Michael Mann continues his slide into hysteria with a claim that “Warming today is hundreds of times faster than any warming in geological history.” And the big problem here is not that it’s untrue, though it is, the warming at the end of the Younger Dryas having been faster. Nor is the big problem that “geological history” relies on proxies far too imprecise to have the slightest idea what temperature changes might have happened on the scale of a century or two, though it does. The big problem is that it’s insolently ridiculous. The supposed warming since 1850 has been less than 1.5°C, thus under one degree per century. So if that pace were “hundreds of times faster” than anything in “geological history” it would have to mean it has never, ever, ever warmed on Earth by as much as 0.015°C in any century since, well, to be charitable, the Cambrian Explosion of multicelled life some 560 million years ago. Which is such obvious rubbish that, naturally, the Harvard Gazette fawned all over him for saying it.

In Mann’s talk he also said “I push back on doomism because I don’t think it’s justified by the science, and I think it potentially leads us down a path of inaction”. Though he evidently doesn’t push back too hard, because so many alarmists have said so many times that we had just 10 years to take decisive action (and somehow still are saying it) that the audience might well conclude that it was now too late and sink into paralysis.

As much of it apparently has. Climate depression is a real phenomenon, according to its enablers, especially among the oh-so-sensitive youth of today, too sad even to holler “How dare you?” And no wonder, with story after story telling you that by 2050 everything from Buckingham Palace to the U.S. Congress to Capetown will be under water. (Though as with audiences in the film Independence Day who cheered when aliens blasted the White House, the prospect of Congress getting the Augean Stable treatment might actually strike normal people as positive.)

Publications like National Geographic have even taken to running features like “Helping kids deal with climate anxiety” that say things like:

“Eco-anxiety isn’t a clinical diagnosis but a term many are using to describe negative emotions associated with the perception of climate change. ‘In general, younger people do tend to experience more of it,’ says Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist at the College of Wooster, who studies how climate change impacts mental health. ‘I think one of the reasons is simply that they're going to be faced with more of the effects than older generations.’”

In short, they’re not just terrified, they’re right to be according to people with jobs like “conservation psychologist.”

As Bjorn Lomborg recently complained, “Because of exaggerated climate alarmism, more than 10 million American children are now scared witless/ In reality, climate impact in half a century is equivalent to 0.2-2% lost income”. But good luck making it stop.

Politicians holler “The urgency of the climate and nature emergency cannot be overstated” as they prepare utterly to transform our way of life to save us from the dreaded carbon. And left-wing media relentlessly shriek things like:

“Last year was the hottest on record, and scientists worry this year will be worse. Thunderstorms in Europe destroyed €9.1 billion in assets, while the US also experienced twenty-eight separate weather and climate disasters throughout 2023 costing at least $1bn a piece. Again, the most ever. It’s not hard to see a trend. If we don’t avert an impending climate crisis over the next 26 years, a quarter million more people will die each year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress. Nearly every child on earth – over 2 billion children – will face more frequent heatwaves which put them at greater health risk, while shocks from extreme weather and climate-related conflict displace hundreds of millions from their homes. We’re falling into a burning ring of fire. 26 years is not some far-off future world. Most people have been on the planet for more time already. By 2050, our growing and strained population will demand 35%-56% more food from crops that will yield dramatically less and be less dense in key nutrients. On top of that, 23%-62% more people will be severely stunted, with their physical and mental potential irreversibly held back.”

You might be tempted to think the stunting of mental capacity is already well underway. And to berate alarmists for manipulative exaggeration. But no. According to Mann it is not they who are sowing panic. It’s the evil lying plotters: “And there are bad actors today who are fanning the flames of climate doomism because they understand that it takes those who are most likely to be on the front lines, advocating for change, and pushes them to the sidelines, which is where polluters and petrostates want them.” See it’s this vast right-wing conspiracy and only he can save personkind.

Mann has clearly succumbed to grandiosity especially following his grotesque court victory over Mark Steyn. He recently accused Elon Musk of criminal behaviour and called Twitter a monopoly that the government must censor. And the less he listens to critics, the less he checks his words on the way out of his mouth to make sure they are not preposterous. And thus a heated competition is arising as to whether his scientific or political pronouncements can discredit him faster.