November 2021: Climate derangement syndrome

Brendan O'Neill. Climate derangement syndrome. Spiked. 5 November 2021.

Climate change is going to be worse than the Holocaust. It will give rise to a global epidemic of gang rape. There’ll be murder, war, slaughter. Your friends will die. Your children, too. The carbon-fuelled heating of the planet will bring ‘human life as we know it’ crashing to a violent, fiery end. It will be nothing less than doomsday.

These are just some of the hysterical claims that have been made in the discussion around COP26. As world leaders private-jetted their way to Glasgow for the latest UN gabfest on how to save the planet from mankind’s dirt, hubris and avarice, there was a severe outbreak of Climate Derangement Syndrome. Prime ministers, bishops, princes and noisy greens all tried to outdo each other with their apocalyptic warnings. It has been a grim competition of catastrophes, an orgy of hyperbolic prophecies that wouldn’t look out of place in the Book of Revelation.

* * * * *

Climate Derangement Syndrome is at root a revolt against modernity. It is a reactionary, Romantic, nostalgic cry of angst against the incredible world of production and consumption mankind has created over the past 200 years. This is why some at COP26 openly denounced the Industrial Revolution. First came Greta Thunberg, the prophetess of doom of contemporary environmentalism. She angrily denounced the British government as ‘climate villains’. The UK, she said, is largely responsible for the horrors of climate change – this ‘more or less… started in the UK since that’s where the Industrial Revolution started, [where] we started to burn coal’.

Shamefully, Boris Johnson echoed Greta’s regressive brickbats against the Industrial Revolution. In his COP speech he pointed out that Glasgow was the place where the steam engine, ‘produced by burning coal’, was born. That, he said, was ‘the doomsday machine’ that led us to the dire predicament we find ourselves in now.