to speak of ‘climate criminals’.
Extinction Rebellion
‘Thirteen climate criminals who should be in jail’, as the headline in a radical magazine put it a few years ago. The list included everyone from Donald Trump to Big Oil CEOs to broadcasters like Jeremy Clarkson. Clarkson’s crime was a speechcrime — to suggest climate change is a ‘fiction’. For that, he and the other ‘real climate offenders’ should be imprisoned, we were told.
‘The internet is finally turning on celebrity “climate criminals”’, chirped a headline in a fashion magazine in July 2022. That piece had a distinctly witch-hunting vibe, arguing that ‘it is right to be outraged’ about these people ‘who are most responsible for the climate crisis’. We must ‘stop the climate criminals who are causing the worst emissions’, says a writer for the Guardian. One left-wing outlet calls for the jailing of ‘climate criminals’ on the basis that they played a part in conjuring ‘floods… fires, heatwaves and other extreme weather events’. These are the new Agnes Sampsons. …
There may not be witch trials in the 21st-century West, but there is certainly the dream of witch trials. Especially for those who have the temerity to use their tongues to deny the existence of manmade climate change. As one academic study asks: ‘Deceitful tongues: is climate-change denial a crime?’ This is Biblical language, literally. …
‘I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead’, environmentalist author Mark Lynas once said. Who are the ‘those’ in that chilling sentence? Climate-change deniers, of course, who will ‘one day have to answer for their crimes’, according to Lynas.
Paul Krugman of the New York Times describes climate-change denial as ‘a form of treason — treason against the planet’. The Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University openly ponders whether climate-change denial should be criminalised. Yes, ‘free speech is one of the most treasured rights in Western democracy’, it says in its discussion of a Norwegian professor’s suggestion that climate-change denial is a crime, but sometimes we make ‘exceptions for points of view which [may be regarded] as particularly destructive and evil’. Evil. What a telling word. As clear a confirmation as one could ask for that the discussion of climate change has been hyper-moralised, turned from a practical matter of how to improve our environment into a crusade against the malevolent forces whose deceitful tongues and activities allegedly wreak havoc upon the weather.
Of course, it isn’t only powerful ‘climate criminals’ who are held responsible for contrary weather today – we all are. …
Blasphemy:
Climate change, the idea that humankind is having a negative impact on the planet, and what’s more that there will be an extinction-level event if we do not radically change our behaviour, has become one of the most feverishly guarded orthodoxies of our age. You query it at your peril. …
Priests of old who were concerned about the influence of heresy sought to save men’s souls — today’s eco-priests, horrified by the heresy of climate denialism, endeavour to mend our minds. Not through rational discussion, though — we’ve already established that human beings behave ‘irrationally’ on climate change — but rather through the manipulation of language and thought. As a report from British think-tank the IPPR put it, ‘the task of climate-change agencies is not to persuade by rational argument but in effect to develop and nurture a new “common sense”’.
Once again, we encounter the Orwellian instincts of the new elites, where they seek to change language as a means of reshaping thought …
The phrase ‘climate change’ is on the way out now. The OED notes that between 2018 and 2020 the use of ‘climate crisis’ increased almost 20-fold in public discussion, while the use of ‘climate emergency’ increased 76-fold. …
Scientists, the UN and even protesters have played a role in pressuring the media to adopt more apocalyptic lingo: in 2019, Extinction Rebellion protesters camped outside the offices of the New York Times to demand that it use the phrase ‘climate emergency’ rather than ‘climate change’. …
Shaping public opinion through the manipulation of language is a key and terrifying theme of our times. In this case, the aim seems to be to force us all into the apocalyptic mindset, to coerce us into the realm of doom by making us think less about ‘climate change’ and more about climate chaos, climate disaster, even climate apocalypse — a term the New Yorker has used. Dissent becomes all but impossible when such fanatical language is made dominant. How can one call for calm in relation to something like ‘climate chaos’? How can one say ‘humanity can fix this’ in relation to something like ‘climate apocalypse’? An apocalypse is the complete and final destruction of the world. There’s no discussing that. There’s no ‘other view’ on that. …
On everything from climate change to gay marriage, we’re constantly told issues are ‘settled’ …We’re done. It’s over. Shut up. …
Where the frightened people of the Little Ice Age were expected to obey God’s diktats as expressed in the weather sermons of their local priest, now we’re expected to obediently nod along to the settled scientific opinion of the weather sermonisers of our era. …
Even the Royal Society, that great institution of Enlightenment, founded in 1660 to expand mankind’s scientific knowledge of the world, now pushes the line that ‘the science is settled’. A few years ago, it wrote to ExxonMobil demanding that it cut off funding to organisations that deny the truth of climate change. … The old Royal Society, the Enlightenment-era Royal Society, understood the unsettled nature of scientific inquiry. Indeed, its motto was Nullius in verba – on the word of no one. …
No criticism tolerated:
One of the most curious things about climate-change science is that it is one of the very few sciences that is fiercely protected from criticism and falsification. …
Everywhere science is picked apart, dismantled, relativised, often in a way that undermines the entire project of scientific inquiry and its important search for knowledge. But climate-change science is never socially deconstructed. It is sacralised, made utterly unimpeachable, put beyond the grubby questioning of both the layman and the expert. Despite the fact that it is clearly more socially constructed than most other sciences. Despite the fact that it clearly embodies the moral and political obsessions of the new elites. In particular, their lost faith in modernity and their urge to ‘shrink the human footprint’ — that is, rein in the era of industry. Every science is fashionably decried as the mere embodiment of man’s social priorities, except the one that most clearly is that.
This is because, when it comes to climate change, we’re not really talking about science. We’re talking about scientism. We’re talking about the use of science to fortify political agendas. We’re talking about the way the technocratic elites now marshal expertise in their fearful moral favour. …
We are rebels:
An essential task of the heretic is to bristle at orthodoxy, to be suspicious of consensus. …
Let us be eccentric on climate change, then. Let us refuse to bend the knee to the custom and rituals and self-flagellation of this religion that self-identifies as a science. And let us say the most unsayable thing of all – that modernity has not in fact destroyed the planet but rather has rendered it a more knowable and liveable place.
Knowledge has expanded, freedom has become a reality, life expectancy has increased, poverty levels have fallen and the threat posed by calamitous weather has been better contained as a result of our industrial exploitation of nature’s bounty to the end of creating a more prosperous world. Our footprint on the planet is a wonderful, civilising thing, not a stain to be erased. It might be blasphemy to say that now, but as George Bernard Shaw knew: ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies.’
