Western civilisation has ditched evidence-based rigour for adolescent hysteria

There is something sinister in the stiff mountain air at Davos this year. As ever, the spectacle is almost burlesque in its grotesqueness: the world’s elite has descended on the luxury ski resort in their private jets to discuss global warming over pan-seared Indonesian soy cutlets cooked by a celebrity vegan chef flown in from Canada. But underneath the seedy hypocrisy lingers an even murkier mendacity: an unthinking consensus on how to “save the planet”.

Take the speech by Greta Thunberg, who rattled off Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures pertaining to requisite cuts in carbon emissions. “I’ve been repeating these numbers over and over again,” she droned as gormless CEOs and UN apparatchiks blinked at the hoodie-clad managtivist standing before them, grinding on about missed deadlines and squandered targets.

Greta’s bland, corporate-friendly strategy is intriguing; it reinforces her ruse – that the science is mind-numbingly clear, the necessary actions are unquestionable, and that her task is simply to “continue to repeat” it until we are bored.

Naturally, Donald Trump was having none of it. He let rip at this paper-shufflers’ PR stunt, dismissing the “predictions of the apocalypse” and “prophets of doom”. In his own ham-fisted way, the president was groping at – if not quite grasping – the disconcerting truth. Global warming is happening, but the climate science itself is messy, mystifying and ambivalent; the certainty with which eco-warriors present their case is thus disgracefully dishonest.