Greenwash crusade gets hotter

Eco-catastrophist miner Andrew Forrest is living proof that a lot of money goes a long way when it comes to getting your opinions heard in the prestigious halls of academia. The Fortescue iron ore chairman is on a global crusade to scare people about the potential for what he considers an apocalyptic-like possibility of lethal humidity from climate change. On Friday Dr Forrest kicked off the Australian leg, which will include keynote lectures involving the University of Sydney, the University of NSW, the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the University of Western Australia, as well as an academic roundtable in Canberra hosted by the Australian National University.

Dr Forrest’s PowerPoint presentation starts with the obvious – “The world’s greatest greenwash” – before warning of the potential dangers of runaway heating leading to hallucinations, seizure, coma, heart attack, organ failure and death. According to the PowerPoint presentation, hundreds of millions if not billions of lives are at risk. Ironically, while reliable airconditioning might save you, he says, power isn’t reliable during heatwaves.

The potential for lethal humidity does exist in the scientific literature, where it is theorised principally under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most extreme high-emission scenario (SSP) 5-8.5, which the latest synthesis report found to be highly unlikely to occur. It was, however, the plot of Kim Stanley Robinson’s fiction novel, The Ministry for the Future, in which 20 million people are killed by persistent “wet-bulb” temperatures of more than 35C in India.

A Fortescue spokesperson said Dr Forrest, who has published on ocean health and plastics, had not published any peer-reviewed papers on lethal humidity but was working with Cambridge University environmental data science professor Emily Shuckburgh on a paper on “lethal humidity and positive power”. Nonetheless, he has made the issue the centrepiece of a lecture tour that has included some of the world’s most prestigious universities including Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, Delft University, MIT, Harvard, Brookings Institution, the University of California and Stanford. The Forrest PowerPoint presents a frightful future before branding Fortescue the good guys and calling on governments around the world to follow Joe Biden’s lead on the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides massive subsidies for industry, to which Fortescue has availed itself. “Every country needs its own Inflation Reduction Act,” says Dr Forrest. “Immediately starting at APEC.” Left unsaid is the fact Fortescue remains one of the world’s big emitters, using 633 million litres of diesel fuel in financial 2023 for which it receives $300m in federal tax credits.