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Note: Someone said that my satires were “lies” - but they are not meant to be news. Satire is a literary and artistic form that uses humour, irony, and exaggeration to critique human folly, societal norms, or political systems. Originating in ancient Rome with figures like Horace and Juvenal, it aims to provoke thought, spark change, or entertain by exposing contradictions. Irish writer Johnathon Swift wrote a famous piece, “A Modest Proposal”, about eating Irish babies; he was not serious and didn’t heat the oven.
I have an Irish passport, but I am about as Irish as Lucky Charms.
Unlike lies, satire is rooted in truth. It amplifies flaws or absurdities to make them unmistakable, often mirroring society’s hypocrisies and injustices.
Hypocrisy is a steady drizzle that turns the flames of collectivist zeal into red embers.
Soon, you have grey coals when believers realise that the ringleaders or their preachers look like performers reading from a script that they’ve long since stopped believing.
We saw this recently when a desperate Justin Trudeau decided that the C02 emissions from home heating oil were magically inversely correlated to the electoral sensitivity of Maritime ridings.
Climate change hellfire and brimstone isn’t the first religious movement to cool off.
Take Liberal Protestantism; its slow decline started in the 1950s when churchgoers began to suspect that their ministers—those supposedly devout keepers of the faith—didn’t buy into much that was recognisably biblical.
And Communism? That glorious utopia of the workers? It burned hot for a while until the proletariat cottoned on to the fact that their so-called comrades were less interested in equality and more interested in a corner office and a dacha.
Eventually, even true believers run out of patience.
There are always the sects and cults, those earnest little hubs of purity and sacrifice; in Canada, it’s Truanon. That is, of course, until the ascetic leader—so humble, so virtuous—turns out to have a taste for private jets, Swiss bank accounts, and other people’s spouses.
The problem isn’t the dream itself; it’s the fact that the dream’s biggest cheerleaders can’t seem to stop waking up in five-star hotels after a night spent belting out horrific covers of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody while they happily and drunkenly run up their tab on the government credit card.
Nothing kills a movement faster than realising the emperor has no clothes but still has an offshore investment portfolio and a penchant for bespoke suits. And who can blame the followers when they walk away?
So, the next time someone promises to lead you to a brave new world, check if their first-class ticket is booked for somewhere else entirely.
For thirty glorious years, daring to question the gospel of climate catastrophe made you a heretic of the highest order—a crank, a “climate denier,” - nothing like a bit of a holocaust denial vibe to buttress your defamatory rhetorical retaining wall.
If you so much as raised an eyebrow at the idea that life on Earth teetered on the brink of fiery doom, you were banished to the intellectual wilderness, shunned as someone who kept bringing a shovel to the “Shut The Hell Up!” foundation of settled science.
The notion that an entire academic discipline—climate science, in this case—might have succumbed to groupthink and the seductive lure of self-flattery?
Of course, note that would never happen except with eugenics and the relentless pooh-poohing of the COVID lab link theory, not to mention academic enthusiasm for Stalin, Mao’s cultural revolution and that early simping for Nazisim in the German universities.
“Hey Wolfgang, wo sind die jüdischen Professoren, sind sie weggegangen?
Ich weiß nicht, Dieter, ich habe es nicht bemerkt, ich bin beschäftigt, das neue Scorpions-Album zu hören.”
(Translation: Hey Wolfgang, where are the Jewish professors, did they leave? I don't know, Dieter, I did not notice. I am busy listening to the new Scorpions album.)
Yes, we have been here before; different song, same shitty band.
Pointing out the whiff of conformity in all this apocalyptic chatter was tantamount to shamelessly carrying a bag of coal when you went to the confessional to see Father Guilbeault.
And yet, here we are. Despite three decades of moral preening and doomsday sermons, vast swathes of the orthodoxy remain as unquestioned as ever.
But often, for us commoners - it’s been easier to shout along with the mob than to ask if they’ve checked their maths.
Of course, none of this is to say that the planet isn’t warming, cooling, or doing something moderately inconvenient.
But one might dare to wonder—just quietly, in case the pitchforks are nearby—whether the endless prophecies of imminent doom owe as much to academic careerism, the pure joy of moral preening and lust for government grants and corporate pork as much as they do to any sincere thermometer panic.
As H.L. Mencken dryly noted, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.” Mencken was a bit of a eugenist but was usually on point.
This brings us to Vaclav Smil, the distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba, whose book The Way the World Works offers a sobering perspective on the complexity of climate adaptation. Smil dismantles the notion of rapid systemic change with his characteristic clarity, observing,
“The reality is that energy transitions have historically taken decades, even centuries, to unfold. Expecting otherwise is wishful thinking, not strategy.”
The alternative title to his book was reportedly “Net Zero My Ass,” but that title rejected by the editors.
Smil underscores that the sheer scale of our reliance on fossil fuels—powering nearly every aspect of modern life—makes overnight transitions unlikely and impossible without catastrophic consequences. He writes, “Our dependency on high-density, readily available energy sources is so deeply entrenched that any significant disruption would destabilise global systems, from food production to transportation.”
Even as policymakers champion green energy as the panacea, Smil cautions against overestimating its immediate impact. “Solar and wind energy have a role to play,” he acknowledges, “but they cannot shoulder the burden of replacing fossil fuels entirely, at least not within the timeframes demanded by activists.”
Instead, Smil argues for pragmatic solutions that account for the glacial pace of energy infrastructure overhaul and the inertia of societal systems.
What has convinced ordinary people that the doomsayers are full of false zeal isn’t a complex interpretation of climate figures or a sudden collective dive into statistical analysis. No, it’s something far simpler: the growing, unavoidable realisation that even the doomsayers themselves don’t believe a word they’re saying.
The priest has been caught at the whore house too often.
Think about it—when was the last time you saw one of these climate prophets live as though they believed the apocalypse was nigh?
Private jets ferry them to climate summits where they sip champagne and lecture the rest of us about shrinking our “carbon footprints.”
Their sprawling seaside mansions don’t count as flood risks, and their entourages of SUVs are simply a necessary evil for saving the world.
George Bernard Shaw once said, “He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything - that points clearly to a political career.”
The hypocrisy is so thick and clumpy you couldn’t spread it on toast without putting a hole in the crust. The same people insisting you trade in your gas stove for a wind-powered wok are lounging on yachts the size of small nations. They aren’t worried about rising seas but about running out of caviar.
As George Orwell observed, “The war is not meant to be won; it is meant to be continuous.” Or, in this case, the climate war isn’t meant to be solved—it’s meant to keep the technocrats in charge.
Ordinary people may not have PhDs, but they know how to spot a con, just like they know that Manchester United defender ripping out sod in agony is soon to rise from his near-death experience.
If someone genuinely thought the world's end was imminent, you’d expect them to act accordingly—selling their cars, planting their gardens, maybe even moving inland. Instead, they hold glamorous galas, pen bestselling books, and call for policies that inconvenience everyone except themselves.
As H.L. Mencken dryly noted, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
In truth, the palpable sense of dishonesty has done more to discredit the climate agenda than any counterargument ever could. You don’t need to debate the models when the supposed experts hide behind their Potemkin enviro-storefront facades.
Ordinary people aren’t stupid; they know when they’re being played.
So here we are, with ordinary people rolling their eyes as yet another red-hot warning hits the headlines, knowing full well that the loudest voices will soon be found boarding their next first-class flight to lecture us on sustainability.
Or, like some of my colleagues, they will consciously shout at me about my subconscious bias.
So, congratulations if you still question, doubt, and refuse to genuflect before the altar of impending catastrophe. Sticking your head above the parapet takes real gall when so many dig bunkers for a rudely late apocalypse.
Unlike the hard sciences, where results are ruthlessly indifferent to the researcher’s politics, climate science specialises in translating inscrutable data into foreboding conclusions. Keep throwing worst-case scenarios into your new app, the oddly named “If you warm up your car, you’re Lucifer’s bum buddy.”
Somehow, it always managed to affirm that the only solution to our impending planetary doom was—you guessed it—doing exactly what those credentialed technocrats had been lobbying for all along.
George Orwell was on to something when he said, “Power is not a means; it is an end.”
The whole setup had the feel of a cosmic joke, one where the punchline involved redistributing wealth, regulating the plebs, and tossing out phrases like “the science is settled” with all the zeal of those fresh-faced kids at Hitler’s Aryan Youth Revival meetings.
What a marvellous coincidence that saving the planet required precisely the same policies the champagne socialists had been demanding for decades.
You might have noticed the uncanny resemblance to certain softer social sciences if you squinted hard enough. This kind reliably churns out conclusions tailor-made to flatter the biases of their patrons. But where sociology merely helped rationalise bad policy, climate science promised a moral crusade, complete with villains (carbon emitters), saints (green energy tycoons), and a priestly class of experts who alone could interpret the sacred data.
The saintly Bill Gates suggested banning commercial air travel right after he purchased a private jet manufacturer.
Though tragically unlettered in the sacred texts of peer-reviewed journals, the ordinary person was not entirely foolish to approach the grand spectacle of climate science with a touch of scepticism. After all, when someone comes bearing apocalyptic predictions that align with their political wish list, only the truly naïve fail to smell the faint whiff of opportunism.
As the ever-sharp Thomas Sowell once said, “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
It reminds me of my university. According to my lawyer, who is more in the know than I on what those beastly lawyers charge the state - the university has spent $400K on a few people’s private hankering to get me fired because I called Nazis Hamas. Sorry, Hamas Nazis. One of the two. Whatever.
Sweet deal if you can get students to pony up a bit of their tuition to fund your private vendetta; sorry, Indigenous kids, no scholarships for you, but didn’t you hear the empathy in my voice as I read the land acknowledgement and put that bit of Indigenous art under the staircase next to the boxes of unused Covid masks?
Sorry, I wasn’t going to bring that up.
And oh, the climate data! The sheer, dizzying immensity of it all—the graphs, the models, the projections, the endless gigabytes of raw information, all meticulously crunched and, naturally, interpreted correctly every single time.
Who could doubt the infallibility of this enterprise? Certainly not the media champions, who swallowed every dire prediction without a burp. It’s as if the entire operation were built on the assumption that the average Joe would be too busy mowing his lawn to ask inconvenient questions like, “How do you model the climate for the next century when you can’t reliably predict the weather next Thursday?”
How does tree ring data from 20,000 years ago give you temperatures as accurate as that home thermometer you just got at Costco?
The sceptics, of course, were dismissed with the kind of sneering contempt usually reserved for flat-earthers and people who microwave fish at work.
Bertrand Russell quipped, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” I think so. I’m not sure. Maybe he was right.
And in this case, the certainties flowed like champagne at a climate summit, where private jets lined the tarmac in a bright display of carbon-neutral hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, the ordinary person sat at home contemplating the sheer hubris of it all. Imagine the gall of claiming to understand the present climate and its trajectory over the next 100 years—all based on models riddled with assumptions that would make a Vegas bookie blush.
Mencken again says it best, “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
But, of course, the models were never wrong. If the planet didn’t heat up as fast as expected, it was merely a “pause.” If the ice caps didn’t melt on schedule, it was “unexpected variability.” The science, as always, remained “settled.”
And so, the ordinary person, lacking a PhD but armed with a healthy dose of common sense, continued to raise an eyebrow.
He’d heard it all before—from the population bomb to acid rain to Y2K—and was wise enough to know that those who loudly proclaim the end of the world are usually just hoping to run it.
And we people who pump our own gas at the corner station need to shut our festering gobs, for in a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act“1
Were scientists so confident that they’d mastered the intricate ballet of sunbeams in the upper atmosphere? That they could gauge, with unerring precision, the temperature of roughly 200 million square miles of Earth’s surface—every desert, jungle, and ocean accounted for?
Or had they somehow cracked the code for comparing today’s thermometer readings with those from 50, 100, 1,000, or even 5,000 years ago, when humanity’s most advanced technology was that super-sharp rock that your ancestral sister and her husband/brother found by the river?
Oh, but their confidence didn’t stop there! Not only had they deciphered these impossibly complex systems, but they also claimed to know exactly which political and economic measures would stave off the apocalypse.
The chutzpah of it all. Here were the self-proclaimed sages of the climate, standing atop their mountains of data like modern-day prophets, proclaiming that they alone had seen the truth.
Their prescriptions aligned perfectly with their preexisting ideological leanings—higher taxes, more regulation, and greater deference to the enlightened technocrats.
As C.S. Lewis once observed, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
As Friedrich Hayek warned, “The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.”
Swap out “economics” for “climate science”, and you’ve got the greasy climate indicators nicely packaged.
Economic medicine was always made with a big old spoonful of surrender to the people making the predictions.
George Orwell put it, “The object of power is power,” and climate crusaders seem keen on reminding us of that fact.
But don’t say that too loud; such heresy is akin to walking into a revival meeting and asking if anyone’s seen this so-called “God.”
You’ll be met with gasps and righteous indignation, and someone might stab you with one of those miniature golf pencils they used to leave in the slots at the back of the pew to help people write their contributions on the little contribution envelopes.
The evidence, you see, doesn’t scream “cataclysm.” Some credible voices even suggest we might cope with a warmer world just fine, provided we don’t destroy our economies and freedoms trying to outsmart the weather.
But no, we’re told, the only way to avoid Armageddon is to “radically rearrange” human life—which, funnily enough, always translates to rearranging your life, not theirs.
Let’s not forget the impressive track record of these prophets of doom. The “population bomb” was supposed to have detonated by now; mass starvation was a given, and coastal cities should be covered in zebra mussels.
Yet here we are—fatter, richer, and more urbanised than ever. As H.L. Mencken aptly said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Please, Mark Carney and Steven Guilbeault, lead us to safety. “We are lost, mister. Help us.”
We are supposed to supplicate like Oliver, asking for some more gruel.
The inconvenient truth is this: human civilisation has thrived through ice ages, medieval warm periods, plagues, famines, and all-natural and self-inflicted disasters. But now we’re to believe that a slightly warmer climate—one that lengthens growing seasons, reduces heating bills, and makes the odd ski slope a little slushy—is the end of the world as we know it.
A 2015 study in The Lancet analyzing data from 13 countries found that cold-related deaths outnumber heat-related deaths by about 17 to 1. Thus, climate change has substantially driven reductions in cold deaths to outweigh increases in heat deaths.
But by the exhortations of alarmists like David Suzuki - as he pontificates outside one of his mansions - it might seem that even if you live in Winnipeg, you can’t help but trip over a few overheated carcasses as you walk to 7-Eleven, even as you pull up your collar in the January cold.
Or do we need to hear from a world-renowned meteorologist, Leonardo DiCaprio?
In 2015, while filming “The Revenant” in Alberta, the actor experienced a sudden warm wind that melted snow and attributed it to climate change. However, any Albertan who had spent a winter in that province knew it was a “Chinook,” a natural warm, dry wind common in the region.
But our elite has no shame: flying over your head in private jets, living in seaside palaces, and demanding you trade your car for a bike while they demand tax breaks for their eco-friendly yachts.
If this is what saving the world looks like, it’s no wonder many people suspect the whole thing is less about survival and more about control.
The climate lobby can wave away these awkward questions if it likes—nothing like a good report or study to dazzle the masses—but let’s not kid ourselves: all the data in the world weighs little against the overwhelming stench of insincerity.
If these activists truly believed their predictions of impending global mayhem, you’d think they’d be falling over themselves to champion zero-emission nuclear power.
But, strangely enough, they don’t. Perhaps uranium isn’t as photogenic as a wind turbine or as profitable as a carbon tax.
And then there’s the annual spectacle of the U.N. General Assembly, where the transnational elite gathers each September for a hectoring contest. The irony is almost too rich to stomach as they clog Manhattan’s streets for a week with an armada of privately chartered SUVs.
Mencken nailed it, “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it.”
The contradictions are impossible to ignore. For all their shrieking about the climate apocalypse, the same people demanding that you stop driving your car and switch to yoghurt from fart-free corn-munching cows seem completely unwilling to give up their private jets, beachfront mansions, or motorcades.
You’d almost think they didn’t believe their warnings.
And nuclear power? Well, that’s the elephant in the room—or perhaps the reactor in the corner. If the crisis is as dire as advertised, wouldn’t an instant embrace of clean, reliable, zero-emission nuclear energy be the obvious choice?
But didn’t Los Angeles burst into flames? Ah, California—the land run by people who profess, with the fervour of televangelists, that climate change is an existential threat to civilisation. Yet here we are, watching thousands of homes reduced to ash by fires spread by a seasonal wind so predictable it has a name.
Just as in Jasper, AB, maybe letting the forests get choked up with dry tinder wasn’t the brightest move.
