The Bamboozlers of Belém
inspired by the recent disasters that plagued COP30
(UN Climate Change Conference) in Belém, Brazil
The shamans of the earth and air,
_Messiahs of the seas,
The saints of planetary care,
_Redeemers of the trees,
The wizards of the wind and waves,
Have been exposed as witless knaves.
Their jet-set-footprint summit seethed.
_It floundered in a flood.
Smoke charred the forest air they breathed.
_Emissions boiled their blood.
The gods of Gaia’s greenest meeting
Fanned the flames of global heating.
These corkers of the cattle toots,
_These taxers of our breath,
Are too big for their savior-boots—
_Their bumbling brush with death
Proves Murphy’s Law and kismet’s rules
Mock lying swine and eco-fools.
Poet’s Note:
Top COP30 Management Fails
• Tents collapsed.
• Sessions delayed or canceled.
• Delegates lost in the venue.
• Shuttles and hotels overbooked.
• Microphones and translation systems broke.
• Fire forced evacuation.
• Wi-Fi didn’t work.
• Draft agreements were vague.
• Indigenous groups blocked from access.
• Flooded walkways and infrastructure chaos…
and the list goes on.
Susan Jarvis Bryant is a poet originally from the U.K., now living on the Gulf Coast of Texas.
Great job, Susan. I watched video of the disaster that it was. 100,000 trees clear-cut to make way for their private runway? Where were the save the rainforest advocates? And to ban the indigenous? Hypocrites all! To call them “eco-fools” is too kind.
Cheryl, I have to admit when I read of the preparations for this summit I was horrified. To think, a couple of years back I was fuming over save-the-planet gurus’ carnivorous menu as bugs were being promoted for we the lesser mortals… and now!! Gosh, how the hubris and hypocrisy has risen to heights beyond the most rampant imagination. I don’t believe there’s anywhere for the Babylon Bee to go with this latest news… it’s crazy-making. I agree with you on the “eco-fools” being “too kind” and have added a “lying swine” to give a fairer assessment… although, I will admit to being tempted to cuss to the rafters and had to rein myself in big time. Cheryl, thank you!
Someday perhaps, if these feckless morons keep trying, they will get something right. It’s a long shot, but you never know. Until then, all their hot air only serves to help future agricultural gains, which will be needed to feed a growing world population. UN = Uninvited Nincompoops.
C.B., “feckless morons” indeed! I wanted to bandy a few F-words about, and feckless is perfect. “Uninvited Nincompoops” is the icing on your comment cake, and I thank you for your wholeheartedly for your sanity.
Susan, you’re getting faster and faster!
This stupid Climate Change Conference only ended yesterday (Nov. 21), and already you’ve whipped up this butt-kicking satire!
When an ideology collapses intellectually, and it becomes clear that it is a jacked-up fraud, it’s pure poetic justice that it also unravels organizationally and managerially, as this Belem gathering did.
Cheryl’s comment blew my mind — these self-important buffoons clear-cut 100,000 trees to make some damned runway for their planes? They refused to allow indigenous people to attend? Isn’t this ecologically disastrous, and racist to boot? Do they have a “Get Out of Jail Free” card that lets them ruin a forest, and treat natives as undesirables?
Susan, I’m glad you called them shamans, messiahs, saints, redeemers, wizards, saviors, and gods. They are simply a manifestation of the nascent New World Religion — in this case, the devotees of the Cult of the Environment and the exploded “Climate Change” myth. They are the self-appointed high priests of this new faith. I’m also glad you called them out as “witless knaves.”
Joe, thank you very much for your astute observations. To call these hubristic hucksters out as “a manifestation of the nascent New World Religion” is spot on. Their behavior is indeed “ecologically disastrous, and racist” – and anyone who is unaware that they’re policies are detrimental to humankind has a rude awakening when we the people are crushed under a their net-zero thumb.
Absolutely love this poem, Susan — it reeks with the disgust you justifiably feel for these ecological woke charlatans. I share in that disgust for these woke dementors. It’s all performance art. It was always performance art, just like the papal blessing of the glacial ice imported from Greenland to Rome. At fabulous expense. But that was just a drop in the bucket compared to this travesty. Here’s an interesting irony for you: “Belem” is Portuguese for Bethlehem. The woke betrayal of Christian virtue and hope is complete.
100,000 trees. What a fury-inducing crime.
Brian, thank you so much for your oh-so-sadly-true comment. It seems to me this in-your-face performance art is getting bigger and brasher by the day. It’s as if those in starring roles are quite happy to flaunt their fakery with no fear of consequence, and that’s the worrying part. Such behavior smacks of a lawless society. Thank you for your Belém translation. I looked it up this morning and the first thing that sprung to mind was the sheer gall of those who claim to have the all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful might of deities choosing a Biblically named venue. This is what inspired me to use the religious terminology in the poem to describe these false prophets of doom. And yes, 100,000 trees – the wicked hypocrisy of it!
here’s a climate change poem from 1989: EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT PRODUCTION OF CARBON DIOXIDE AND METHANE FROM HUMAN ACTIVITIES HAS ALREADY BEGUN TO CHANGE THE CLIMATE, AND THAT RADICAL STEPS MUST BE TAKEN TO HALT ANY FURTHER CHANGE
Reasoning from first principles bought the Hemlock,
All men are brothers hung upon the cross,
Grave Malthus prophesied,
And Father Darwin scanned the tangled bank.
“And yet it moves” — No Concord jail
Can hold the forests’ slashed succession or the loss
From grim satanic mills,
And coal and guns and butter all go blank.
Deny it, Slashers — all of it was true.
Your acid smoke is drifting low
The bodies of the trees you killed
have melted ice to flood your bedroom suites.
You cannot kill forever and take money for the dead —
For soil and for Auks, for Pigeons and for Buffalo.
The World is real and finite —
but still your bloated economics grows and cheats.
Able to think, perhaps, as well as we,
You turned our Science to your selfish gains
Muskrats without predators, you ate the World’s sweet marsh
and ran more madly as you stripped it —
Slave ships and black lung mines, Valdez and Stalingrad —
All summed into the greenhouse panes.
Thinking like men, you lived like Rotifers,
Small swirling heads filtering the Earth for money profit.
But now the World has warmed, the ozone thinned,
The sky has summarized your lives.
Your never-make-a-difference has come false.
So let us, wimps and dreamers, undo Earth’s disrepair,
Bind up your wounds with peat and flowers,
Sequester carbon as the forest thrives,
Living wood and leaf scour the skies,
And orchids bloom where seething Sphagnum purifies the air.
Tlell, Haida Gwaii, April & May 1989 – The truth-tellers alluded to in the first stanza are Socrates, Jesus, Robert Malthus, Charles Darwin, Galileo Galilei, and Henry David Thoreau, the title is borrowed from a Scientific American article.)
Fred, gotta love your passion. Science rests on good predictions. Sorry to say, but by that measure alone, the Existential Climate Change Threat simply hasn’t panned out… just a few failed predictions:
Predictions vs. Reality (1989–2025)
“Entire nations wiped out by 2000”
Reality: No countries disappeared. Low-lying island nations like the Maldives still exist.
Failed
Mass displacement / eco-refugees by 2000
Reality: Some localized flooding occurs, but there was no mass displacement on the predicted scale.
Failed
Global mean sea-level rise of 50–200 cm by 2100
Reality: As of 2025, global mean sea level has risen about 10–15 cm since 1900, far below the extreme predictions for the first decades.
Exaggerated / failed so far
Catastrophic warming and widespread crop failures by 2000
Reality: Temperatures rose modestly; agriculture expanded in many regions due to CO₂ fertilization and improved technology. No global crop collapse occurred.
Failed
Inundation of low-lying coastal areas like Bangladesh by 2000
Reality: Bangladesh has had localized flooding (normal in delta regions), but no catastrophic inundation or national-scale disaster.
Failed
Runaway global warming leading to “irreversible collapse”
Reality: Climate is still variable, but there is no evidence of runaway collapse. CO₂ levels rose, yes, but catastrophic feedbacks did not materialize.
Failed / exaggerated
There are far, far more:
https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/
“It’s cruel corporate greedsters who spurn the fair path:
A liveable world we could have at their will.
Since the day that Arrhenius first did the math,
They’ve denied & bribed as they’ve drilled.”
Some of us are old enough to remember that through the century before the air pollution-induced cooling of the 1970s it was universally accepted that the planet was warming, and the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide are the same now as they were in 1905 when “Arrhenius first did the math.” While some extreme predictions may not have been accurate, the Alliance of World Scientists” provides the collective international voice of thousands of scientists regarding the global climate crisis and environmental trends with the intent to turn accumulated knowledge into action.” Here are the summary points of their latest report from – https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf149 – A summary of key findings:
• The year 2024 set a new mean global surface temperature record, signaling an escalation of climate upheaval.
• Currently, 22 of 34 planetary vital signs are at record levels.
• Warming may be accelerating, likely driven by reduced aerosol cooling, strong cloud feedbacks, and a darkening planet absorbing more heat.
• The human enterprise is driving ecological overshoot. Population, livestock, meat consumption, and gross domestic product are all at record highs, with an additional approximately 1.3 million humans and 0.5 million ruminant livestock added weekly.
• In 2024, fossil fuel energy consumption hit a record high, with coal, oil, and gas all at peak levels. Combined solar and wind consumption also set a new record but was 31 times lower than fossil fuel energy consumption.
• So far, in 2025, atmospheric carbon dioxide is at a record level, likely worsened by a sudden drop in land carbon uptake partly due to El Niño and intense forest fires.
• Global fire-related tree cover loss reached an all-time high, with fires in tropical primary forest up 370% over 2023, fueling rising emissions and biodiversity loss.
• Ocean heat content reached a record high, contributing to the largest coral bleaching event ever recorded, affecting 84% of reef area.
• So far, in 2025, Greenland and Antarctic ice mass are at record lows. The Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets may be passing tipping points, potentially committing the planet to meters of sea-level rise.
• Deadly and costly disasters surged, with Texas flooding killing at least 135 people, the California wildfires alone exceeding US$250 billion in damages, and climate-linked disasters since 2000 globally reaching more than US$18 trillion.
• Climate change is endangering thousands of wild animal species; more than 3500 species are now at risk and there is new evidence of climate-related animal population collapses.
• The Atlantic Gulf Stream circulation is weakening, threatening major climate disruptions.
• Climate change is already affecting water quality and availability, undermining agricultural productivity, sustainable water management, and increasing the risk of water-related conflict.
• A dangerous hothouse Earth trajectory may now be more likely due to accelerated warming, self-reinforcing feedbacks, and tipping points.
• Climate change mitigation strategies are available, cost effective, and urgently needed. From forest protection and renewables to plant-rich diets, we can still limit warming if we act boldly and quickly.
• Social tipping points can drive rapid change. Even small, sustained nonviolent movements can shift public norms and policy, highlighting a vital path forward amid political gridlock and ecological crisis.
• There is a need for systems change that links individual technical approaches with broader societal transformation, governance, policies, and social movements.
“We are hurtling toward climate chaos. The planet’s vital signs are flashing red. The consequences of human-driven alterations of the climate are no longer future threats but are here now. This unfolding emergency stems from failed foresight, political inaction, unsustainable economic systems, and misinformation. Almost every corner of the biosphere is reeling from intensifying heat, storms, floods, droughts, or fires. The window to prevent the worst outcomes is rapidly closing.”
Fred, thanks, but a few points are not realistic:
Record temperatures and CO₂: Global temperatures fluctuate naturally; short-term records are expected and not proof of catastrophic anthropogenic trends. CO₂ has risen, yes, but causation vs. correlation is still debated.
“Planetary vital signs” at record levels: Highlighting high population, livestock, and GDP as evidence of catastrophe conflates human activity with ecological crisis. Growth and technology improve resilience; the framing is alarmist.
Fossil fuel consumption and renewables: Record fossil fuel use reflects global energy demand and economic development, not a moral failing. The claim that renewables are insufficient ignores the dramatic efficiency and adoption gains in recent decades.
Forest fires, ice mass, ocean heat: Fire frequency and ice mass vary naturally; attributing every extreme event to CO₂ ignores long-term historical variability. Headlines cherry-pick short-term anomalies.
Biodiversity threats: Species loss is real in some areas, but connecting it directly to human-driven climate change overstates the case. Habitat destruction, land use, and invasive species are bigger drivers.
Tipping points and hothouse Earth: These are speculative worst-case projections, not established facts. Predictive models have historically overestimated trends, giving institutions a political and funding incentive to err on the side of alarm.
Social tipping points and “urgent action”: Mobilizing public fear benefits governments, NGOs, and certain academics financially and politically—just like any other sector. Incentives matter.
Bottom line: Many cited “crises” are exaggerated or poorly linked to human CO₂. Realistic climate discussion should separate natural variability from policy-driven alarmism and scrutinize the incentives behind these reports.
The point of my poem, Fred, is to highlight the wicked hypocrisy of the self-appointed saviors of our planet. This line of your poem leaps out at me: “The bodies of the trees you killed” – 100,000 of them were slaughtered to create a venue for the beef-eating, Champagne-swilling fat cats to quaff, scoff, and conjure up new and more expensive ways to reach Net-Zero for those who can barely afford to heat their houses and feed their families, let alone globe trot in a private jet.
Well, it’s said that some of the largest delegations to the conference were from the fossil fuel industry, and there are a lot of fossil-fueling countries who were promoting their business interests rather than climatic amelioration (including tar-sandy Canadians), so the footprint of the conference was in large part due to those who were trying to thwart its goals. Billionaires are a social as well as an environmental problem, and ought to be taxed back much closer to the maximum sustainable personal income (the North American poverty line).
Susan, your poem is deliciously spot-on. You and I had this whole scam clocked years before we ever met— you back in old Blighty and me here in South Texas. We’ve lived long enough to watch the climate scare begin its unraveling, only to be swapped out for an AI-enabled boom in energy, connectivity, and surveillance.
The upside, of course, is that there will always be plenty of satirical poems to write!
Biggest Fan, thank you for your support, your sanity, and your care for the future of humankind.
Thank you for alerting us all to such a farcical display of conceit, hypocrisy, and miscreant behavior capped by consuming and destroying the very thing to which they paid feckless homage. I am as outraged as you and commend your poem to be read to every one of them in condemnation of their criminal and callous acts of lunacy. Now if we can only secretly insert you into their midst on their program at their next meeting under the guise of a classical climatological poet we might bring some of them to their senses. On second thought, probably not, since they are too wrapped up in themselves and are receiving stipends and grants that bring them money and notoriety they misconstrue as fame.
Spot on —as an actual scientist ( with degrees in the ‘hard’ sciences) –a real one not one of these so called climate scientists– I despair at the continued promulgation of the warmist nonsense–the COPs are huge excess fests at our expense– they mean nothing– hopefully they will fade away as the advancing years show that the predictions of doom goblins like Thunberg are just wild hysteria. Well done Susan.
In their own words:
“The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”
Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
“The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.”
Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
Sir John Houghton, First chairman of IPCC
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
Now on to the Club of Rome.
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
Alexander King Co-Founder of the Club of Rome, (premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations) from his 1991 book The First Global Revolution
“We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Prof. Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Biology and Global Change. Professor Schneider was among the earliest and most vocal proponents of man-made global warming and a lead author of many IPCC reports. He was a member of the Club of Rome.
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation and member of the Club of Rome.
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
“[The Earth Summit will play an important role in] reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance.”
“The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.”
Maurice Strong, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Al Gore’s mentor and executive member of the Club of Rome.
“I believe it is appropriate to have an ‘over-representation’ of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience.”
Al Gore, member of the Club of Rome. He was also the largest shareholder of Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which tried to become the world’s central carbon trading body.
Maurice Strong sat on the board of directors for CCX.
Back before he became U.S. President Obama served on the board of directors for the Joyce Foundation when it gave CCX nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which called itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”
Essentially Obama helped fund the profiteers of the carbon taxation program that he then steered steered through Congress.
“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘international disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”
Mikhail Gorbachev, Former President of the Soviet Union, member of the Club of Rome
“We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”
David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive member, former Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, founder of the Trilateral Commission, executive member of the World Economic Forum and donated the land on which the United Nations stands. Speaking at a U.N. Business Conference, Sept. 14, 1994
“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.
“Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure ‘one world’, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
David Rockefeller, Memoirs, page 405
Every one of these men and women have been replaced by others. We only know a few of their names, but we know their goals… the New World Order. By whatever name you’d like to call it… it is up and running. Mike Bryant, 2025, SCP comments moderator and erstwhile plumber.