Essay by Eric Worrall

“… they worry that if the true nightmare was revealed, … everybody … would … just give up …”

Trump’s America is abandoning climate action and the fight just got harder

By Alan Kohler

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Bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is a fitting way to mark 30 years of failure, of annual gabfests that have released colossal amounts of carbon dioxide from the mouths of the well-meaning, and burned tonnes of aviation fuel to get them there, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions not one bit.

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Energy scientist, Vaclav Smil puts the total cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at $US444 trillion, or $US17 trillion a year for 25 years, “requiring affluent economies to spend 20 to 25 per cent of their annual GDP on the transition”. 

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So net zero by 2050 won’t happen and the increase in global temperature will not be limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels that was agreed as preferred at Paris in 2015 – nowhere near it.

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There has been systemic reticence on the part of scientists to spell out what’s actually going on, first because science is inherently uncertain, so they are always reluctant to be definitive, and second because they worry that if the true nightmare was revealed, politicians and everybody else would either refuse to believe it or just give up.

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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-17/climate-change-religion-trump-zeldin-epa-wind-back-rules/105057538

The average temperature difference between the Aussie state capitals Melbourne and Brisbane is around 4ºC, so why isn’t everyone in Brisbane dying from climate change? How could global warming of 4ºC make Melbourne uninhabitable?

Cairns is about as much warmer than Brisbane as Brisbane is warmer than Melbourne. 4ºC warming wouldn’t even make Brisbane uninhabitable.

And of course you have prosperous and high population tropical cities like Jakarta and Singapore even closer to the equator than Cairns.

And of course we have evidence from the deep past that warming is not a problem.

Our monkey ancestors also did well in a much hotter world. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the encroaching cold drove them from their new homes.

Fish did pretty well during the PETM.

As for climate scientists failing to tell the truth to prevent Net Zero being abandoned, surely the time has come to stop hiding the truth and let it all out, and tell it how it is?

Net Zero is being abandoned anyway, so what do you have to lose? Please entertain us, don’t hold back – let’s hear your nightmare, let’s hear and read the predictions of your dying climate doomsday cult in all their glorious detail. Go out with a bang rather than a whimper.