MONOKULTUR

Debatten er ovre! bragede Connie Hedegaard i 2009 i Bella Center da COP 15 startede. Hun mente, at konsensus nu var så cementeret af politik og penge, at der ikke længere var brug for videnskab, blot handling. Debatten er nu ovre, men det blev Trump der sluttede den: klimaforandringerne er ikke katastrofale og CO2 er ikke et problem, nu skal der bores. Vores egen Bjørn Lomborg skrev til Fox News

At the Sept. 23, 2025, U.N. General Assembly, President Donald Trump drew global headlines by blasting what he called the “extreme cost” of the green transition, arguing that climate alarmism is impoverishing ordinary people while enriching elites. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s rhetoric, he touched on an inconvenient truth: despite endless assurances from campaigners and institutions like the U.N., World Bank, and World Economic Forum, wind and solar are still not delivering cheap energy. In fact, they are making electricity more expensive. 

For years, media and green advocates have insisted that solar and wind are now the cheapest forms of electricity. This claim is central to the idea that a green transition is inevitable and beneficial — even under a second Trump administration. But two decades of evidence shows the opposite. The countries that have added the most solar and wind also have the highest power costs. 

Lomborg taler her med Wall Street Journals Paul Gigot. At man politisk kan afblæse klima-alarmismen bunder i, at man politisk har skabt klima-alarmismen. Og nu har Bill Gates, der aldrig har været en ørn til videnskab, indset at med de lukkede offentlige amerikanske kasser, at eventyret er ovre, skriver J. B. Shurk i American Thinker

World Economic Forum fanboy Bill Gates broke the hearts of “climate change” communists all over the world by releasing a seventeen-page memorandum in which he concludes that “global warming” isn’t quite the threat to humanity that he and his fellow climate cultists have long alleged.  He calls for a “strategic pivot” away from endless fear-mongering over the weather.  

That’s pretty strange, given that “Big Government” Gates has long mocked reasonable people who refuse to jump on the global cooling…er, global warming…er, climate change…I mean, extreme weather bandwagon.  A decade ago, he told the world that neither representative democracy nor private-sector investments would save us from fossil fuel Armageddon.  The answer, he argued, was for communist China and Obama’s socialist United States to band together and fight the weather with bigger Big Government.  Ol’ Billy-boy was convinced that only more government regulations, more government programs, more government agencies, more government bureaucrats, and — of course! — more government spending could save the planet.

“From the “You can’t make this up” file” skrev Matt Taibbi

The New York Times rushed a piece out titled, “Bill Gates Says Climate Change ‘Will Not Lead To Humanity’s Demise.’” The paper linked to Gates’s net worth on the Bloomberg Billionaires’ Index, to his prior comments about irreversible ecological damage, and to the Gates Foundation’s $1.4 billion commitment to climate change research. It didn’t link to Gates’s new essay, though, instead quoting the editor of Inside Philanthropy, who said “one could imagine” this was Gates’s way of “not wanting to be a target of the Trump administration.” Social media is still burning with theories about Gates betraying the climate cause to get out from under an investigation into his foundation’s alleged funding of Chinese entities. The imminent extinction dream is dying hard.

On the eve of the the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, Gates’s downshift from “We’re gonna die!” to “A serious but survivable problem” was ripped as a grievous affront. The climate story has been reported as an extinction panic for decades, in the process becoming one of the most influential news stories ever. Its impact reached far beyond energy policy to realms like mental health, family planning, even journalism and academic freedom. Ostensible uniformity of climate consensus was used as an argument against both “viewpoint diversity” on campuses and objective “both sides” reporting.

Global warming and the certainty of a “sixth mass extinction” became this century’s End-Times religion, replete with the Millerite pattern of repeat “final” warnings and failed predictions or “tipping points” (we reportedly just passed one two weeks ago, missing a chance to prevent “widespread dieback”). Even when warnings were scientifically accurate, the concept of unsurvivable catastrophe was still treated as an article of faith, and refusal to panic could be a cancelable offense. Denial of climate emergency was even listed in Twitter’s Files as the company’s “canonical” (!) example of “unhealthy content,” i.e. speech that should be shadow-banned even if it doesn’t violate rules:

“Suddenly, pragmatism and nuanced thinking are back in fashion” skrev Bjørn Lomborg i New York Post.

In the US, Democrat Senator Chris Coons of Delaware declared that climate is “not a top three issue right now”. Canada’s Liberal prime minister—who warned a decade ago that potential climate catastrophe meant fossil fuel reserves could be “unburnable”—is fast-tracking the construction of an LNG export terminal and promising to “transform our country into an energy superpower.” 

Even the green-leaning British and German governments are newly talking about the need to inject some economics into climate and energy policy.

It is time to move beyond the doomsday narratives that have dominated the climate discussion.

(…) Globally, we have spent over $14 trillion on climate policies. Last year alone, the cost exceeded $2 trillion. Again, it is money spent on climate policy that cannot be spent on basic education and maternal healthcare.

Then there is the alarmist claim from climate professor Michael Mann that “there is no greater threat to developing nations than the climate crisis.”

This patronizing argument suggests that climate campaigners in ivory towers know far better than those from the Global South. In real life, Africans from 39 nations rank climate as their 31st most important problem of 34 — far behind education, jobs, health, and roads. The greatest challenges are pretty obvious if you live in poverty, where disease and hunger claim lives daily.

What green campaigners are essentially saying is that poor people need emissions cuts first and foremost, before more food, medicine, or pathways out of poverty. Bill Gates has countered this by urging us to focus on what helps most.

For den tidligere vicepræsident og præsidentkandidat Kamala Harris, er klimaets tilstand en grund til at sætte valgretsalderen ned til 16 år “They’ve only known the climate crisis” argumenterer hun og fortsætter “They missed substantial parts of their education because of the pandemic”. 

They’ve coined the term climate anxiety to describe fear of not only being able to buy a home, but that fear will be wiped out by extreme weather, but fear of having children.

If they’re voting right now at 16 and up, they’re going to be talking about the importance of climate. They’re going to be talking about the importance of figuring out how AI is going to affect the future of the workforce. They’re going to be focused on what are we really doing about affordable housing.

Deres “climate anxiety” kommer af de løgne, der er pumpet ud i medier og uddannelsesinstitutioner over et kvart århundrede. De ved intet andet, end hvad de er blevet bildt ind af middelmådige ideologer. For at citere Gretha Thunberg “How dare they?” Taibbi forklarer 

The impact climate messaging (or education, if you prefer) had on Thunberg’s generation was described in a strange way. Harvard researchers in 2023 wrote semi-approvingly about “climate anxiety,” with one adolescent psychiatrist explaining that while some see generalized anxiety as a “pathological response that needs to be treated,” climate anxiety was different: “A healthy response to a real threat.” Other academics agreed that youths feeling a “chronic fear of environmental doom” and experiencing “panic attacks, loss of appetite, irritability, weakness and sleeplessness” were behaving more healthily than those who turned away “in denial or disavowal.” Climate anxiety was not pathological but “adaptive,” according to Cambridge researchers. No one thought the idea of a society that believes in “adaptive anxiety” was odd.

Some celebrated the success older generations had in freaking out the world’s youth, with people like Thunberg celebrated for expressing feelings of “intergenerational injustice,” having been “invalidated, betrayed, and abandoned” by old-heads who failed to fix the planet. This always seemed strange. Again, even if warnings were accurate, why foster anxiety on purpose? Would we teach young people to embrace being panicked and irritable before sending them to deal with war, pestilence, invading aliens, or any other serious challenge? If older voices were wrong to instill these fears they were doing terrible psychological damage, but even if warnings were right they were prematurely signaling failure, weakening the country through a campaign that was like the opposite of “Nothing to fear but fear itself.” We split the atom on a clock and went to the moon, but can’t fix this? What’s been the utility in thinking this way?

These constant invocations of disaster haven’t even had their intended effect. CNN poll guru Harry Enten went on air this summer to complain that it “boggles the mind” that Americans aren’t more “afraid of climate change,” given “everything that we see on our television screens… the hurricanes, the tornadoes, the flooding”:

Men bange har man lov at være. Scott Adams henledte min opmærksomhed på George Semaans artikel Societal Collapse Isn’t an Accident It’s a Predictable Feature of Growth i Daily Neuron 

This is the core of a concept known as the “diminishing returns of complexity,” famously proposed by historian Joseph Tainter. His idea is simple but profound: societies add complexity (things like governments, bureaucracies, armies, and legal systems) to solve problems.

At first, this works beautifully. A new legal system solves disputes and helps the economy grow. A new army protects trade routes. But as a society grows, it must keep investing in complexity just to maintain itself.

Think of it like a small company. The first ten employees create massive value. The 1,000th employee, perhaps in a third-level management or compliance role, is still necessary but adds far less direct value to the final product. Eventually, Tainter argued, a society reaches a point where adding more complexity (like another layer of bureaucracy) costs more in resources than the benefit it provides. The society becomes “top-heavy,” fragile, and extremely vulnerable to any new shock.

I økonomi kaldes det parkinsonisme, efter den neurologisk sygdom, som langsomt paralyserer hele kroppen, indtil man til sidst end ikke kan trække vejret. Da Musk købte Twitter, skilte han sig af med ¾ af de ansatte og X giver nu et lille overskud. ‘Det viste sig’ fortalte han, ‘at hvis ikke man har så travlt med at censurere hvad andre mener på nettet, at man kan få mere fra hånden’. I satireserien Javel Hr Minister præsiderer Sir Humphrey, undskyld Jim Hacker over Ministeriet for Administrative Affærer. EU er stat ovenpå stater, et bureaukrati oven på bureaukratier. Men det er selvfølgelig også dyrkelsen af projekter som den grasserende hensynsbetændelse, der er bag indvandring, minoritets-dyrkelse, positiv særbehandling og dovendidrikkernes vagtparade. Oven i det kaster man sig oven i købet ud i en udsigtsløs krig med Rusland. Affaldssortering er en lille del af kompleksiteten men ment som bureaukratiets endelige ydmygelse af de svedende masser.

Jeg startede med at blogge mod klima fortællingen i 2007, dengang det stadig hed global opvarmning. En rapporter på BBC havde i et indlæg spurgt “whatever happened to global warming” og konstateret at temperaturen ikke var steget i ti år. Det kunne der være en eller flere forklaringer på, men de optrådte ikke i medierne og de sædvanlige eksperter. Problemet med at påpege en naturlig proces der opvejede menneskets påvirkning var, at det i sig selv ville åbne døren for, at udviklingen måske bare var naturlig. Naturen fluktuerer. I stedet blev rapporteren irettesat og måtte den følgende uge skrive en undskyldning.

Jeg ihukom min tid på Geografisk Institut, hvor jeg var en dårlig studerende i slutningen af 90erne. Vi havde 3 klimatologi moduler med en eksamen til slut og midt i den periode skrev Bjørn Lomborg sine fire kronikker i Politiken, hvor han, som matematiker og underviser i statistik ved Århus Universitet, påpegede en række fejl i den måde, som IPCCs rapporter brugte deres datamateriale. Politiken var en avis, der var særligt glad for debat og havde endda en hel sektion til læserdebat hver lørdag. Så jeg så frem til at Lomborg fik kvalificeret modspil i en videnskabelig debat i et folkeligt medie.

Men ak, de første uger var modspillet kun fra rasende aktivister og ‘eksperter’ der beskyldte den unge matematiker for at svigte miljøet, gå de ondes gang og kun tænke på at fremme sig selv. En tilskrev endda Lomborg at være særligt opmærksomhedssøgende da det var velkendt at han var homoseksuel(!) Jeg kan rigtig nok også godt lide at bruge ‘bøsse’ som skældsord, men dette var blot fjollet – og så i Politiken, nu ber’ jeg dem. Det afslørede for mig at videnskaben bag påstandene om menneskets farlige påvirkning af klimaet, sandt eller ej, ikke var drevet af saglig forskning, men af ideologi. Flere af underviserne på Geografisk Institut, havde i øvrigt ikke slået mig som de skarpeste knive i skuffen og min agtelse for universitetsmiljøet tog i de år et dyk. Der var dog nogle, bla. Ole Humlum og ‘Sølvmanken’, som kritiserede IPCC for at søge et konsensus og således forstene den videnskabelige debat i et socialt stillbillede. Når man læste sin Kuhn og sin Popper var den observation meget tung.

Debatten om Lomborgs kronikker kulminerede med at nogle aktivistiske forskere fik indklaget Lomborg for Udvalget Vedrørende Videnskabelig Uredelighed. Et uredeligt udvalg i sin essens og de fik da også blot fat i en amerikansk artikel bedrevet af en venstreorienteret aktivist, der fremturede med en masse usandheder om Lomborg og hans argumenter og på den baggrund dømt Lomborg i offentligheden som en utroværdig debattør. Politikens daværende redaktør Tøger Seidenfaden, det var inden han blev skør og døde, gik ellers hårdt til forsvar for Lomborg og videnskabens principper, men skaden på hans renomme var sket her i andedammen.