Eco-hysteria is the real threat to humankind

There’s nothing like a heatwave to shine a light on the medieval lunacy of eco-alarmism. The minute the thermometer spikes, all the bourgeois doomsayers are on their soapboxes haranguing humankind. This is ‘hell on Earth’, they cry. It’s ‘global boiling’, they wail. A ‘hound from hell’ is dragging the heat of the ‘Underworld’ into our world, say media scribes, like absolute nutters, blissfully unaware of what faux-priestly, pre-modern fools they sound to the rest of us.

And of course – you already know this – it’s all our fault. We brought this hell upon ourselves by flying and driving and existing. We are reaping the scorched harvest of our own sinful endeavours. As the UN’s climate chief says, it’s our ‘addiction to burning coal, oil and gas’ that is making the crimson sun blare so brightly and causing ‘climate change [to] run rampant’. Your modern living is ‘boiling the planet’ and ‘wrecking our world’, nagged a Guardian writer this week. Repent! Sweat!

Is anyone else tiring of this? Has anyone else had a gutful of the fact that we can’t even enjoy a hot day without being accused of planetary genocide by posh twats in haircloths? Is anyone else sick of those weather maps where the hot countries are Merlot coloured to drive home the crank idea that Cerberus himself has risen from the abyss to put his fiery ass-crack on our planet? I’m not even a fan of heatwaves – being Irish – yet I cannot abide this weaponisation of weather to bully the public.

It’s going to get worse – the heat and the hectoring. Another heatwave is coming. London might even reach 29C, cries the BBC, alongside a blood-red map of our scorched capital. Am I allowed to say that Londoners frequently fly overseas to lounge around in weather hotter than that, or will I be accused of ‘heat-stress denial’? That’s the latest species of ‘denialism’, according to mad old George Monbiot, who says the ‘billionaire press’ has ‘hit rock bottom’ with its denial of the ‘impacts of the heatwave’. We could strap them to the stake for their blasphemous speech, but apparently we’re all on the stake now – we’ve ‘[set] fire to the planet’, says Monbiot. Witches burn themselves these days.

No one is ‘denying’ the impact of the heatwave, of course. Certainly not me. I had to flee a London bus last week. It was a sweatbox on wheels, a rolling tomb of flushed bodies. If only we had air conditioning. But green hysterics, including Monbiot’s own paper, have been wringing their untoiled hands over AC for years. ‘It’s destroying the planet’, said the Guardian during last year’s heatwave. It’s ‘philosophically problematic’, apparently. Nothing – and I mean nothing – better captures the supercilious indifference of our eco-overlords than this vision of a well-fed Guardianista telling the sun-baked masses that it’s ‘philosophically problematic’ to cool your home in a heatwave.

It’s the cruelty of the heatwave hysterics that most startles. For years the climate-change cult has warned us that Earth will shortly be consumed by a hellfire of Man’s own making. Yet anyone who said ‘Let’s get air-con, then’ was damned as a devilish contributor to these End Times fires. The Wall St Journal asked an apt question this week: ‘Europe is hot as hell – why doesn’t it want air-conditioning?’ It reported on the hospitals of our Old World where the ill and elderly are ‘forced to endure… heatwaves’ because their well-fanned rulers have decreed that air-con is an ‘energy-hungry technology’ that undermines ‘the fight against climate change’. The fantasy cause of ‘saving the planet’ takes precedence over the earthly cause of saving the sick from heat.

Air-con is ‘not the solution’, says Time. I don’t know, it’s the solution to my sweating. More importantly, it’s the solution to the sweltering discomfort of elderly folk forced to live in heat-trapping homes and poorly people crammed on to roasting wards because society now fears a fictional apocalypse more than disease. There will be excess deaths this summer, and that’s awful. But it’s far more the fault of the eco-preaching classes than it is of the polluting masses. A hill I’ll die on: the climate-change ideology is a worse killer than climate change itself. I mean, it isn’t Mother Nature going into people’s homes and ripping out the air-con.

This is the story of our times: the elite panic about modernity is far deadlier than modernity. The truth, as Bjorn Lomborg says, is that deaths from climate-related disasters have plummeted in the era of industry. In the 1920s, half-a-million souls perished each year in storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves. In 2020, it was just 14,000. Global annual deaths from climate madness fell by 96 per cent. It is those who libel modernity as a uniquely murderous phenomenon who are signing the death warrant of humankind, for they seek to roll back the very developments that have insulated us from the violent whims of nature. Which includes air-con. To agitate against AC even in a heatwave is to exhibit a staggering misanthropic disregard for one’s fellow humans, especially the vulnerable ones.

And yet still they come, the heatwave hysterics, demonising the very tech that defends us from the heat and wind and water of amoral Nature. ‘[It] seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said a green-leaning writer of recent heatwaves. The 2023 heatwave was christened Cerberus, after the hound from hell who rips sinners apart. How fitting. ‘Cerberus’s inferno’, newspapers cried. Even Greta Thunberg, the most celebrated hysteric of our age, has taken a break from berating the Jewish State to say, basically, ‘Fuck, it’s hot’. I guess that’s one upside of the hot weather – it will drag the attention of the idle pricks of the activist class away from the Jews and back to the ‘climate emergency’. Breathe easy, Israel – they’re wanging on about weather, again.

I’m sick of all this luxury apocalypticism. Its medieval strain is undeniable now. Just like our forebears, these fruitcakes see all weather – rain, storm, heat, hail – as a punishment from God / Gaia for our wicked ways. Though at least our ancestors had the excuse of being uneducated. Nature isn’t punishing us. We’re punishing ourselves. The greatest threat to humanity is not the weather but an elite that feverishly seeks to appease the gods of weather by winding back modernity. They’re the reason you’re baking. Rage against them, not the eye of heaven.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.