Doomed Planet

Klive’s Kampf

Climate Holocaust & Green Jihad 

Clive Hamilton, the Greens candidate in the upcoming Higgins by-election and eco-apocalyptic prophet, is shameless. Not content with advocating the demagogic manipulation of public opinion and the suspension of democratic rights in the name of the eco-apocalypse, he has now compared climate change skeptics to Holocaust deniers, and predicted that the effects of climate change would be a hundred or even two hundred times worse than the Nazi Holocaust.

So extreme were his claims that even bloggers on his Crikey.com website expressed concern, with one condemning Hamilton’s article as an “execrable piece of garbage”, and “yet another stream-of-conscious rant this time punctuated by invoking a most foul parallel”, while observing that “Clive’s desperate grasp for relevancy is palpable”, and that “the good folk of Higgins deserve to know what a bona fide lunatic sounds like”, ahead of the December 5 election.

Hamilton argues speciously that from a consequentialist ethical standpoint climate change skeptics must be judged now as morally culpable for the “hundreds of millions of mostly impoverished people” who he is certain will die in the future “from the effects of climate change”, plus “an additional 30-200 million people at risk of hunger with warming of only 2-3°C; an additional 250-500 million at risk if temperatures rise above 3°C; some 70-80 million more Africans exposed to malaria; and an additional 1.5 billion exposed to dengue fever”.

Toying with speculative mortality statistics in this macabre fashion, Hamilton claims that the eight million who actually died in the Nazi Holocaust will be numerically dwarfed by a global warming holocaust death toll of between 300 million and 2 billion people, with moral responsibility for this mega-catastrophe born by climate change skeptics and the gigantic conspiracy within Western societies for which they are allegedly the mouthpieces.

Two observations can briefly be made about such an outrageous claim. Firstly, the logic of Hamilton’s argument and his invocation of the Holocaust betray the weakness of the entire climate change case. The core of this argument is that drastic and irreversible actions must the taken right now – literally within days – in order to avoid destruction at an apocalyptic level; that this outcome must be accepted as certain; and that dissenters are morally wicked for even questioning such assertions. The problem for Hamilton is that Hitler was just as certain and insistent about the apocalypse he envisaged 70 years ago when he launched the Holocaust, the only difference being that the threat then to the world was not climate change but a fantasized Jewish-Bolshevik world conspiracy, a threat that Hitler nevertheless described in the same graphic detail as Hamilton and was just as fanatical about. As Joachim Fest describes in Hitler (1974: p.152): “The whole world was in danger, Hitler cried imploringly; it had fallen ‘into the embrace of this octopus’ [and he concluded] ‘If … the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of the world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men’.”

While he shares his apocalyptic vision of a dying earth with Hitler, Hamilton would allege that his certainty of approaching Armageddon is based not on an insane ideology but on science, or more correctly “The Science”. However, his advocacy of emotional demagoguery over rational inquiry has discredited him, as has empirical research into the climate changes that are actually taking lace, as opposed to the predictions provided by speculative computer models purporting to see decades and even centuries into the future.

Secondly, Hamilton’s hysterical claims are extremely irresponsible from a political and national security perspective, especially when they come from a senior academic and self-proclaimed public intellectual. When he insists that “climate deniers, if they were to succeed, would share responsibility for the enormous suffering caused by global warming [involving] hundreds of millions of dead” he is feeding the hatred and resentment of Western societies that is already cultivated by the various economically underperforming dictatorships, theocracies, and kleptocracies that are spread across the world. These have positioned themselves to benefit from some $100 billion a year in "compensation payments" as a result of the Copenhagen agreement and have a vested interest in promoting climate change panic. Claims like Hamilton’s absolve such regimes of their crimes against their own people, and help remove all incentive for them to make even token efforts to ensure the welfare of their populations, as all suffering can now be blamed on the wicked West and exploited to extort more “compensation”.

Western societies already face a massive security crisis arising from an Islamist-backed global terrorist campaign, so the last thing we need is a similar "green jihad" campaign driven by deliberately propagated claims that the West is presently intent on destroying hundreds of millions and even billions of poor people, along with the entire planet. In that type of apocalyptic scenario, compensation payments become little more than protection money and the productive economies of the world and their working people become permanent hostages to a transnational racket led by ideologically committed NGOs, a venal UN, and their bureaucratic, political, and intellectual cheer squads.

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