"It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, best-sellers and research grants"

The climatastrophe has been a terrible mistake. It diverted attention from real environmental problems, cost a fortune, impoverished consumers, perpetuated poverty, frightened young people into infertility, wasted years of our time, undermined democracy and corrupted science.

Shell and BP have returned to being oil companies, to the delight of their shareholders. Ford is about to cease production of electric pickups that nobody wants. Hundreds of other companies are dropping their climate targets. Australia has backed out of hosting next year’s climate conference.

Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in the law or practice.

"The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat"

Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming.

"Quite why it became mandatory among those concerned about climate change to support these unreliables so obsessively is hard to fathom."

throughout the tech world of the American west coast, emoting about climate suddenly seems like a luxury belief compared with the need to sign contracts with firm power suppliers, mostly burning natural gas – or get left behind in the AI race.