Whoa: Prominent Climate Activist Apologizes for 30 Years of “Alarmism”

Well, this is something you don’t see every day. In a stunning new article written for both Forbes and his own environmentalism site, prominent climate change activist Michael Shellenberger issued a grand apology on Monday, telling readers that activists like him have been engaging in deceitful alarmism for the last 30 years. Pulling the veil back on the outright fraud that the environmental (and mainstream) left has been perpetrating on the world, Shellenberger hopes that his new book, Apocalypse Never, will open people’s eyes to the lies they’ve been fed for decades.

“On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem,” Shellenberger wrote. “I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. But as an energy expert asked by Congress to provide objective expert testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to serve as Expert Reviewer of its next Assessment Report, I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.”

Shellenberger followed that astounding admission up with a list of facts that the climate change community don’t want you to know about, including:

    Humans are not causing a “sixth mass extinction”

    The Amazon is not “the lungs of the world”

    Climate change is not making natural disasters worse

    Fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003

    The amount of land we use for meat — humankind’s biggest use of land — has declined by an area nearly as large as Alaska

Shellenberger explained that while he’s been passionately outspoken about preserving the environment for most of his career, he never felt entirely comfortable when the subject turned to climate change. He knew that saying the “wrong” thing about global warming would have an immediate negative impact on his standing in the scientific community.

“But until last year, I mostly avoided speaking out against the climate scare. Partly that’s because I was embarrassed. After all, I am as guilty of alarmism as any other environmentalist. For years, I referred to climate change as an ‘existential’ threat to human civilization, and called it a ‘crisis,’” he acknowledged.

“But mostly I was scared,” he wrote. “I remained quiet about the climate disinformation campaign because I was afraid of losing friends and funding. The few times I summoned the courage to defend climate science from those who misrepresent it I suffered harsh consequences. And so I mostly stood by and did next to nothing as my fellow environmentalists terrified the public.”

It’s actually quite admirable and courageous for Shellenberger to expose the climate hysteria movement in this way; hopefully, his turn towards reason and facts will encourage others to follow suit. Unfortunately, given how much money there is to be made in this global racket, it probably won’t make as much difference as we might wish.