How to Sell a Scam

I am old enough to remember when the Maldives were drowning due to global warming. 

Back in the days when television was broadcast in 4×3 and Al Gore was a thing, the Maldives and Tuvalu both got on the map as early victims of the West’s ravenous appetite for fossil fuels, destined to drown due to our slavish devotion to the burning of dead dinosaurs and plankton. 

People were drowning. Coral reefs were getting bleached. Whales were being boiled alive, screaming for us to save them. Cabinet meetings were being held underwater, begging for…foreign aid. 

Which, by the way, they dutifully got. Lots of foreign aid has streamed into climate endangered islands, and no doubt it has done real good. 

Lots of it, in fact. 

It’s worth noting that after their theatrical ’emergency’ meeting underwater with politicians in diving gear signing a UN climate declaration, they received a multi million dollar ‘climate rescue fund’ which they spent on brand new beachside airports.
It’s also worth noting that…

— Psychedelia Smith (@PsychedeliaSmi4) August 13, 2026

In 2004, the BBC warned the Maldives were “soon to be uninhabitable,” claiming sea levels were rising 0.9 cm per year and that 80% of the islands could vanish within a century. 

More than two decades later, though, reality says otherwise. The Maldives haven’t sunk, they’ve exploded with growth: 12 new airports, expanded international terminals, record tourism of over 2 million visitors a year, and more than 170 resorts. 

Instead of drowning, this so-called “paradise in peril” has shown no statistically significant sea level rise since the 1980s, according to satellite data. 

Here we have another climate catastrophe headline completely undone by time.

Twenty-two years ago, here is how the BBC described a visit to the Maldives, a dying hellhole that needed our help badly. They needed international aid to deal with the impending doom the West created, and they needed us to impoverish ourselves by stopping the insane use of fossil fuels — something the British government proceeded to do. 

To visit the Maldives is to witness the slow death of a nation.

For as well as being blessed with sun-kissed paradise islands and pale, white sands, this tourist haven is cursed with mounting evidence of an environmental catastrophe.

The country is portrayed by travel companies as a tropical paradise

To the naked eye, the signs of climate change are almost imperceptible, but government scientists fear the sea level is rising up to 0.9cm a year.

Since 80% of its 1,200 islands are no more than 1m above sea level, within 100 years the Maldives could become uninhabitable.

The country’s 360,000 citizens would be forced to evacuate.

The Maldives’ survival as a sovereign nation is truly at stake.    

No wonder it was the first country to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, which sets targets for cuts in industrialised countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.

No wonder that Male, the capital, is surrounded by a 3m-high (9.8ft) wall, which took 14 years to construct at a cost of $63m. Unable to foot the bill themselves, the government happily accepted aid from Japan, which paid for 99% of the cost.

But the wall offers protection for just one of the Maldives’ 200 inhabited islands – and then only against tidal surges rather than the rising sea level, the longer-term threat.

A few years back I decided to check on how the Maldives was doing. Were they becoming as extinct as the polar bear? When I decided to check in on these dying islands, I found this on their website. 

Since then, things have only gotten worse. Nobody will leave them alone!

Yes, life is hell in the Maldives, where you have to learn to scuba dive to even have a government meeting these days.

There’s a reason why I compare liberal politics to organized crime. It’s because liberal politics, or essentially almost all politics, is akin to organized crime. As bad as it is, though, the disorganized crime of radical politics is even worse, and climate change politics combine the two in the most toxic of all brews. 

Well, not quite. COVID politics was far more toxic, and DSA-style communism is a step even farther, which is why even the Organized Crime Democrats are fighting like hell to kill it. 

By now we should recognize the scams as they come along, and many of us do. We are far more cynical today than we were back in the 1990s or the 1970s, when fewer of us immediately scoffed when “experts” told us that overpopulation would kill us or that global warming would cause mass extinctions the world had never seen since the dinosaurs died off. 

Unfortunately, a large proportion of the population hasn’t learned the lesson, and with new generations being born those of us who have die off all too quickly.

There’s a new sucker born every minute. 

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