‘The long drawn-out cry of intergenerational rage’
By Paul Homewood
The Telegraph have prostituted themselves with this latest advertising feature, written by the eco-loon. Jonathon Porrit:
The righteous anger of our younger generations over decades of ignoring climate change must be the catalyst for long-term action
Jonathon Porritt
Author and environmentalist
There are many reasons why young people today may feel they’ve got the short end of the intergenerational straw. But today’s climate emergency provides the starkest – and most morally reprehensible – justification for any potential grievances that young people may have.
Consider for a moment two disconnected data points regarding the year 2100. The projected life expectancy of a 10-year-old girl in the UK today is 90, predicts the Office for National Statistics. So a very significant number of them will still be alive in 2100.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, average sea levels will have risen by no less than a metre by 2100. That’s the best case. You probably don’t want to think too much about the worst case. That’s still 80 years away.
Climate change is already ravaging the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the planet. We all know 2020 has been a terrible year – and that’s not just because of Covid-19.
Unprecedented change: Wildfires dominated headlines across the world in 2020 Credit: Getty
Unprecedented wildfires in Australia, California, Oregon, Brazil, even the Arctic Circle. Appalling flooding in China, India and Bangladesh. The worst-ever hurricane season in the Atlantic. The second worst year on record for melting Arctic sea ice. I could go on. The disasters, assuredly, will be on a rising scale, not just to 2100 but well into the next century. And if we continue to do next to nothing about it, it will be a great deal worse.
This is the backdrop to the rising anger of so many young people. At the UN’s Climate Action Summit in 2019, Swedish activist Greta Thunberg expressed this as follows: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal-clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You are failing us. But young people are starting to understand your betrayal.”
The disasters will be on a rising scale and if we continue to do next to nothing about it, it will be a great deal worse
Jonathon Porritt
I saw that as the first salvo in what I believe will become a long-drawn-out cry of intergenerational rage. That phenomenon will become one of the most significant factors in the climate debate – not least as that kind of rage will be so important in sustaining young people’s hopes.
When schoolchildren go on strike, this itself is a form of civil disobedience. And why would anyone think that the experience of disobedience at this young age will not turn into more engaged patterns of disobedience as young people make their way in a world increasingly disrupted by climate change?
And why would we, their parents and grandparents, not be standing alongside them at that point?
The Power of Us
Building greater, more sustainable economic growth can improve the lives of everyone in the UK.
This is the goal of inclusive capitalism: using money and investment as a force for good, to create real jobs and better infrastructure to transform the UK’s cities and towns and tackle the biggest issues of our times such as housing, climate change and ageing demographics.
It’s something businesses, communities and individuals can all get behind and work together to achieve – and it’s why Telegraph Spark has teamed up with Legal & General for The Power of Us, a campaign that aims to identify the challenges facing society, then use some of the UK’s brightest, most innovative thinkers to help solve them.
The Power of Us: the future is in your hands.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/inclusive-capitalism/climate-change-rage/
‘The long drawn-out cry of intergenerational rage’ ?
How utterly absurd! The world is in far better shape than it has ever been.
Life expectancy has doubled throughout the world in the last century:
Undernourishment continues to fall:
Deaths resulting from famine has dropped to record low levels:
Crop yields have rocketed since the 1960s:
Contrary to the misleading impression put out by the Lancet, deaths from malaria are much lower than they were, even as recently as 2000:
In richer countries, contrary to popular narrative, outdoor air pollution has fallen sharply since the 1970s:
And thanks to economic growth, the number of people in extreme poverty across the world has plummeted. The only exception is Sub-Saharan Africa, which has been left behind in the growth game:
And last but not least, most of the world can now read and write, for the first time in history.
These are all things of which we should be immensely proud. And they have all been made possible by modern economic society, itself based on fossil fuels and all of the other things Jonathon Porritt seems to despise.
Children these days would be horrified if they had to grow up in the conditions of 50 or 100 years ago. But the younger generation has always been idealistic, untinged by reality.
Like we did, they will eventually grow up. It seems Porritt never did though.
As for the increasingly woke Telegraph, shame on them for taking the money to promote this nonsense.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
When will the Telegraph and other newspapers sack their foolish, blind, climate correspondents and listen to the science. No wonder the Telegraph is losing readers. it’s all down to Chris Evans in the Telegraph. Is he really that stupid ?
Did you see the piece on Attenborough this morning?
The comments section is well worth a visit.
I didn’t renew my sub, several years ago.
Someone should tell the editors at the Telegraph that projections regarding life expectancy and sea levels in 2100 are not “data points”.
+1
Climate Cult members follow the Humpty Dumpty theory of language.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less.”
At least there is some balance in the Mail, though not nearly enough. Young people have been exposed to relentless brainwashing on the news and current affairs programmes as well as dear old Attenborough. However we know that among the young there is a rebellious streak and incessant hectoring will bring this out I hope.
I subscribe to the telegraph, I totally missed this article when it was published on the 8th, no comments allowed, as it is advertising I wonder if it breaches advertising rules. Thanks Paul for all the charts and graphs.
Seconded.
John Doran.
And what about this one https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/how-to-be-green/post-covid-environmental-changes/?utm_campaign=tmgspk_plrbin_2953_AwVhpVCgfhY8&plr=1&utm_content=2953&utm_source=tmgspk&WT.mc_id=tmgspk_plrbin_2953_AwVhpVCgfhY8&utm_medium=plrbin&mvt=i&mvn=4cf3421bf9ac4e8fb347206ba1395096&mvp=NA-TELEDESK-11238861&mvl=Key-bin-advert_tmg_bin_1%20%5BWeb%20-%20Index%20-%20Sparkbrain1%5D
A brainwashed UN collectivist eejit.
Quite right, GB…..they have increasingly taken to inserting pages of ‘puff pieces’ like this into the DT. Happily – at least in the online edition, they always appear in the same section which – like you, I just skip over. I have grown increasingly disappointed with the wokeness developing in the DT. Mostly (just a personal observation) pieces written by wet-behind-the-ears graduates whose given names all seem to end in ‘a’.
If the DT loses people like Allison P. Sherelle J and a (few) others, I’ll be off too. Having a good laugh at Ambrose E-P when he’s been on the green sauce doesn’t justify a subscription.
But…. where do we go???
How on earth have I become “Joe PublicJohn Palmer????
Ah, the wonders of modern technology – when operated by a geriatric!
Change, “average sea levels will have risen by no less than a metre by 2100. That’s the best case.” That’s not correct. In any event, most of sea level changes from Greenland melt and due gravitational effects that part will not affect the UK at all.
I’m not sure Porrit is right when he accuses the IPCC of making this claim either. It may be in the Fairy Story for Policymakers bit but I don’t think the IPCC is ever this prescriptive in the report itself, certainly not to the point of putting figures on scenarios.
But nobody ever reads anything but the FSPM
The promoters of the article, Legal & General, have gone aggressively woke. Based on their twitter feed, getting a good return for their investors is bottom of their priority list:
They are primarily concerned with campaigning for damaging climate policies, promoting mass immigration and nurturing racial grievances among minorities. I moved a £100,000 ISA away from L&G after some promoted tweets drew my attention to their corporate priorities.
I suspect that the insurance businesses are running scared of future claims that they will have to insure against climate change events – unless they can show they were singing from the AGW/CC hymn sheet. For example: claims for flood might be lost because of CC – which the insurance company can show they warned of.
Insurance companies love disasters as it gets more customers to buy insurance. They price the risk accordingly and buy reinsurance to cover the big events.
What the business is afraid of is the share market will lower the share value because its ‘not taking climate seriously’ . As well they see Musks Tesla valued at $600 bill , more than all the other car companies combined (VW is $70 bill, Ford is $20 bill).
Wall St is always a more peverse taskmaster than Greta
My shareholding at L&G will be removed in the very near!!
Until recently I held L&G shares for many years. However their last half year report was full of greenery and wokishness. They were proud of their teams of “mental health first aiders”. There was absolutely no mention of their responsibilities to, or ambitions regarding, shareholders. As a result I sold a significant shareholding. It used to be a solid investment but its share performance has declined as its green agenda has increased. Coincidence?
As a parent of two (very) young adults – one in work, one at university – I have a little insight into what the “young think” through them and their friends.
OK it’s a tiny sample but what I learn is as follows:
– few are bothered about “climate change”, it just isn’t an issue at least until they pay their full share of rising electricity bills;
– the “young” are far, far, far more exercised about what our incredibly stupid leaders and their ludicrous medical adviser doomsters are doing about Covid. Dire implications are happening right here and now both for serious education and work implications. Worse still, none of them are affected to any degree medically and the idiots in charge, as I write, are considering months more of total, useless lockdown.
It’s our leaders’ response to Covid that is screwing up the lives of the young, not modelled fantasies about climate change that they can’t even see happening.
Thank you for your enlightening comment
The Leaders’ response to Covid is a ‘model’ for how they will respond to Climate Change.
God help us.
Jonathan Porritt is at heart a depopulationist monster. A Malthusian monster. & Malthus has been proven wrong each year for the past 222 years.
Anyone wanting to understand the Malthusian, Darwinian & Nazi roots of the so-called “environmentalist” movement could do worse than reading nuclear PhD engineer Robert Zubrin’s book, Merchants Of Despair.
It’s a grim read in parts, but draws heavily on brilliant economist Julian L. Simon’s book the Ultimate Resource 2, which proves clearly that increasing human population acts as a spur to progress & prosperity. There exists the possibility of a better future ahead if we can get past the control freak cowards like Porritt & the 1%s funding his ilk.
John Doran.
“The righteous anger of our younger generations over decades of ignoring climate change … ”
But we DIDN’T ignore it!!!
We worried ourselves sick with the approaching ICE AGE! 🙂
Well, some did! 🙂 🙂 🙂
“The disasters will be on a rising scale and if we continue to do next to nothing about it, it will be a great deal worse. Jonathon Porritt.”
So, what has Johnnie-boy recommended we do about it? We have been told this for decades. “Act soon, time is short!”. But to do what? What will keep the global temperature from rising? Rapid reductions in carbon fuel emissions destroy economies. Taking CO2 from the atmosphere cannot be done in any meaningful amounts. Adaptation is part of the plan but mitigation does nothing but keep carbon in the ground and devastate transportation over long distances and in the large amounts needed. Scaring people doesn’t help and is counterproductive.
It’s the usual someone else must do something. People like Jonathan Porritt and David Attenborough are part of the problem if they aren’t living a zero carbon existence (if that is actually possible) themselves. How many miles has Mr Porritt travelled in his lifetime using fossil fuels? Were any of those journeys necessary? Does he use electricity, gas/fossil fuels and products that needed these to be produced and delivered? If he does, then he is part of the problem for not growing his own food, living in a cave clothed in animal skins, and shivering because burning wood emits CO2 that will take decades to be reabsorbed by the trees he’s not planting day in day out to compensate for a life of excessive CO2 emissions.
As ever, if it’s no-one’s job – he’s the guy to do it……
If they are not actively promoting some form of nuclear energy, their milking stool is short 3 legs.
Amazing how “disasters” became the meme with no evidence whatsoever. Slowly rising temperatures that you wouldn’t actually notice just wasn’t doing it.
Nobody is ‘part of the problem’, because the problem is fictitious. It only exists in computer models.
Ask yourselves how 0.04% of the atmosphere, of which at most 1/3rd is influenced by humans, is going to have much of an effect on anything. Remember also that most of the energy in the system is in the oceans, not the air.
The ‘rage’ my six-year-old grandson will feel in 30 years time will not be because the government didn’t do anything about climate change: it will be because they did! And in doing so managed too impoverish his nation, prevented him from meaningful work – except for the State – and prevented him becoming a home-owner as his own man.
Sadly, people like Porritt will be long gone before the fruits of their labour have laid waste to a once proud country.
Quite. It will be far more “why did you squander our prosperity on this BS?” rather than “why didn’t you save the planet?”
Jonathon Porrit, if I’ve found the correct bio, is just 70.
With good luck and proper care he ought to live until 2040.
At the rate the EU and UK leaders are forcing bad policies,
it is likely the man will see much of the destruction — “bless his little heart.”
Oxford 1st in Modern Languages plus every green based fringe group and political party ever since
These articles are clearly being sponsored by ultra-wealthy power groups who seem to have ganged-together, as no-one is funding the counter arguments as would occur in democratic situations when there are grounds for debate: in-fact they have very successfully prevented the real climate debate from occurring. Surely they do not all believe in the drivelling science of computer models? This makes one suspect that their motives are more sinister.
It is the billionaires and their like who may be blamed ultimately for the economic disaster that is being wrecked by their games.
Love it facts vs fictitious claims.
‘intergenerational straw’
The wut?
‘According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, average sea levels will have risen by no less than a metre by 2100.’
So take ’em out and shoot ’em.
‘Unprecedented wildfires in Australia, California, Oregon, Brazil, even the Arctic Circle.’
Wildfires are a tenth of what they were 80 years ago.
‘Appalling flooding in China, India and Bangladesh.’
They never had floods before.
‘The worst-ever hurricane season in the Atlantic.’
Cirrusly? By what measure?
‘The second worst year on record for melting Arctic sea ice.’
Worst? Was there more or less? How far back do your measurements go, a few decades? How many people died? What property was damaged? What makes it a ‘disaster?’
Porrit paints a picture of disaster with watercolors too thin to be seen.
I am am interested in the climate and like to follow the incidence of fluctuating temperatures and sea levels which have been happening for a very very long time. The current evidence to some people is clear but depends on what statistics one looks at. I was reading an information sheet at the top of the Grossglockner pass a few years ago and it was quite clear that it was warmer there several hundred years ago (I’m not sure of the exact date) as the retreating glacier (2.5km since 2014) has uncovered large tree stumps which proved that it was a lot warmer and for a considerable length of time during this period. In recent history the largest extent was in 1850 and it has been receding since. So the earth is warming and this could be cyclical and natural but beyond human intervention. However we cannot be complacent because things have changed dramatically in the last few thousand years of relative stability. The biggest issue is that man is now the largest number and biggest influence on our fauna and flora to the exclusion of most of them. This will get worse with rising populations. There is an argument that the numbers are tailing off. They are, but slowly and numbers will still continue to increase. This is something the world cannot sustain.
I urge all of you who say we should do nothing because global warming is not a problem, to think about what human numbers are doing to this planet. In some respects Jonathon Porrit and many well know people (David Attenborough, Jane Goodall etc but forget Chris Packham) are correct. Its the human population that’s the problem. Half the numbers would be good. I shall now sit back and wait for the brickbats. (did I here anyone say Nazism)
The way to limit Population growth is through Industrialisation to produce the wealth to educate the people. Population growth has already dropped in the industrialised countries.
“half the number would be good”, well to start us off why don’t all those that believe it do the world a favour?
BH:
Have you noticed that improving living standards leads to reduced birth rates?
And where do you ‘think’ population should be reduced? In overcrowded countries like The Netherlands and the UK? Or Italy? Or far off places like China or Africa? Wouldn’t the inhabitants there object?
No. Grammar.
‘The biggest issue is that man is now the largest number and biggest influence on our fauna and flora to the exclusion of most of them.’
Mosquitoes around here ain’t skeert.
They conned us with the ozone game and now they know fear based activism works. We’ll shudder and shake and cave in.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/11/30/the-unep-healed-the-ozone-hole/
What was it Boris said a few days ago? “Green policies and growth go hand in hand” ? The vision I had when I read that was Thelma & Louise – green policies drive growth over the cliff edge.
The next generation will want to know why they can’t afford to buy a house. They’ll wonder why their wages are rather similar to what their parents’ wages were twenty years before. They may wonder how their parents could afford to drive anywhere or heat their homes or go on foreign holidays. They won’t find any answers in carbon dioxide concentrations.
One other thing. A metre of sea level rise by 2100 (this is a highball estimate) would be laughed at by any civilisation worth the name. To bleat about it as a threat is just asinine.
These people are mathematically compromised.
Sea level is rising at 2mm per year.
80 x 2 = 160mm. Not 1000.
A lot of floods in Asia are due to overpopulation and deforestation… not climate change. Same as here, when you build on flood plains, property gets flooded = disaster. Same as here, when forests are cut down, rivers flood more rapidly as runoff is accelerated… nothing to do with climate change. When you don’t manage woodland, and build houses in nice wooded areas, forest fires will cause property damage… nothing to do with climate change, just plain human stupidity.
My estimate of sea level rise by 2100:
Mid case 1.9 mm x 80 years = 15.2 cm (average linear rate from Jevrejeva 2014)
Just as it was in the last century. For error bars +/- 50%
The Express, not to be outdone, has Richard Madeley with this:
“We humans can even change the weather – global warming’s nothing to do with the sun – it’s us! Sure, rising temperatures and sea levels are a big negative, but we know how to bring the problem under control; we have our hands on the levers of power. Then we’ll surge onwards. What’s to stop us?”
https://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/richard-and-judy/1374545/coronavirus-pandemic-climate-change-virus
What indeed!
Robert:
surge upwards? or in the opposite direction?
Aaaahhhgh. My Mrs has chosen to put the Reith Lecture on the tele this evening and it’s Mark Carney, the Canadian useless ex Chief of the Bank of England, who got every forecast wrong and did everything he could to undermine Brexit, who is going to explain how we can avoid climate disaster by doing what loonies like Schwab and Charlie are telling us. The Reith lecture used to be given by a distinguished scientist, not a failed overpaid charleton. I have gone to the attic in despair.
Intergenerational rage means that the younger you are and the less educated you are the easier it is to sell you the climate snake oil. Those educated old farts are a pain in the ass because they will do things like look at the data even after they have been told that the science is settled and that there is a 97% consensus among scientists.
Yes it’s like sweet manufacturers claiming intergenerational rage because parents won’t give six year olds all the chocolates they want.
Lol
Do we laugh or cry? Life expectancy of 90 for the poor dears, the highest ever for anybody anywhere. Is that because of anything they have done? Obviously not. So its down to us and our parents and grandparents. And they will be richer, safer and healthier than anybody ever as well. Thanks to us.
What evil we have perpetrated, how unfair life us.
“It ain’t half cold, ‘ere at the North Pole, Mum!”
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
Also:
The one thing that unites all climate alarmists is their complete ignorance of climate history. Enter Tony Heller. He has the most amazing collection of historical data and old newspaper articles going back 150 years. Check out his website and enjoy seeing the historical evidence of the idiocy of today’s climate-Armageddon predictors!
Weather history. There is no such thing a “climate history.”
I think it’s always useful to dig up what somebody has said in the past about a subject. In the case of Porritt, he revealed his first thoughts on the subject of global warming or climate change back in the mid-1980s in his book “Seeing Green: The Politics of Ecology Explaned” which I happen to have a copy of. On page 41 of the 1986 reprint he states his views in the following paragraph:
“The least precise and tangible of all the many threats to the environment concerns the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We are engaged in a dangerous planetary experiment. When fossil fuels are burned, carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. There’s no technological fix that can do anything about this, and at the present rates of consumption, CO2 concentrations will have doubled by the middle of next century. This may well trigger off the ‘greenhouse effect’, causing significant and socially traumatic climate changes. An increase of 2°C would be enough to melt much of the Antarctic.”
From that paragraph, written before the subject got hyped up by the media and politicians in subsequent decades, he seems pretty nonchalant about climate change. He is certainly showing no concern over ‘intergenerational rage’. He seems to be ruling out the idea of reducing CO2 emissions or doing any geo-engineering in his assertion that “there’s no technological fix that can do anything about this”. It looks like he’s advocating that the world would just have to adapt to climate change, and it appears that he is expecting a pretty big adaptation if he thinks much of the Antarctic would melt under a 2 deg C temperature rise.
You say ‘no-one is funding the counter arguments’; that seems to be true. I have wondered about this for a while myself. Why don’t the fossil fuel companies do it? Why don’t sane investment funds do it? I have asked questions like this here before, and got some interesting and useful answers, but it still seems that to find the ‘counter arguments’ to all the nonsense, you have to look outside the mass media – to this blog, to WUWT, and so on. I still think that physics will force sanity in the end, when the winters remain stubbornly cold, and vulnerable people cannot pay their heating bills. But it seems so stupid and sad that we have to live through these problems, rather than apply thought and imagination to them, and solve them before they happen.
A while ago there was an investment fund that offered the chance of shorting renewable energy stocks. I can’t find it now – perhaps it went bust, because the nonsense is still in charge (and has survived much longer than I expected, say 10 or 15 years ago). But if I had a few billion (if, if…) I would like to do something of the sort. Perhaps some ingenious financial company might like to start a sideline, for small investors, in joining in the fun of shorting Tesla, and the other empty monsters of this particular period of cultural insanity. I don’t know how to do it, and don’t have the means, but I would surely contribute what I could, and enjoy playing a long game.
And thank you Paul, for all your efforts, and Merry Christmas!
THERE is the fundamental truth – that you can profit from a mass madness that devalues a good thing, by buying it low; but you cannot counter a mass madness that overvalues a bad thing, by short-selling it high.
The worst that can happen with the purchase is it goes even lower, and potentially down to zero. The lower it goes the less reason to actually dispose of it prematurely. The short-sale can go as high as the madness will take it; The higher it goes the harder, it is to meet the margin calls and NOT cut the position prematurely.
In other words, speculation finds it harder to curb over-valuation than under-valuation.
Indeed, a truly cool speculator will knowingly buy rubbish like Tesla if he thinks he can unload it to a ‘greater fool’ in time. However, doing it still leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Re covid-19: How can you short-sell a crazed faith in ‘computer simulations?’ You cannot.
Sorry not to make it clear – this was meant as a reply to Jack Broughton, above. And seasonal greetings to all!
Hold them to account Paul
Wanted to make a comment on the Telegraph page about this laod of codswallop but notice not available – typical!!!