Sheep-like Behaviour

 In the past ten years, we've suffered no fewer than four international social manias: the transgender craze, #MeToo, Covid lockdowns, and post-Floydian Black Lives Matter. Having accelerated from scientific hypothesis to fever dream, climate change apocalypticism now displays all the markers of another mania.

Suddenly everyone thinks the same thing. The media, politicians, celebrities, the arts - they're all in tell-tale accord. No dissent is allowed, and the few kooks who differ are denounced as murderous heretics who must be silenced or imprisoned. There is only one "truth". Ironically, governed by an extreme, emotive, absolute "truth", some politicians, journos and experts just start making things up.

Sheep
Richard Ansdell (1815-1885) (Follower of)
Photo Credit: Grundy Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-SA]

The governor of Hawaii claimed that thanks to climate change Maui was subject to a "fire hurricane". There's no such thing as a "fire hurricane".

We're contriving hugely consequential policies in a state of hysteria. Maybe if we don't stop burning gas, oil and coal humanity is doomed, but in any case we need to calm down, as well as to engage productively with sceptical perspectives. By 2030, will our electrical grids support the number of electrical vehicles for which the US and UK governments are currently legislating? No? Back to the drawing board, then. These are highly technical questions, and wrong answers at scale could bring on catastrophe of a different kind. In the service of getting a grip, not blaming every wildfire, cloudburst, and hailstorm in the world on "climate change" would be a start.

(Lionel Shriver, The Times, 2023.)

Good journalists don't cite vague collectives as sources, as in: "Scientists say". They should name the scientists and their claims with data - with evidence. Where do you go for information on climate change? Certainly not politicians or celebrities or much of the media. Go to where the expertise is - that is the scientists who are studying the problem.