By Vijay Jayaraj

The world is in the middle of the coronavirus crisis and economies are crashing. No one expects doomsayers to talk about climate change at times like these.

But that’s exactly what some people have done.

In their relentless pursuit to promote the doomsday agenda, doomsayers inculcate the masses with more misleading information on climate change.

Last week, Barack Obama tweeted a LA times news article criticizing the current administration and commented, “We’ve seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic. We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall.”

Only Obama can compare climate change with a pandemic and still get away with 340,000-plus likes. There are multiple flaws in his tweet.

First, you can’t compare apples with oranges. While the coronavirus is an active problem, the entire climate doomsday theory is hinged on forecasts about temperatures in the distant future. These forecasts come from a few hundred computer models that exaggerate the real-world scenario. Model inefficiency is a globally acknowledged fact.

Second, most of the political leaders, including Trump, did not deny the warning of a pandemic. To the contrary, it was the World Health Organization (WHO) that delayed declaring a pandemic. President Trump even criticized WHO for concealing the gravity of the situation and its misleading recommendations. 

On the other hand, climate doomsayers issue empty threats and warnings about dangerous warming without actual evidence. Their only justification — computer climate models — has proved faulty time and again.

Not only are the predictions unreliable, but there is no evidence (note that word: evidence, which is actual, empirical observations, not projections by computer models) to prove that the current warming, which has been steady since the 18th century, will snowball into dangerous warming.

If anyone is denying climate change, it is a person like Obama, who refuses to acknowledge the scientifically established facts on the global slowdown in warming.

Obama is not the only one riding the pandemic wave to promote climate doomsday. Student protest leader Greta Thunberg has also used this time to promote her propaganda in innovative ways.

A complete lockdown has forced school classes to go digital. Continuing to stop students from going to classes, Greta encouraged her followers to go on a digital school strike. Greta, like Obama, keeps comparing the current crisis to the imaginary climate doomsday.

This climate crisis obsession does not stop with individuals. The negotiations in the United States Congress between Republicans and Democrats on the coronavirus stimulus were painfully prolonged when Democrats demanded their climate policies be included in the package.

The Democrats’ obsession with the climate emergency irked many senators who wanted to get the coronavirus relief funds to people quickly. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, “Democrats won’t let us fund hospitals or save small businesses unless they get to dust off the Green New Deal.”

There is a common theme among all these climate-obsessed voices: They don’t want to miss the opportunity to propagate the climate doomsday theory and are seldom worried about the real, deadly crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has given them the ideal platform to misuse people’s vulnerability and fear, and they continue to push climate misinformation.

Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England) is a research contributor for The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.