Apparently “Massive wildfires exposing millions to toxic smoke, drought shrivelling crops and key waterways, destructive storms supercharged by record ocean temperatures – in the last year the world has had a taste of what to expect with warming of 1.5C.” So shrieks AFP, whose journalists do not seems to be tasked with checking whether there were an unusual number of wildfires, crop failures, major storms or anything else in 2023. Or whether we’re already experiencing disaster, are about to, or might at some point soon. Indeed the story goes on to say that the alleged “12 consecutive months of temperatures 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the pre-industrial era… does not signal a breach of the more ambitious limit agreed by countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement – because that is measured as an average over two decades.” And yet the disasters we were told would happen if we did breach Paris are happening now even though we didn’t. It’s how settled science works.

Of course alarmists are very good at having their cake and eating it too, including having security protect them while they break the law at protests. In this case “Severe climate impacts are already visible around the world and would be amplified once the 1.5C threshold is reached.” So vanilla apocalypse now, hot pepper apocalypse later.

Thus in December we were warned by The Daily Digest that in addition to the usual list of cliches if it got warmer “You should also worry about ancient diseases and zombie fires”. They didn’t claim they were already here… although in fact most infectious diseases have been with us for millennia and “zombie fires”, ones that burn underground after the visible fire is out, are also very old news. The same publication hollered in late January that “If we don't cut emissions by 50% in 7 years we are doomed”. Which we won’t, and we’re not. But it drives views.

Over at Euronews a story even noted that:

“The United Nations has issued its predictions for 2024… ‘The unfolding climate crisis and extreme weather events will undermine agricultural output and tourism, while geopolitical instability will continue to adversely impact several subregions … especially the Sahel and North Africa,’ the World Economic Situation and Prospects 2024 report says.”

Which is very odd since anyone who thinks past geopolitical instability in the Sahel and North Africa will be due to some future crisis doesn’t understand what cause and effect means. But in any case the “unfolding climate crisis” is actually a kind of mental dodge, because it means it was already happening, is happening now and is going to happen. As for extreme weather events, the North African “breadbasket” of the Roman Empire turning into the current desert strikes us as pretty extreme. But it happened nearly two thousand years ago as the planet, um, cooled.

The rest of the AFP piece reads as though ChatGPT had written it, including lines like:

“Coral reefs – ecosystems that provide habitat for an immense array of marine life and protect coastlines – are projected to decline 70 to 90 percent in a world that has warmed 1.5C.”

Oh really? Corals evolved in a warmer world, flourish in the warmest parts of the world today, and are actually doing really well in a world supposedly already 1.2C warmer than these fabled “pre-industrial times”, which makes it hard for a rational person to believe another 0.3C would wipe out 90% of them. If a rational person could be found.