Commentary
The COP26 conference—which Prince Charles has dubbed the “
last chance saloon” for the world—continues to grind on in Glasgow, Scotland. Many of the glitterati have now left in their carbon dioxide-spewing private jets, which numbered
around 400, including Air Force One.
Highlights so far have included President
Joe Biden falling asleep, maybe due to jet lag or the trauma of having been photographed by a naked
Scotsman on the journey in or just because he was bored. Greenhouse gas girl
Greta Thunberg showed the world she’s now a mature, articulate 18-year-old who has swapped her pig-tail for attitude, telling the protestors outside the conference: “No more blah, blah, blah. No more whatever the [expletive] they are doing inside there.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us just how devastating a global cross-border threat can be,“ he said. ”Climate change and biodiversity are no different. In fact, they pose an even greater existential threat, to the extent that we have to put ourselves on what might be called a war-like footing.”
The future King Charles III also mentioned the need for a “vast military-style campaign,” which raised some eyebrows. Was he talking about invading China? After all, that’s where COVID-19 came from, and it produces more carbon dioxide emissions than any other country. But is biodiversity really an existential threat, your royal highness?
A big agreement was reached on
methane reduction and more cash has been pledged, but then the $100 billion that was pledged to poorer countries in the Paris Accord of 2015 still hasn’t been paid.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened British companies that they'll have to publish their low carbon plans by 2023 or face public condemnation. But even if the UK meets its 2050 net-zero target at an
enormous cost, this will only reduce global carbon dioxide levels by 0.5 percent per annum—very small potatoes.
U.N. climate change conferences such as COP26 Glasgow have become enormous events. “
The First Earth Summit,” as it was then called, was held in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1972. That same year, the British pioneer of climate change studies,
professor Hubert Lamb, founded the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Lamb believed that between the 10th and 13th centuries, the North Atlantic region experienced a warmer climate than the present. Prevailing temperatures at time “approached the level of the warmest of
post-glacial times,” he claimed.
During this Medieval Warm Period, Lamb estimated that average summer temperatures in the UK and central Europe were 0.7–1.4 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. This allowed the expansion of Norse culture across Iceland and into southern Greenland, and grain cultivation in Norway itself extended to north of the Arctic Circle.
His views were featured in the first assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990.
Following the UK’s drought and heatwave of 1976, Lamb acknowledged that anthropogenic activity affects the climate, but he cautioned, “On balance, the effect of increased carbon dioxide on climate is almost certainly in the direction of warming but is probably much smaller than the estimates which have commonly been accepted.”
He also learned that there was money to be made from talking about looming economic catastrophe, melting ice caps, and flooding cities, as seven major insurance companies soon agreed to sponsor his new unit.
Lamb died in 1997 and, like other early revolutionaries, his views were soon denounced by his protégés. The IPCC’s 2001 report instead featured Michael E. Mann’s controversial “
Hockey stick graph,” which attempted to prove that today’s climate is much hotter than medieval times and is rapidly increasing.
“The last time the planet approached this degree of warmth was during the interglacial period preceding the last ice age over 100,000 years ago. It might even be hotter now than it has been for at least a million years,”
The New Scientist wrote in support of Mann’s thesis.
But it may be some comfort for the
25,000 people or so who did make their way to Glasgow to know that the UK Parliament and monarchy have been working on climate change for a very long time—359 years, to be precise.
On Jan. 11, 1662, when it was just an English Parliament, its House of Lords announced: “His Majesty [King Charles II] hath been pleased, by proclamation, upon the unseasonableness of the weather, to command a general and public fast, to be religiously and solemnly kept, within the Cities of London and Westminster, and places adjacent.”
This was the much-vaunted pre-industrial period that today’s climate changers want us to return to. But it seems as though people back then were just as worried about the climate and extreme weather.
The contemporary diarist
Samuel Pepys commented on Jan. 15, 1662: “Fast day ordered by the Parliament to pray for more seasonable weather; it having hitherto been summer weather, that it is, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which do threaten a plague (as all men think) to follow, for so it was almost the last winter; and the whole year after hath been a very sickly time to this day.”
A week later, Pepys gave further detail to the unseasonably warm winter of 1662.
“It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before,” he wrote.
Were their methods any more successful than today’s efforts? Prayer and fasting were certainly a lot cheaper than the billions of dollars being pledged in Glasgow. And cold winters did return, with
King Charles II able to enjoy several winter fairs staged on the frozen-over River Thames.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
