Could the wheels finally be coming off the greatest hoax of the last fifty years? Is it too much to hope that the upside of the coronavirus may well be, as has been pointed out by numerous writers in these pages, the decline of the climate change alarmism myth? Could it be that a relatively serious and genuine global health crisis has thrown into stark focus not only the high cost of tampering with economic activity but also the utter stupidity of pandering to overtly political agendas built entirely on flawed modelling by so-called ‘experts’?

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine ‘Hero of the Environment’ and Green Book Award Winner. A regular guest on Sky News Australia’s climate-sceptical Outsiders program (hosted by this magazine’s editor), this mild-mannered, softly-spoken Californian environmentalist has impressed audiences with his practical approach to what he sees as a genuine issue – the need to reduce global carbon emissions. Having been a leading renewables advocate, he underwent a dramatic Damascene conversion several years ago and now advocates nuclear energy as the only solution to climate change (in which he still believes). He was of course roundly attacked for his new position yet persists, claiming that widespread access to cheap, clean nuclear power is the only logical next step for mankind to take in its ongoing quest to gain more energy out of less land space.

This week he really set the sceptical cat among the luvvy pigeons, by publicly apologising for his role in climate alarmism. He wrote in Forbes magazine: On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologise for the climate scare we created over the past 30 years. Climate change is happening. It’s just not the end of the world. It’s not even our most serious environmental problem. I may seem like a strange person to be saying all of this. I have been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30. But as an energy expert asked by the US congress to provide -objective testimony, and invited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to serve as a reviewer of its next assessment report, I feel an obligation to apologise for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.

Fair enough. Apology accepted, old bean. So what was the response of Forbes readership? Well, we’ll never know, because in what is becoming as monotonously regular as it is Orwellian and insidious, Forbes quickly buckled to the Left and removed the article. Michael Shellenberger’s apology has been cancelled.

That this is a disgrace to professional journalism should go without saying, but increasingly, ‘cancel culture’ is turning our once proud and free democratic press into frightened, cowering toadies jumping at every shadow and ‘taking a knee’ to every wish and whim of the ‘woke’ totalitarians. The thought police, it appears, now have a ‘wokehold’ on us that is strangling our liberties and starving our brains of intellectual oxygen. Be afraid.

But Mr Shellenberger does much more in his apology than merely say sorry. He pops the balloon on over a dozen myths that have been spruiked by the climate alarmism industry; many of them lies and distortions being taught to our vulnerable and impressionable children in order to frighten them into supporting the renewable energy agenda.

Here’s just a taster from Mr Shellenberger’s balloon-popping frenzy: The Amazon is not ‘the lungs of the world’; Climate change is not making natural disasters worse; Fires have declined 25 per cent around the world since 2003;The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California; Wood fuel is far worse for people and wildlife than fossil fuels.

Wow. Australia in particular should take note. And there’s plenty more contained in Mr Shellenberger’s new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which is already racing up the Amazon charts and the apology is clearly designed to advertise.

Yet even if every one of Mr Shellenberger’s claims is only partially true, or if only half of his claims are accurate (both of which are unlikely given his well-established scientific rigour), they throw the entire climate change and renewables discussion open for renewed debate. Clearly, our participation in the Paris Agreement is recklessly dangerous to our economic prosperity and national security. Worst of all, what this book and the reaction to the apology show is that the tentacles of the ‘renewables industrial complex’ have a stranglehold on our political and academic worlds and are traumatising our children on a fraudulent premise. This is unforgivable.

This magazine, alone in Australia, remains committed to debunking the false claims of the global warming myth and exposing the rot at the dark heart of the climate alarmists’ agenda.