According to StarInsider, “The impact of climate change and global warming is hitting humanity hard. It’s also having grave implications for the natural world, not least Earth’s already fragile ecosystems. But if asked, how would you describe the consequences of climate change on everyday life?” Well, since you asked, things keep getting better, with rising population, rising per capita income, rising life expectancy and so on. But let me guess: that’s not the answer you were hoping for.

In case you hadn’t noticed yourself roasting, boiling and starving all at once, they helpfully inform us of, as their first item, “The affect on food”. We’re tempted to point to the effect on spelling and literacy. But let’s go with science instead:

“Climate change has a direct impact on food systems, and food security. It depresses global agricultural production, which, in turn, drives up food prices.”

Except um global agricultural production has not been depressed, apart from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which nobody blames on climate change. (After writing that sentence we checked, following the scientific method of prediction first, verification afterward, and as far as we can tell, to our surprise, nobody did, though certainly many people have said the invasion will make it worse and at least one person said climate change had made it harder to invade because the ground thawed sooner, sucking Russian tanks into the mud.)

Still, StarInsider chomps on: “Lower crop yields/ Lower and unstable yields of major crops can adversely affect the welfare of livestock. Ultimately, climate change can affect the way food is produced and the quality of our diets.”

Gosh. Less food can adversely affect the welfare of livestock? Call the Farm Bureau. But where are we actually seeing lower crop yields?

Oh. At the supermarket. See “Inevitably, rising food costs have a major impact on vulnerable households. But we are all affected.” And yes, food prices have been rising, due to inflation, albeit of the money supply not the mercury. But be assured, it’s real inside a computer:

“According to a joint report published by the European Central Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, continued global warming is projected to increase food prices between 0.6 and 3.2 percentage points by 2060.”

No price is too high to pay for that kind of precision. But if food prices rise 0.6 percentage points by 2060, so a third of a century from now if you’re still around your grocery bill will rise by slightly over half a cent on the dollar, it probably won’t be your biggest concern. Though it will rank ahead of the inability of most journalists to do math.

The piece also warns that “It’s a fact that higher temperatures are more frequent. Intense heat waves lead to heat-related disorders such as heat stroke, exhaustion, cramps, and rashes.” And does not mention that higher temperatures are not intense heat waves and indeed, the latter are not becoming more common.

We could go on and on, from the bit about more plagues to flooding, wildfires, “Eco-anxiety” and getting beaned by a red-hot kitchen sink. We won’t, partly because we understand that some people might respond with “Shaddap with StarInsider already, who reads that kind of stuff?” Actually somebody must. But the point is that climate alarmists are once again just making stuff up because the real world has let them down.

They do not say hang on, you’re describing effects, or affects, the IPCC warns might arise from climate change decades from now rather than ones it claims are already here. They shriek that:

“Wildfires, hurricanes and heat: The U.S. is getting hit by extreme weather from all sides/ Climate scientists say it’s an all-too-real look at how global warming increases the risks – and consequences – of the deadly events.”

It might seem pedantic to require actual coherent facts. But when, for instance, the New York Times “Climate Forward” emails us that “Global climate efforts still aren’t enough to avoid calamity, report says” they’re talking, plausibly or not, about something that is going to happen, not something that is happening or happened back when it was predicted, or described, 10 or 20 years ago.

For instance Canadian megapundit Jeffrey Simpson on January 27, 2007: “Climate-change scoffers are now as rare as defenders of the invasion of Iraq. Reasonable people, in Canada and abroad, can differ over the means to combat the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that produce climatic changes, but only a dwindling few now deny changes are occurring – and that more will occur, with mostly negative effects.” Or his home newspaper, the Globe & Mail, in 2013:

“Denial is no longer an option, UN panel says… the frequency and severity of extreme weather in recent years points to new instabilities in the global patterns of ocean currents and atmospheric jet streams. More and worse weather extremes can be expected.”

So they had it both already here and coming soon, a common habit. And alarmists today say the same sort of stuff as StarInsider, and as they and their ilk were saying a decade ago and more, in a random manner with regard to content and timing that makes them hard to pin down and refute.

The Pope, for instance, recently claimed that “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.” And we are tempted to chant “Block that metaphor” since if it’s collapsing it is not nearing the breaking point, let alone perhaps doing so, it has passed it. But the problem isn’t the analogy, it’s the mental collapse behind it.

Thus alarmists write columns starting:

“There is nothing the modern world sees more clearly than a dollar figure. But whenever anyone tries to put an actual price on the damages from global warming – to calibrate a carbon tax, assess past responsibility or aid in litigation against fossil-fuel malefactors – the numbers are almost too much to process.”

And as you plow through talk of reparations and the social cost of carbon and how “an oil well decommissioned three decades ago may still be doing climate damage three centuries from now” you realize you have no idea whether the author is talking about damages now or damages in 2050 or damages in 2250… because he doesn’t either.

Activists also say stuff like “it’s time for us to [realise] we are being cooked” as if a person might plausibly overlook such a development because they were busy reading about, say, celebrity breakups. It’s one thing to say we might be in the soup if we don’t cut carbon now, and quite another to rave that “the era of global boiling has arrived” when it’s 15°C outside.