Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The wildfires in Europe have prompted Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to claim that the “angry Online Right” needs to accept Net Zero. But all his ‘facts’ are wrong, says Paul Homewood.
The wildfires in Europe have prompted Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley to claim that the “angry Online Right” needs to accept Net Zero. But all his ‘facts’ are wrong, says Paul Homewood.
The Online Right is going wrong, eschewing compassion or charm, talking itself into corners of angry irrelevance. The evidence is stacking up – we only have to look out of our windows.
Take climate change. This is no longer a matter of speculation: the wildfires of Europe, pitiless and persistent, are the way we live now.
As with so many of his ilk, Stanley confuses weather with climate. Take the latest fires in France.
Yes, the wildfires are running above average this summer in Europe, but there have been other years as bad and worse. But much more importantly, the data since 1980 show that wildfires around the Mediterranean have not been getting worse:
European wildfire trends
Stanley cannot even get his facts right, claiming that in past times France endured roughly 15 fires each year. The true figure is around 100.
Stanley then claims that Europe is thought to have lost around 10 million tons of forecast grain production last month. Annual output is around 500 million tonnes on average, making that loss just 2%. The historical record shows that annual output regularly rises and falls by much bigger amounts than this.
He then quotes a British farmer:
“Last year it was really dry,” a farmer from Merseyside told the BBC: “2024 was really wet. There’s no clear pattern other than extremes. … We might as well not bother growing things and leave the farms empty.”
It is, of course, called weather!
Last year was a long way from being the driest on record – there have been 26 drier summers in England. Nor was the previous summer particularly wet.
It is a fact that, when it comes to rainfall in England, “extremes” are the norm! But there are no trends towards either wetter or drier summers.
He dismisses the Right’s criticism of Net Zero that the UK cannot make a jot of difference as we only produce 1% of the world’s CO2 by saying we should think about the Third World. According to Stanley:
In reality, if anything, poor countries are more worried about climate change than we are – for the simple, horrible reason that they are more vulnerable to its effects.
Every year, an average of 110,000 people are displaced by natural catastrophe in Bangladesh alone. This is a country where more than half the population works in farming, yet one-third of its agricultural GDP is expected to vanish by 2050.
Bangladesh has always been prone to natural disasters. But this is where his whole argument falls flat on its face.
Far from the picture he paints, Bangladesh’s agricultural sector is thriving. Cereal production, which includes rice, hit new highs in 2023 and 2024 and has doubled since the 1990s. Agricultural GDP has tripled in that time as well.
A half of the country’s population was in extreme poverty in the 1980s, according to the World Bank. That proportion is now just 5%. GDP per capita is four times higher than it was just 30 years ago.
Life expectancy is much higher and child mortality has plummeted. By all measures, the people of Bangladesh are unimaginably better off than they were just a generation ago.
The same, of course, applies to pretty much the whole of the developing world, with the exception of war-torn countries such as Sudan and Somalia.
Bangladesh cereal and rice production trends
None of this would have happened without fossil fuels.
Without fertilisers and mechanisation, all made possible by the fossil fuels he demonises, millions of Bangladeshis would literally starve to death.
Is that what Tim Stanley wants? What right does the West have to dictate to the Third World how its people must live their lives?
He claims that rolling out renewables in the UK will bring lower prices and energy security. I don’t know what planet he is on, but the current push to Net Zero is having the very opposite effect.
Right-wingers have always been pragmatic types. If renewable energy really offered all these benefits, the market would automatically embrace them. They would not need the unaffordable subsidies, carbon taxes and mandates we have now, which are wrecking the economy and leaving us perilously exposed to blackouts.
Renewable energy is fine under the right circumstances. Solar panels in the Gobi Desert, for instance, or hydro power in Norway. But here in the UK, we only really have wind power – and we cannot rely on it when the wind stops blowing for weeks on end in winter.
Until somebody comes up with a better idea, we will still need fossil fuels, whether Tim Stanley likes it or not.
The Chancellor has no clothes.
Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles.
Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of Chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.
Merz just now: “On social media any anon can just say what he thinks and how he thinks. I find that unfortunate.” https://t.co/cO1eWVhsjY— eugyppius (@eugyppius1) April 30, 2026
Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his Chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.
Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-Right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the Leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.
Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Backbenchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.
Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s Government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.
We have here before us the final stages of an inexorable, terminal process. In this story Merz’s role is but a late and a small one; Merkel wrote the early chapters, and regular installments will continue until the Federal Republic is destroyed or politically reconstituted. Every Chancellor is going to be a bigger joke, even weaker and more ineffectual and more retarded than the last one. Every government is going to be even more paralysed and ridiculous than the heretofore most paralysed and ridiculous government that preceded it. Our industry will waste away while new taxes sprout like weeds, rail will grow less reliable and tickets more expensive, health insurance premiums will increase and medical care will get worse, schools will just get shittier and shittier. There will be no answers, no fixes and no succour, until the devolution is complete.
The problem is not merely the demise of a single Chancellorship or a solitary party, but of an entire political world. Thus even longstanding Merkelian éminences grises like Peter Altmaier have begun to refer to our situation as a “crisis of the state”. Since its founding in 1949, the Federal Republic has been so closely identified with the two great people’s parties – the CDU and the SPD – as to be effectively inseparable from them. Other nations like France have extremely fluid political systems, but in Germany a combination of prior conservative cultural tendencies and a burdensome, deliberately enfeebling constitution has yielded one of the most inflexible political cartels Western parliamentary democracy has ever seen. The Social Democrats are already in a state of advanced decay, and now the Union parties are following them to a similar fate.
What awaits us at the bottom of our freefall is either a total reconstitution of the uniparty around Alternative für Deutschland and the Union in some dwarfed, reduced form; or an AfD ban and an institutionalisation of Leftist rule in a less dogmatic reincarnation of the German Democratic Republic. The former seems vastly more likely right now, but of course that could easily change. Because we don’t know what will happen when we try to run different political software on our slow, overburdened constitutional hardware, it’s impossible to say whether the Federal Republic can even survive this resolution, and in no scenario will more than a portion of the present political elite make the squeeze.
Other countries would’ve adopted half-measure reforms to head off the cataclysms that are coming for us years ago, but not Germany. It is in our ethnic character to do everything longer, harder and in more determined suicidal fashion than everybody else. We must take everything to the absolute extreme to demonstrate our moral commitment, in the process proving to everyone else how stupid our ideological persuasions actually are. In this way our worst politics will sooner or later become their own refutation and their own undoing. Unfortunately the whole process takes a long time and is both extremely destructive and eye-wateringly expensive.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
Do you believe in UFOs? If so, be careful, you might be a dangerous Right-wing radical without even knowing the fact! A new Pentagon report released last week made the dismissive claim that historical spikes in sightings of such things back in the 1950s and 1960s were largely just the result of paranoid members of the general public innocently mistaking top-secret U.S. military craft of the era for those of extraterrestrial beings.
Do you believe in UFOs? If so, be careful, you might be a dangerous Right-wing radical without even knowing the fact! A new Pentagon report released last week made the dismissive claim that historical spikes in sightings of such things back in the 1950s and 1960s were largely just the result of paranoid members of the general public innocently mistaking top-secret U.S. military craft of the era for those of extraterrestrial beings.
The report was issued on behalf of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), headed up until last December by a physicist and former CIA man named Sean Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the man habitually known by the media as ‘the Pentagon’s UFO chief’, in the limited sense that, whenever a journalist wanted to ask the U.S. Government whether there was any definite proof aliens had landed on Planet Earth yet, it was his job to say “No, please stop asking us”.
Nonetheless, the term UFO means just that – Unidentified Flying Object, and there have certainly been plenty of those buzzing American airspace of late, although whether they are actually extraterrestrial in nature, or simply invasive drone-like tech from an enemy nation like China or wherever is a moot point, as Kirkpatrick himself has explained.
Alien Worldviews
Yet, besides making such perfectly reasonable apolitical points, Kitkpatrick also appears to possess a certain fondness for making a few rather less reasonable overtly politicised ones too. In early February, Kirkpatrick gave an interview to politics website Politico, expressing his grave expert opinion that the authorities should be much more forthcoming in revealing details about such mysterious phenomena to the general public: hence the release of the Pentagon’s new debunking report, I suppose.
His reasons for advising this course of future action were rather interesting. Noting it was AARO’s job to investigate potential military or terrorist threats to U.S. airspace, not “to go and find extraterrestrials”, Kirkpatrick argued that “If there is a void in the information space, it will be filled with the imagination of the public Right and [their] conspiracies”.
Yes, that’s right: only conservatives ever subscribe to mad conspiracy theories of any kind. A rash of media stories in recent years have tried to link (in fact wholly unrepresentative) Right-wing American movements like QAnon and January 6th rioters to belief in UFO-related conspiracies, often with the self-evident aim of smearing anyone non-Lefty as a David Icke-style, lizard-loving loon (which rather ignores the fact Mr. Icke was once in the U.K Green Party).
As someone who has written twobooks exposing the fake contemporary online legend of Nazi UFOs, I would fully admit that the subject can indeed occasionally be used as a front for fascism or a handy far-Right recruitment tool. But, on the other hand, as someone who has also written another book substantially dealing with how the subject can equally sometimes be used as a front for far-Left Marxist recruitment purposes too, I can see how an honest accusation of this nature could actually go both ways. Honest accusations, however, are no longer terribly in fashion.
Obviously, with their God-given contemporary right to define precisely what counts as ‘misinformation’ in the public sphere, today’s all-wise and all-knowing Leftists hold a total and complete monopoly upon objective truth, and would never stoop so low as to begin making bizarre politically motivated claims about what are popularly dismissed as disreputable fringe topics like UFOs and alien beings. Or would they…?
The Dry Canals on Mars
Speaking to the media back in 2011, Venezuela’s former quasi-Marxist Dictator, Hugo Chávez, was very firmly of the opinion that, many years ago, there used to be life on Mars, now an utterly barren and dead globe, but that native Martian forms of capitalism had killed it off wholesale.
“I have always heard that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived, and finished off the planet,” Chávez said in a speech to mark World Water Day in March 2011, whilst himself ostentatiously sipping from a glass of H2O as if to mock the tragically dehydrated Martian dead.
“Careful!” Hugo added. “Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts.” And why? All because of climate change, caused by rapacious Western capitalism, El Presidente cautioned. (Awkward note: Venezuela is a principal member of OPEC, has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and fossil fuels provide the backbone of its entire economy – or at least they did until Chávistas began wrecking it all like Mars with their blessed planet-loving socialism.)
That sounds uncannily like a Left-wing ET-related conspiracy to me. But then, Chávez always was a noted nut. Maybe he was just an unfortunate, unrepresentative progressive one-off? Sadly not. I have written before in the Daily Sceptic about Left-wing astronomers trying to contact PC ETs (see here and here), and in my regular Takimag column this week have detailed some barely believable current attempts of queer activists to contact races of homosexual ‘gayliens’. But the rival Left-wing trope of trying to spuriously relate extraterrestrial life and flying saucers to climate change is even more surprisingly widespread in today’s wokery-ridden academic and media worlds.
Guardian Readers of the Universe
In 2019, the New York Times (America’s rough equivalent of the Guardian, but even worse) ran a thought-experiment by op-ed columnist Farhad Manjoo entitled ‘Pretend It’s Aliens’. Here, Manjoo spoke of how, as Westerners today lived in a world of absurd Right-wing illusions conjured by wicked populist politicians – specifically, “full-grown adults who maintain, against all evidence, that immigration poses an existential threat to the United States”, no less – why shouldn’t Leftists like him just “perform the same sleight of hand” with causes close to their own bleeding hearts?
Some sceptics may argue they have done so already, with their hyperbolically exaggerated talk about ‘global boiling’ etc., but Mr. Manjoo proposed extending such lies even further by proposing the idea that evil extraterrestrials were actually behind our planet’s imminent eco-doom, by spreading ludicrous tweets like this:
Manjoo’s logic, such as it is, ran as follows:
This [combatting climate change] will be a long-term existential battle that will require remaking every part of society… that may involve costly and politically unpopular changes to our way of life for years to come, and will necessarily make some people [but not Manjoo himself, probably] worse off than if we did nothing. But that will be justified, because we understand the stakes: we are fighting murderous aliens… If the aliens attacked, we’d do better. I’m sure of it. We would understand the stakes in the battle ahead. We would apprehend the necessity of sacrifice and perseverance. We would be able to perceive what is happening to our planet and our species as what it plainly is: a war for survival.
Manjoo meant the public should be brainwashed to adopt this millenarian mindset as a dramatic internal motivational tool, rather than as a literal belief, much as an Olympic runner might be able to sprint faster by imagining he is being chased by an endangered Bengal Tiger. Yet there are other people out there who apparently believe such things rather more literally. And some of them, unlike humble NYT columnists, are actual scientists.
The Goonhilly Goon Show
I don’t know if you happen somehow to have missed it – and really, how could you? – but October 2022 saw the advent of something annual called ‘World Space Week’, the theme of which for that particular year was ‘Space and Sustainability’ (this year’s is ‘Space and Climate Change’; I can see a pattern developing here). Considering that, as far back as 1852, Lord Kelvin had already theorised the ultimate heat-death of the universe, it could be argued that, in the long-run, even outer space itself is not actually fully sustainable at all, but never mind.
As part of the whole pointless shindig, astronomers from METI International (METI = Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) based at Cornwall’s Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, planned to beam out a message towards the far-distant star-system of Trappist-1, which is deemed a likely spot for potentially inhabited Earth-like planets to be located. And what would this radio-signal say? Naturally, it would tell the ETs all about our planet’s currently ongoing climate crisis.
“The great challenge of interstellar communication is to establish a common ground for understanding” between humans and aliens, the men from METI explained. Traditionally, this may have meant sending them signals based upon mathematics, reasonably guessed to be a universal language all across the cosmos, as two plus two equals four even on Alpha Centauri (although certain lettuce-headed Left-wing U.S. academics like Rochelle Gutierrez might disagree). METI preferred to send the aliens transcripts of the Periodic Table, however, hoping this may prove the initial basis for interstellar symposia about how industrialised capitalism would cause severe and damaging chemical changes in any planet’s atmosphere and environment, not just Earth’s own.
The hope was that the ETs would be a much older civilisation than ours; if so, they would surely have long passed through their foolish planet-polluting phase aeons ago, and thus have worked out how to solve the catastrophe of global warming entirely. Otherwise, how would they still be here to talk to mankind? Wouldn’t they all just have been burned to a crisp? Once the Trappist-1 aliens realised we comparatively primitive humans were facing a climate crisis too, they would surely be able to help, METI hoped, beaming us back down advice on what to do next in return.
But what if the ETs replied to say: “Ignore the whole thing – it’s a total mad alarmist cult movement, just put gags on George Monbiot and Swampy and you’ll all be quite, quite fine”? I would guess, in that alarming eventuality, METI might conveniently ‘forget’ to pass the unwanted message in question on to mankind at large, or else ‘accidentally’ wipe it from their recording systems. Appropriately enough, the cult-busting ETs from Trappist-1 would be forced to remain every bit as silent as their monkish human counterparts traditionally are down here on terra firma. Either that, or Michael Mann would just sue them, like he did with Mark Steyn.
Little Green Men
And what happens if the aliens turn out not to be quite as benign as METI might hope? Anyone who has read Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy series of books will know it makes perfect military sense for any alien civilisation to immediately wipe out any other currently less-advanced intelligent societies elsewhere in the galaxy as soon as they become aware of them, lest their far-off interplanetary rivals one day grow strong enough to do the same to them, a bit like if the US had nuked Moscow back in 1945 to prevent the entire Cold War ever taking place at all.
A 2011 report from a group of NASA-affiliated scientists from Pennsylvania State University, ‘Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis’, argued that just such a situation really could occur, should any alien intellects “vast and cool and unsympathetic”, as H.G. Wells once put it, detect that Earth was currently undergoing climate change due to rapid post-WWII-era industrialisation.
As the ever-onwards expansion of borderless international capitalism uncaringly pushes other disposable species like rhinos, polar bears and white people to looming extinction here on Earth, so wary ET military scouts might fear the same fate being imposed upon the flora and fauna of other innocent planets, should the evil imperialist Earthlings ever advance far enough to begin colonising them too. In this case, the aliens could just blow our entire planet up with death-rays, to nip the danger in the bud, like a time-traveller killing Hitler at birth to avert his future invasion of Poland. Alternatively, they may be a race of exoplanetary Chris Packhams from the Planet PETA and decide to land on Earth and just destroy all the nasty naked ape humans, thereby to save the trees, whales and great crested newts, whose lives they may deem to be innately more significant.
According to the report’s distinctly doom-mongering authors:
Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ET because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions… These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.
To be fair, the full written assessment as a whole did consider a range of possible other scenarios, and did specifically deem the above detailed outcomes to be rather unlikely – but guess which specific possibility the Guardian picked out when reporting on the paper? That’s right: its chosen headline was ‘Rising greenhouse gas emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report’. The Guardian’s story was bylined as being by someone named Ian Sample, but given its basic methodology and outlook, it may as well have been written by Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times.
All this is daft enough, but it gets much worse. In part two of this short series, we shall see how clever scientists have now also managed to model the basic path of climate catastrophes endured by other planets – other planets that do not even exist. Why was the entire world in Dune nothing more than one gigantic, globe-spanning desert? Hugo Chávez knew. And so, it would seem, do his contemporary academic counterparts: the answer is capitalism!
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