If anyone was likely to ruin the solemnity and dignity of King Charles’ coronation, it wasn’t his errant son. Harry quietly, without fuss, took his assigned place in the Abbey as a non-working royal and that was that.
But it was hard to keep a straight face throughout the ceremony as Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby seemed determined to channel Peter Cook’s iconic Impressive Clergyman, from The Princess Bride.
If only that was the end of Welby’s inadvertent comedy. Unfortunately, the Woke Wet Welby insists on poking his nose into politics — and making a complete dill of himself.
He asserted that ‘the IPCC forecasts that climate change by itself, let alone the conflicts it is causing, will lead to at least 800 million more refugees a year – in total – by 2050’.
This is, not to put too fine a point on it, complete and utter horse shit. A double-whammy of lies.
It’s not only completely unfounded in any sort of rigorous scientific evidence, the IPCC has never, in fact, said any such thing.
First of all, like so many of the numbers that the Climate Cult like to bandy around, it might make for impressive rhetoric for the easily fooled, but it doesn’t stand a moment’s back-of-the-envelope scrutiny.
If the Archbishop was trying to say that 800 million people would be displaced by climate change every year that would mean one in ten of the world’s population having to do a runner every single year. But let’s assume – which seems fair given his delivery – that the words ‘a year’ were an error and that the Archbishop was correcting himself when he added the words ‘in total’. It is still a stark figure, that 800 million people could be displaced by climate change by 2050, so did the IPCC really predict that?
In fact, the claim is too ludicrous, even for so debased an organisation as the IPCC.
The IPCC’s 85-page synthesis report, published in March, does not mention the word ‘refugee’ once. Nor does the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report published last year. What the synthesis report does say is that between 3.3 billion and 3.6 billion people ‘are living in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change’ – in order words, there is some negative form of climate change going on where they live. It does not, however, speculate on how many of them will at some point have to flee their homes.
So, unless he pulled it out of his clerical orifice, just where did Welby come up with such an obviously farcical claim?
The closest match appears to be a report published in 2015 by a group of scientists calling themselves Climate Central. That forecast that ‘carbon emissions causing 4 degrees celsius of warming (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) – a business as usual scenario – could lock in enough eventual sea level rise to submerge land currently home to 470 to 760 million people globally’.
It should be noted that a 4°C rise is not at all a “business as usual scenario”. In fact, it’s the IPCC’s worst-case scenario. This is the common deceit of the Climate Cult and the mainstream media, to present the very worst extreme as the norm, and then clutch their pearls.
But, even under this worst-case scenario, not even the nutters of “Climate Central” are so extreme as to back Welby’s idiotic claim.
Climate Central was not saying that these people would be driven from their homes by 2050 (indeed, the IPCC’s central estimate is for 32-62cm of sea level rise over the course of the 21st century, which would not cause mass evacuation of land anywhere save for marshlands, and communities built on marshland without sea defences). What it was saying was that were global temperatures to rise by 4ºC – which itself would only happen if the world took no action on climate change whatsoever – then eventually (which could mean several centuries’ time) sea levels would rise to flood land currently inhabited by between 470 and 760 million people.
Spectator Australia
So, we have yet another in the endless chain of deranged Climate Cultists making demonstrably, obviously outlandish claims. Yet, are they ever held to account? Of course not: they just bask in the honking chorus of approval from the rest of the Cult, and go on to do it again.
