Sorry BBC! The world isn’t interested in the West’s groupthink obsession with global warming

With the arrival of the season of goodwill, it would obviously not be appropriate to touch on the ever more dismaying shambles we are making of Brexit. But last week also saw what, in global terms, was a much more important event, the real historical significance of which has passed the world by.

That mammoth UN climate conference in Poland may have opened with an apocalyptic warning by Sir David Attenborough that, unless we “act now” on global warming, we face “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world”. But what followed over the next two weeks, despite the best efforts of the BBC and others to pretend otherwise, was that the 22,000 delegates gathered in Katowice achieved nothing at all.

Their proclaimed purpose was to get “back on track” the 2015 Paris climate accord, designed to limit “the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5C above their pre-industrial levels”, by committing the world to a 45 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.Their guiding principle was to endorse an emergency IPCC reportthat this would require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. They wanted the world’s “developed nations” to contribute $100 billion a year to a Green Climate Fund, to persuade still “developing nations” to follow the West’s lead in phasing out use of fossil fuels.

Despite 12 days of unbelievably tedious and fractious argument, none of this happened. A motion “to welcome” the IPCC report was vetoed by the US, Russia and several other oil-producing countries. The “$100?billion a year Green Climate Fund” was yet again kicked down the road for further discussion at some future date. And the “nearly 200 nations” represented could not agree on any binding steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions whatever.

All they were left with was what the BBC described as “the rules” that “are key to the game”. This was a tortuous agreement that both the developed and developing countries would accept common rules for measuring their own emissions.

This alone was what enabled the BBC to claim forlornly that “the conference was a success”, because it showed “China showing leadership” by accepting that it and the US are at last both “on the same page”.But herein lies the real reason why not just this UN conference but Paris, Copenhagen and all the other 23 before it ended in failure.

The real problem goes all the way back to the Rio “Earth Summit” of 1992, when its utopian socialist organiser Maurice Strong first insisted on that division between “developed” and “developing” countries. His core principle was that the then-richer countries should lead the way in cutting their emissions, leaving the then-poorer countries, such as China and India, free to catch up economically (while subsidising them to follow suit in due course).

What we have seen, of course, is that those “developing countries” have been free to power on, to the point where China and India are now not only the world’s first and third-highest emitters of CO2 but intend, as they made clear in Paris, to carry on building hundreds more coal-fired power stations. So, as we have seen, global emissions are continuing to rise and there is no way most of the rest of the world is any longer paying any more than lip-service to the Western world’s groupthink obsession with global warming. The UN and the West may continue to believe in their apocalyptic scare stories. But the rest of world is carrying on regardless.

The BBC may comfort itself with its make-believe that the rules are “key to the game”. But the real lesson of Katowice is that in reality the whole game is well and truly over. It’s time we all woke up to that fact.

Friday evening marked the 50’th year when I have led a happy band of carol singers around villages in Dorset and Somerset. For the past 32 years, I have been very fortunate to live in my present village of Litton, and when we end at each house by singing “We wish you a merry Christmas”, we can always call out the names of everyone listening on the doorstep. I can only end by wishing the same to all my readers.

—Courtesy The Telegraph