The IPCC Report & the Pivot from Covid to Climate

Kit Knightly

The latest IPCC report on climate change was released last week, and has signalled a sea-change in the ongoing “big issue”. The Pandemic was fun while it lasted, but it’s time it faded back and we got on with the next stage.

That’s not just my interpretation either, they are quite literally saying it themselves.

Usually, when there’s a big narrative shift looming, you can find one key article that tells you everything you need to know about the plan. For the IPCC report, it’s this iNews article by Andrew Marr. Where he literally uses the phrase “hinge to climate from Covid” several times:

There is a great turn coming, a change in the terms of political debate, a period of hinge. We are swinging from the many months of coronavirus obsession into an autumn which will be dominated, rightly, by the climate emergency. But much of what we have learned from Covid-19 – about the state, authority, journalism and civil society – is directly applicable to what’s coming next.”

The media have, naturally, been full of headlines on the IPCC report, with varying degrees of alarmism and insanity.

“It’s now or never!” screams the Guardian as a “climate reckoning” is upon us. The Sun calls it a “full fledged arson attack on the planet!”

But none of them outline just what the next few months have in store for us better than Marr. The goblinoid face of the establishment, who nauseatingly cheered on Blair in Iraq, can always be relied upon to keep on message. He’s always right there saying the right thing at the right time. And this piece is no exception.

He headlines “Treat people like grown-ups and they will fight climate change like Covid-19”, adding [our emphasis]:

Education works. We are following the science and as we continue to do so, we will successfully tackle climate-change issues in the same way we faced down the coronavirus.”

He never outright states what this “same way” is, exactly, but it’s not really hard to imagine what he means. His article isn’t about the future, anyway, it’s all about the past.

It’s tracking the tools deployed during the “pandemic”, and how effective they were. A performance review for the politicians and “journalists” who have successfully parlayed a “virus” that poses almost zero danger to the general public into a full-fledged remodelling of society.

He points out how politicians under-estimated how willingly people would leverage their freedoms:

To begin with [Western leaders] worried that voters would not accept restrictions on their liberties for the greater good. By and large, they were wrong. […] This shaped how Germans, Americans, the French and British – and many more – responded, and allowed societies to change direction faster than anyone would have predicted.”

How easily the media were able to spread misinformation that controlled public opinion:

The media, so often blamed for almost everything, found new ways to explain complex scientific arguments in ways that most people understood.”

And how these lessons can be applied to messaging on climate change going forward:

This is a core lesson that needs to be learned, as we hinge from Covid to climate. Public understanding of science has become a security issue. Without it, there will be no public support for the hard decisions on transport, heating and land use.”

The whole thing reads that way, like a cross between a press release and a progress report. Appearing a blithe opinion piece to the uninitiated, but having a clear second layer of meaning to those who know how to read it.

There are throwaway lines propping up globalism (“how little nature notices national borders”), and brief praise for China’s authoritarian government vs the West’s “slapdash” approach and “tardy lockdowns”, but those are B plots.

The story here is “hey guys, this all worked much better than we thought it would, we could do the same thing for climate change”.

Does this mean that the pandemic is over?

Not “over”, but certainly on the decline. It’s obvious that the press are prepping the groundwork to leave Covid behind, and turn their focus to the next stage of the Great Reset.

But, all that said, it will be a difficult sell. Harder than Covid, in some ways, because people are so much more used to climate alarm calls. For want of a better word, they have become somewhat immune to it.

What’s more, the establishment clearly knows this, because they’re keeping the pandemic warm on the backburner. Ready to bring it back to the boil should the need arise.

We’re being told the disease will be endemic, but that “Delta has changed the endgame” and that “herd immunity is impossible”

The pandemic is becoming a new forever war, akin to the war on terror. We won’t ever win it, but it will disappear from headlines until they need to shock or distract people.

Marr, for example, doesn’t declare the pandemic over, instead he says:

The pandemic is not, of course, yet over. It will end raggedly and slowly; and politicians who proclaim victory will quickly sound foolish[…]it will probably feel as if we have beaten this thing.

Before adding the ubiquitous riders that will keep the “threat” of the Covid alive in the public imagination:

The Delta variant may be the most contagious virus ever [and] can reinfect the double-vaccinated […] Britain is going to face a period of “bumpiness” in transmission rates and uncertainty about the near future […] the winter may be tough […] Booster jabs will become routine.”

There’s clearly a plan in place. He practically spells it out, claiming Covid19 will be pushed off the front pages…

Though not every day…this will be bumpy. There will be sudden scares about the emergence of a possible new variant somewhere unexpected; and urgent questions about biosecurity at Heathrow. There will be stories about outbreaks in care homes, or a sudden spike in infections in particular age or ethnic groups.

Do you see what he’s saying yet?

The pandemic isn’t over, it will just “feel” like it is, while they fill the front pages with big red numbers about climate change.

If people don’t respond to those big red numbers the way they should…well, there just might be another variant. Maybe a racist one.

The pandemic has served its purpose, but they won’t end it yet. Not until they’re sure everyone is good and scared of something else.

So what comes next?

It’s not hard to see exactly where this all leads. Mostly because they’re telling us.

Establishment voices have already talked about “climate lockdowns”, and the UK’s Science Advisor Patrick Vallance wrote, last week, about how:

nothing short of transforming society will avert catastrophe”

This isn’t new. This has been bubbling along in the background for months (I have already written two articles about it), but the message is being refined into a simple three-step process:

1. Point out all the ways Covid and climate change are similar.
2. Emphasise that Climate Change is much more of a threat than Covid. Use the word “existential. A lot.
3. Argue that since we were willing to change to fight Covid, we should do the same for climate.[optional]

You can see it in Marr’s article.

The comparison:

The interesting thing is that so much of the world’s experience during the pandemic relates quite closely to the climate crisis – our human interrelatedness, the importance of effective governance, the centrality of science and its communication.

Followed by the “covid is worse” [my emphasis]:

Of course, the two challenges are different. So far, a little over 4.3 million people have died from Covid. Australian and Chinese academics estimate that around five million people are dying each year from the effects of climate change […] Suffice it to say that even if the Delta variant is the most infectious disease mankind has so far faced, the climate emergency is at another level – a reshaper of geography, highly unpredictable and, in short, existential for the planet and its inhabitants.

Patrick Vallance does the same in his article in the Guardian, and then again in The Times. There are several others along the same lines, such as this one from the Hill, or this one from the International Monetary Fund.

It’s also apparent that the same tactics of demonising any opposition and attempting to turn it into an opportunity to virtue-signal will be used. There are lots of articles comparing “covid denial” and “climate denial”, or otherwise attempting to politicise the issue.

So, the way they’re going to talk about (or should we say say “market”?) climate change action is fairly clear. But what are these hypothetical actions going to be?

Are we seeing any hints as to what this “transformation of society” might entail? Or what these “tough decisions” could be?

Well, there were whispers of climate lockdowns, but they have died away since the outraged reaction. There’s always talk of other schemes, like limiting flights, outlawing beef and “personal carbon allowances”, but these are hardly new.

Andrew Marr’s article contains a couple of hints. But the only specific policy he mentions is forcing households to replace their boilers (“at a high cost to millions of families”), and this somewhat creepy allusion to the importance of the Deep State:

A final lesson is that Westminster and the state are two very different things. The state includes the NHS, national science labs, networks of experts […] I now feel we should spend less time on the distracting national puppet show and more time thinking about what I might delicately call the deeper sources of authority.”

(Attacking democracy for hampering “drastic efforts” is a concerning trend, one to watch out for)

Mostly, though, the mainstream voices are being very quiet on specifics. I suspect partly to stop the spread of what Marr calls “an outbreak of conspiracy theories in new media”, but mostly because they’re not sure exactly what they want to do yet, and they don’t believe the majority mentally prepared enough.

The COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, this November, will be something to keep an eye on. Expect a lot of scary stories in the weeks leading up to it, and then a lot of “policy recommendations” in its wake.

We’re pivoting to climate change guys. Great Reset Phase II is upon us.