{"id":256190,"date":"2023-05-06T13:30:36","date_gmt":"2023-05-06T11:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=256190"},"modified":"2023-05-06T13:30:48","modified_gmt":"2023-05-06T11:30:48","slug":"king-charles-iii-has-a-climate-record-to-live-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=256190","title":{"rendered":"King Charles III has a climate record to live down"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From\u00a0CFACT<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Rupert Darwall<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This Saturday\u2019s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain\u2019s history. No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly. Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king\u2019s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2000, the BBC invited the then-Prince of Wales to give the last<\/a> of the 2000 Millennium Reith lectures on sustainable development. Charles spoke of his belief in the \u201cbounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which sets limits to our ambitions and define the parameters of sustainable development.\u201d He name-checked the founders of the modern environmental movement\u2014Rachel Carson and Fritz Schumacher, authors, respectively, of Silent Spring<\/em> and Small is Beautiful<\/em>. He embraced the precautionary principle, warning that the absence of hard scientific evidence of harmful consequences from genetically modified (GM) crops should not be taken as a green light to exceed nature\u2019s limits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of looking to science for all the answers, mankind should work with the grain of nature, Charles argued. If a fraction of the investment going into GM technologies was devoted to improving traditional systems of agriculture, \u201cthe results would be remarkable,\u201d he declared. He then praised fellow Reith lecturer Vandana Shiva, an environmental campaigner and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, for condemning large-scale commercial farming \u201cso persuasively and so convincingly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately for the people for Sri Lanka, Shiva also convinced the Sri Lankan government to ban GM crops and chemical fertilizers and switch to organic farming. The results were worse than remarkable; they were disastrous. According<\/a> to Matt Ridley, within months of Sri Lanka going organic, \u201cthe volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.\u201d Soon after, the government collapsed, too. Street protests forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee<\/a> to the Maldives in an air force jet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a 2013 speech on protecting rainforests, the prince\u2019s rhetoric became distinctly unroyal, accusing those who questioned the need to act as belonging to \u201cthe incorporated society of syndicated skeptics and the International Association of Corporate lobbyists.\u201d This would have come as news to his father and sister. Asked in a 2020 interview<\/a> whether she discussed farming with her brother, Princess Anne replied, \u201cYes \u2026 occasionally, but rather short,\u201d adding \u201cI don\u2019t even go down the climate change route.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the terms laid down by his son, Prince Philip would also be numbered among the syndicated skeptics and corporate lobbyists. In 2018, Philip wrote<\/a> to Ian Plimer to congratulate him on his book The Climate Change Delusion. <\/em>Prompted by Ridley\u2019s 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture<\/a> on how carbon dioxide emissions were greening the earth, Prince Philip had lunch<\/a> in the House of Lords with Ridley and Nigel Lawson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Father and son clashed on wind farms. In 2011, a wind farm developer reported<\/a> that Prince Philip had told him that wind farms were \u201cuseless, completely reliant on subsidies, and an absolute disgrace.\u201d In his movie<\/a> \u201cHarmony\u2014A new way of looking at the world,\u201d Charles speaks of wind energy \u201cworking with nature\u2019s freely-given forms\u201d and the need to \u201cend our dependence on fossil fuels.\u201d In the film\u2019s opening sequence, showing a wind turbine in a meadow, Charles intones<\/a>, \u201cTime is running out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, time has run out for Charles\u2019s forecasts of climate apocalypse. In March 2009, Charles warned that only 100 months remained to avert \u201cirretrievable climate collapse.\u201d That forecast expired in 2017, with no climate collapse. Subsequent dating of doom was pushed further out and became less precise. In 2015, the 100-month deadline was stretched<\/a> to 35 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 2021 paper<\/a> on extreme climate forecasts tabulates 79 predictions of climate-caused catastrophe dating back to the first Earth Day in 1970. Charles has the distinction of being the only individual to be featured three times, with separate predictions of climate apocalypse. As the paper\u2019s co-author David Rode of Carnegie Mellon University comments<\/a>, alongside Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Prince Charles has \u201cwarned repeatedly of \u2018irretrievable ecosystem collapse\u2019 if actions were not taken, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain . . . and so far, they\u2019ve also been wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s hoping that the reign of King Charles will be a happier affair than his failed forecasts of climate doom. Long live the King.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article originally appeared at\u00a0Real Clear Energy<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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