Kelly’s Eye

IT TURNS out that the petulant child (she’s 21, by the way) called Maddie Budd, who poured excrement over Captain Sir Tom Moore’s memorial as an eco-protest, also once tried to glue herself to goalposts in a Premier League match. Of course she did.

Sour little death-cult glum buckets like her are the inevitable result of the drip-drip doomsday mentality fostered by much media reporting, which has led more impressionable minds to conclude the planet will be pretty much incinerated shortly after 2030.

Even our most eminent broadcaster, not to mention a certain new monarch, sometimes appear to give credence to that outlook. ITV News, in particular, has yet to find an isolated ice floe or forest fire it can’t co-opt to such a narrative.

For a welcome antidote I suggest reading False Alarm, by the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg.

He is emphatic that climate change is a problem the world faces, but argues that our chosen methods of combatting it are counter-productive. He points out, for instance, that analysis of figures from the world’s leading database of global catastrophes (EM-DAT in Brussels) shows that in the 1920s, such events as droughts, floods, storms, wildfire and extreme temperatures killed almost half a million people worldwide annually.

Today climate-related deaths have declined to fewer than 20,000 per year.

Lomborg suggests the alarmist approach takes no account of our ingenuity at adapting to the endlessly changing Earth, and that the priority for best future-proofing ourselves lies in maintaining the sort of economic growth that has previously funded such innovation, especially in the world’s poorest countries which suffer disproportionately from the adversities of extreme climate conditions.

Yet such dissenting voices are drowned out by a “climate crisis” lobby, which has become a vastly lucrative multi-national concern – with a lot of vested interests in the fear-mongering that creates more net zeroes like Maddie Budd.