2 weeks Ago By Nick Cater
I n November 1997, Christopher Pearson speculated in a column in the Australian Financial Review on how long the global warming panic would last. Two decades earlier, global cooling and the coming ice age had caused similar anxiety yet had been largely forgotten. “Perhaps, having safely negotiated the millennium, which is a major cause of all this anxiety, we may collectively surrender to a bout of unqualified optimism,” he wrote.
“I doubt it because the appetite for catastrophe is now highly developed, and mass media delight in pandering to it.” Pearson’s pessimism was well-placed. The climate-change narrative proved to be exceptionally robust despite its weak empirical foundations.
Only now, a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century and more than a decade after Pearson’s untimely death, is the global warming paradigm collapsing under the weight of its own complexity. In February, BP joined a growing number of global corporations that have abandoned..
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