IT IS easy to get bogged down in the technical detail of the climate debate. But science can distract us from the fact that before climate change, environmentalists made exactly the same kind of predictions that now drive arguments for draconian climate policies. The gloomy predictions of civilisation’s imminent collapse made by environmentalists in the 1970s came to nothing – the world population grew larger, wealthier, healthier and safer. This should alert us to the fact that, whether or not ‘climate change is real’, environmentalism is a radical political ideology, bent on reorganising the world, whatever the facts are. It is not merely a response to scientific discovery about our relationship with the natural world.
