Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent Cop summit in Belem, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to secure new pledges for a cut in fossil fuels, Cop achieved less than nothing. The venue caught fire, the air conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper. Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he conceded that global warming ‘will not lead to humanity’s demise’ after he closed the policy and advocacy office of his climate philanthropy group, is just the latest nail in the coffin.

Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, acid rain, ozone, sperm counts

In October, the Net Zero Banking Alliance shut down after JPMorgan Chase, Citi-group, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs led a stampede of banks out of the door. Shell and BP have returned to being oil companies, to the delight of their shareholders. Ford is about to cease production of electric pick-ups that nobody wants. Hundreds of other companies are dropping their climate targets. Australia has backed out of hosting next year’s climate conference.

According to an analysis by the Washington Post, in the US it is not just the Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democrat party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European parliament has now voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping to fight climate change.

It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, bestsellers and research grants. 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 law or practice.

But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom–laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realised the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, cancelled, blacklisted, called a ‘denier’ and generally deemed evil. In 2010 in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was........

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