Climate alarmists might not get a big laugh out of the old Soviet joke about what to do if the nuclear attack sirens sounded, which was wrap yourself in a winding sheet and walk slowly to the cemetery? “Why slowly?” “To avoid causing panic.” But many former global-warming sirens are now sauntering away from their previous positions lest sprinting should give rise to anxiety or even recriminations. Others, hardier souls perhaps, hold their ground, insisting that they were right all along and the problem was just messaging. Thus Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post writes that “As the world spins into what appears to be a new global order, one of the dominant movements of the past half century has been pushed to the sidelines. Once billed as the threat that could destroy much of life on Earth, climate change driven by human consumption of fossil fuels has moved to the back-burner of national and global policy-making.” And then he cites a Telegraph piece (strangely, it’s the second of two in a stack to which that link points) by “noted environmental academic Christian Dunn” of Bangor University in Wales, UK, who admits that “a harder truth is that those of us who work on environmental issues have helped to create the problem ourselves.” How, by promoting theories that turned out to be costly and untrue? No, Dunn says languidly, by telling people how bad they were. If only they’d presented apocalyptic doom in a more cheerful tone lest sowing panic cause a ruckus.

As Matt Ridley wrote in December in The Spectator:

“Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent COP summit in Belém, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to pledge a cut in fossil fuels, COP achieved less than nothing, the venue caught fire, the air-conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper. Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he conceded that global warming ‘will not lead to humanity’s demise,’ after he closed the policy and advocacy office of his climate philanthropy group is just the latest nail in the coffin.”

So what to do? Come clean, or tiptoe away? As Ridley adds:

“According to analysis by the Washington Post, it is not just Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democratic party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president last year.”

But ceasing to talk about it isn’t exactly making amends for having yelled about it. Which Dunn admits he and his ilk did. Right after that bit about that “harder truth” Dunn says:

“For years, we have led with catastrophe. We have told people that saving the planet means giving things up: cheaper food, warm homes, family holidays abroad, cars, and choice. We have moralized, shamed, fined, taxed and scolded. And then we have acted surprised when large sections of the public decided they wanted no part of it.”

But this attitude rather misses the point. When Churchill promised the British people “blood, toil, sweat and tears” they didn’t decide they wanted no part of it. They kept calm and carried on, because they believed the crisis was real. As it was.

Here the issue is that it’s not. And Dunn regrettably avoids any such admission. Instead he deplores the failure of the communication strategy:

“Environmental scientists like me often say the climate and nature crises are fundamental to how our society functions. We are not wrong. But our messaging is increasingly ineffective – because while most people accept some kind of action is needed, they baulk at being told the solution is a lifetime of hairshirt-style misery…. This requires a change in tone: from negative to positive. We need to stop thinking like environmental scientists and instead think more like advertising executives. Instead of selling environmental action as sacrifice, we should sell it as improvement.”

What, as in the Blitz may knock your house down but it was ugly anyway? It won’t do. If their diagnosis was, and is, that fixing the crisis requires of lifetime of hairshirt-style misery there’s no positive way to spin it. Dying the hair pink or light blue, or indeed emerald green, won’t help. And claiming it’s gain when it’s pain just won’t fool people… and increasingly doesn’t. As Anthony De Luca-Baratta wrote in the National Post in December:

“Canadians could afford to pursue abstract environmental goals when things were going relatively well. The glow of green virtue was enticing when housing was relatively affordable, inflation was a non-issue, and the Canadian middle class was, as the New York Times suggested in April 2014, the most affluent on the planet. To read that New York Times story today is to rediscover an alien world.”

And if the people who preached a green energy transition that would make us all clean, wealthy and sleek were so wrong about both the environmental and economic aspects, why should we believe them on almost anything now, especially those two?

Speaking of alien worlds, Climate Home News grimly claimed that same month that:

“The world that is today marking 10 years since the Paris Agreement was adopted feels like a very different place. Gone is the sense of euphoria, as divisions between countries that want to keep the polluting status quo clash with those trying to forge a greener future.”

But the issue isn’t people wedded to the “polluting status quo” because they are stupid and like wallowing in filth. It’s that this “greener future” has lost credibility because of results not rhetoric.

The real and glaring problem with climate alarmism, the one so many like Bill Gates are tiptoeing away from, is that the whole theory is wrong and therefore so are its predictions and its prescriptions. The Canadian government may pump out press releases full of rhetoric like:

“To adapt and prepare for the weather conditions that we can expect with our changing climate, Canadians need accurate, evidence-based information.”

But it doesn’t mean their claims of weirder weather including “extreme precipitation” are correct… or that people won’t at some point notice that they’re not.

Thus Peter Savodnik recently wrote in “Revenge of the Climate Realists” in The Free Press about how academics like Roger Pielke Jr. and Judith Curry had been driven from academia and subjected to McCarthyite political inquisitions for denying the looming climate apocalypse. And then about how many formerly shrill voices were trying to walk back the tone if not the content.

It may not be hot news that a conference in Prague organized by Clintel last fall “declares and affirms that the imagined and imaginary ‘climate emergency’ is at an end”. But it is hot news that more and more people are saying so, or not saying “NOOOOO!” when someone else does. And why? Savodnik argues that:

“The reassessment was driven by several factors – starting with the all-important fact that we were still here.”

Indeed. And it’s hard to ignore. (In the first episode of Star Trek: The Lost Generation an elderly Dr. McCoy asks irritably “What’s so d*&^ed troubling about not having died?” But here it is.)

When we argued back in June, in a video “The End Of Alarmism”, that climate alarmism is about to collapse in its moment of apparent triumph it might have seemed fatuously optimistic, not a failing we’re often accused of. But we invoked the history of science, and the theories of Thomas Kuhn about the nature of scientific revolutions, to argue that the CO2-is-cooking-Earth theory seemed compelling in the 1980s yet ran out of steam so quickly, and was itself about cooked not because its predictions of catastrophe weren’t accompanied by perky muzak but because they were wrong.

It’s not about the spin. It’s about the logic. In the immortal title of Richard Weaver’s 1964 book, “Ideas Have Consequences”. They have consequences for how people behave, and they have those consequences because they have consequences for what people expect, for what other ideas they hold, and for what decisions they make based on what those ideas tell them is desirable, likely or both. And if the ideas are wrong, the decisions bring pain not gain and eventually people revisit the ideas.

Even ones who don’t want to admit error lest it lead to a stampede.