The story behind climate alarmism
Say goodbye to the sun.
It must have been in the news that day because the adults were talking about it. The sun was going to flame out!
At 4 years old, I understood the sun was very important to my life. “When is the sun going to stop shining?” I asked my parents.
They told me I should not worry about the sun dying because it still had a billion years or so to live. But a “billion years” meant nothing to me. My time scale was only now until my next birthday, and now, I thought, I am not going to make it to my next birthday.
I recovered from my scare before my next birthday because the adults told me not to worry about the sun dying. It was not going to happen in my lifetime.
But today, adults tell children our carbon dioxide emissions are going to end life on our planet in 6 to 12 years. That the world will end before they grow up. Then their elementary school teachers, high school teachers, and college teachers tell them.
These kids grow up to be zombies. They have been indoctrinated. Their minds are, maybe, permanently warped to reject all evidence that shows our carbon dioxide emissions do not cause dangerous climate change. They may as well be connected to Star Trek’s BORG. Their minds are wired to their controllers.
Fear is the greatest motivator. When humans accept a belief because of fear, sometimes they cannot recover. They can’t comprehend evidence that their fear is not warranted. Fear supersedes logic.
Witch doctors, tribal leaders, and “fire and brimstone” preachers learned that a long time ago. To control the people, instill fear in the people.
Today, we have two generations of people who have grown up with the belief that human carbon dioxide emissions cause serious climate change.
The importance of the philosophy of science
Very few scientists with PhD degrees have studied the philosophy of science, even though “PhD” stands for “Doctor of Philosophy.” Indeed, not all PhD work requires understanding the philosophy of science.
However, the philosophy of science is critical to determine the cause of climate change. The cause of climate change is not a subject of ecology or environmental studies. The cause of climate change is a subject of theoretical physics.
If you are going to do theoretical work in physics, you must understand the philosophy of science like you understand basic calculus. Scientists who believe human emissions cause climate change simply do not understand of the philosophy of science. They approach science incorrectly.
I was fortunate to have studied the “philosophy of science” under Professor John Kemeny while I was a teaching fellow in physics at Dartmouth College in 1959. Kemeny opened my mind to a whole new world on how to think.
Born in Budapest in 1926, Kemeny came to America in 1940. As a mathematician, he worked in the theoretical division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos from 1945 to 1948, with fellow Hungarians, John von Neumann and Leo Szilard. While working on his PhD, he was a special assistant to Albert Einstein from 1948 to 1949.
He was such a remarkable teacher that I can still “see and hear” him lecturing to his classes. He is a co-inventor of the Basic computer language.
I took his classes, “Probability and Markov Chains” and “The Philosophy of Science.” Both courses turned out to be critical to my PhD thesis.
Robert wrote to me on December 21,
I just discovered your webpage. Professor Kemeny would have been delighted. I took his philosophy of science course in 1964 with 6 other students. He sat on the corner of a desk and mesmerized me. I have treasured my copy of his book, “A Philosopher Looks at Science”.
I cannot understand the current popular deviation from scientific principles by such as Michael Mann and his pack. How can our society draw real scientists back into the search for truth when grants are awarded only to alarmists or to those who propose programs that destroy our progress in harnessing economical energy?
Thank you
Climate alarmism is born of politics, not science.
From the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, to the Earth Summit in June 1992, climate alarmism was born and raised in politics.
Maurice Strong’s lifetime goal was to transform the UN into a world government. He founded the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). He argued that rich Western countries had benefited by exploiting the earth’s natural resources. Therefore, he argued, the Western countries must fund the poorer countries so their economies can catch up with America. President Obama supported this UN idea.
Under Strong’s leadership, the 1972 United Nations Stockholm Conference made the environment an international agenda. Strong commissioned the report by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, “Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet,” to help promote the Principles of the Stockholm Declaration.
Environmentalism incorporates the climate scare.
In 1978, Professor Bert Bolin of Sweden and his tiny band of meteorologists proposed the rise in atmospheric CO2 causes a rise in temperature, and human CO2 emissions may be bad for mankind.
In October 1985, UNEP and the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO) sponsored the first international conference on climate change in Villach, Austria. Bolin presented his theory with an urgent call to action. Strong made Bolin’s climate theory a key part of UNEP and thereafter protected the theory from critique by the scientific community.
The Brundtland report, 1987
Strong was a member of the Brundtland Commission. The Brundtland report warned that human CO2 could raise global temperatures. These increased temperatures, it claimed, would harm agriculture, “raise sea levels, flood coastal cities and disrupt national economies.” The report called for a major global effort to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. It promoted the idea of “sustainability” as a possible solution to human-caused environmental problems.
IPCC, 1988
In 1988, UNEP and WMO formed the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The U.S. government promoted and funded the IPCC.
The IPCC appointed Bolin to be its first chairman and his supporter, John Houghton, to lead “Working Group 1” that would produce IPCC’s climate reports. IPCC’s goal is to produce reports that show human emissions cause climate change. IPCC’s goal is NOT to find the true cause of climate change.
In 1990, IPCC’s First Assessment Report made global headlines. It claimed human CO2 caused global warming and warned the world must reduce its CO2 emissions by 60 percent immediately to save the planet.
Environmentalists quickly adopted the IPCC climate claims because they supported their environmental agenda.
America promotes the IPCC climate fiction, 1988
In 1988, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before a Senate committee chaired by Senator Tim Wirth. Senator Al Gore was on the committee. Hansen predicted the world was headed for a global warming disaster.
The media produced headlines across America and cover stories in Newsweek and Time. Senator Al Gore carried the climate change agenda in America.
Earth Summit, 1992
In June 1992, Strong, Secretary General of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, chaired the conference in Rio de Janeiro, the “Earth Summit.”
US President Bush and 107 other world leaders attended. Some 20,000 climate activists and green lobby members attended. All expenses were paid by UN and government funds.
Strong’s Summit speech declared,
“A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to environmentally damaging consumption patterns. We may get to the point, where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?”
Strong founded and chaired the Earth Council Alliance where he worked with Mikhail Gorbachev to create the Earth Charter which called for a
“sustainable global society founded on the principles of respect for the Earth and life in all its diversity, economic and social justice, and a culture of peace and non-violence.”
Strong long supported global governance at the expense of national sovereignty. He said environmental mandates require the eventual dismantling of the power of the nation state:
“It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.”
“We need a system of global governance through which nations can cooperate and deal with issues they cannot deal with alone. The ultimate example is climate change.”
The UN IPCC denies science.
The IPCC 2013 report incorrectly claims,
“With a very high level of confidence, the increase in CO2 emis¬sions from fossil fuel burning and those arising from land use change are the dominant cause of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.”
“The removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence).”
Climate alarmists believe these IPCC claims without questioning the science. They reject evidence that proves their belief is wrong. They are anti-science. They are delusional about climate science.
There is ample proof that human CO2 emissions are not the dominant cause of the increase in atmospheric CO2 and are not the cause of climate change.
The climate cult is a groupthink.
Today, almost all major news media, government websites, and case law assumes the IPCC climate theory is correct. But the IPCC theory is not correct. The IPCC theory is groupthink and nothing more.
In 1972, Yale professor of psychology, Irving Janis, published the results of his study on human behavior, Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy Decisions and Fiascoes. He revised and enlarged his second edition published in 1982.
He defined the term Groupthink to describe what happens when people get caught up in a pattern of collective psychological behavior. He showed that groupthink has three distinct features:
- A group of people assume a belief without a proper appraisal of the evidence.
- To take the place of evidence, they claim their belief is shared by a ‘consensus.’
- Because their belief is not based on evidence, they defend their belief by irrational and dismissive hostility towards anyone who dares to question it. They will not engage in scientific discourse. They will reject all evidence that proves their belief is wrong.
Janis showed, with examples, how people in a groupthink make bad decisions.
In contradiction to science, people believe what they want to believe. Even intelligent people who should know better.
Facts don’t change people’s minds. Emotions change people’s minds. Climate alarmists are ruled by emotions, not science.
The scientific method
IPCC’s claim “With a very high level of confidence…” reverses the scientific method. No one can prove a theory is true. Science can only prove a theory is wrong. But IPCC and climate alarmists will not allow any evidence that proves their theory is wrong. So, they have abandoned the time-tested scientific method.
All climate alarmists are anti-science, even the ones with PhD’s.
Climate alarmists and the IPCC choose only data that seems to support their climate theory. This is called confirmation bias and it contradicts the scientific method.
Alarmists think every bad weather event proves humans cause climate change. That is invalid logic. Climate changes do not prove humans caused the change. Events do not prove their cause.
The scientific method requires scientists to test all theories. Science progresses not by claiming a theory is true but by proving a theory is false.
IPCC’s claim fails because there is significant proof the IPCC theory is wrong. Many scientists have proved the IPCC theory is wrong. I have played a small part in this effort.
My Preprint #3 proves the IPCC theory is wrong and proves all IPCC’s arguments to support its claim fail science and logic. Of course, the IPCC and climate alarmists will not acknowledge such a publication because it proves them wrong.
My last letter described the following in more detail.
My Preprint, now on edberry.com shows how the IPCC calculation of the human carbon cycle would not pass high-school level physics and math. The IPCC violates basic physics because it uses different rules for the human carbon cycle than it uses for the natural carbon cycle.
My preprint then shows what may be the first valid calculation of the human carbon cycle. It uses the same physics rules for human carbon as the IPCC uses for natural carbon. Lo and behold, when we do this it proves all human emissions from 1750 to 2020 have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by 32 ppm. This shows that natural emissions have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide by 100 ppm.
The calculations I show in my Preprint are simple calculations. A good high-school student will understand them.
“America promotes the IPCC climate fiction, 1998”
Typo in date of this heading.
Thank you for the concise history of this debacle. I look forward to the next letter. I have been trying to get letters to the editor printed to help educate some but the Bozeman paper refuses to print my work.
DMA, thank you for finding my error. I have now fixed it.
I live in Gardnerville, Nevada and would be happy to post one of your articles in the opinion page of our local paper – The Record Courier. Limit is around 400 words.
If Dr. Ed will send you my e-mail you can contact me and I will send you a sample to see if you approve. Thank you for the offer.
Everything was besutifuly put, until the name “Trump” was called in. No need for that idiot, science is all we need. Climate alarmism is a fraud, and so Is Trump.
Dear Luis,
Do you honestly think we can effectively promote climate truth to the public without political support?
We can talk about climate all day long but if we want to promote climate truth to the public, we are going to need all the political help we can get.
Like him or not, Trump happens to be the most important ally we have in our effort to promote climate truth.
Politics is not about who we like or don’t like. Politics is about working with people who share our common goal (even if we don’t like them).
Hello Ed
I guess fundamentally I support a philosophy from right of centre and believe that mankind will be best served by this approach. While we should be sympathetic to the rest of the natural world this should be in balance with progress. I feel AGW supporters are probably being misled.
I have two questions that I would like your view on.
1. I have seen a temperature record that shows over the last 500,000 years, temperature has risen sharply every 100,000 years and then falls to previous levels. We appear to be near the point where temperature having nearly peaked would begin to fall. How can the current rise be distinguished between natural and man caused?
2. I have also seen a graph showing CO2 concentration rise against temperature. It is claimed that this demonstrates CO2 is causing the temperature rise. But I fail to understand why it could not be the other way round. Is there any evidence of cause and effect?
I have read much of your recent blog and recognise my questions are not in the same league intellectually but I would feel more secure in my conviction that the current decision makers are being misinformed if my instinct is right.
Regards
Patrick Wallace
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for your questions.
The temperature record for the last 500,000 years shows a 100,000 year cycle. Each cycle includes warm periods of about 12,000 years and the remainder is an ice age. Our present warm period has lasted about 12,000 years. If the 100,000 year cycle repeats itself, the next 88,000 year ice age may be humanities next concern.
A plot of the temperature for the last 12,000 years shows periods where the temperature exceeded our present temperature. If we look at only temperature data, there is no way to distinguish a human-caused rise in temperature from a natural cause.
When we have both temperature data and CO2 data, we find temperature always changes before CO2 changes. The only way to interpret these data is to conclude temperature changes cause CO2 changes, not vice-versa.
Thank you for the short explanation. I had a discussion with a friend about climate change for the following reason: The High Court in the Netherlands have decided that to change the climate with 2 or 3 degrees C is a correct political goal as the Dutch government has submitted the Paris agreement.
I asked him: In what way can one politically decide that climate has to change that amount of heat transfer? He referred to the democratic process in which that decision was taken and hence it was correct; I had to be coöperative.
Almost the same arguments are in the mind of many people I know. One of the main reasons is that pollution and climate change, whatever that is, have interchanged by the supporters of the UN’s climate idea. CO2 is considered as a pollution threatening life, hence women will be scared. That is what the UN actually is doing.
Also the UN is supporting economists who are developing a climate orientated economy. Asking people what CO2 is, is out of order. No one I know has any clue what CO2 is and I do neither.
The dutch media has made it very difficult for people to use their brains and mind, because a known physicist Robert Dijkgraaf, who has a position at a famous US university, just argued on TV, by using his fantasy about climate, that we, w.r.t. CO2, are now in the position we were once with ozone layers. So, changing people’s mind is a very difficult task and that can’t be done by only pointing to scientific results.
Also, as in the Netherlands president Trump is blamed for everything on earth, relying on Trump’s politics or decisions will not help. Dijkgraaf also blames president Trump, explicitly. Democrats are up, republicans are down. Don’t ask what president Trump has done to improve the income of people. The democrats will impeach him, which will have the same consequence in my opinion as being incorrectly judged as a criminal. Once judged, always judged.
By the way, I don’t support your president or the democrats. He is your president, not mine.
P.S. I am interested in science although I am not a scientist and became interested in the intertwining of science and politics which reminds me of the combination of religion and politics. And I am a former teacher in math but now painting is my hobby.
Dr. Berry,
Your comments are spot on. The climate alarmists have created a golden goose for climate scientists. They can get any and every study funded by governments as long they say it needed for climate change research.
I believe that is why climate scientists go along with the IPCC even when they know that the IPCC is putting out bullshit. I believe that is why so many so-called “climate scientists” are willing to ignore the science not contradict the IPCC narrative.
If a climate scientist is willing to question any IPCC narrative, they will loose their funding. Climate science is really climate politics.
Excellent articles, I am pleased that someone with your qualifications is dismissing a theory that not only is false, but will impoverish the human race.
When this ‘theory’ was first advanced in the 1990’s, my wife and I had two young daughters with one more on the way (my son). I was terrified for their future, so I examined the evidence as closely as I was able (I have a UK degree in dentistry and UK Advanced and Ordinary Levels in the three sciences).
Ten minutes of research was all it took me to realise that we are being collectively lied to with the greatest deception since the 1930’s (Hitler & the Jews).
Please keep up the good work I will Share this on my FB page!
“Every day, some 10,000 Americans turn 18 and become eligible to vote. Over 80 percent of them are confirmed socialists, brainwashed by America’s schools, who will vote Democratic socialist. ”
‘We will beat you without firing a single bullet.” -Mohmar Khadafi
That was not a comment made by Khadafi but rather an interpretation of a speech made by Nikita Khruschev where he stated “We will bury you…” in 1956. And that is currently in question……
“We have 50 million Muslims in Europe,” Muammar Gaddafi claimed back in 2006, more realistically adding, “There are signs that Allah will grant Islam victory in Europe — without swords, without guns, without conquest — will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
https://www.meforum.org/7236/demographic-jihad-islamists-celebrate-rising
Hi Ed, I am a reader of your site from Australia, we here are the testbed for cagw BS.
At the moment on the east coast here in Australia we are in a major drought with relatively high temperatures and this natural weather event is being used by every major MSN outlet and nearly all our scientifically dumbed down politicians as PROOF that – yes an event proves the cause – and we need to blow up all our coal fired power stations, stop all coal exports, close down all industry and farms and commit to fans and mirrors (unreliables) for our electricity or that evil CO2 that is the cause of all the droughts and heatwaves will just get worse and ……bla bla bla….
The climate porn here on a daily basis has to be seen to be believed Ed, idiot activists gluing themselves to streets, school kids going on strikes and scared witless, seemingly intelligent people completely losing all critical thinking skills….it just goes on.
Cagw is defiantly a religion that has a powerful spell over those that drink the Kool-aid.
Love your site anyway Ed. Merry Christmas.
There’s a clear solution to all that ignorant madness Lachlan. Ignore the idiots gluing themselves to the streets, expel the kids leaving their classes and start confronting the reporters responsible for this epidemic of propaganda………..Whoever controls the media, controls the minds of the populace.
It follows the same cyber censors, who search for, and suppress, those people in opposition to their ideology, are the same people, responsible for the deliberate manipulation of all public media outlets by presenting their calculated lies and propaganda, as factual Reality.
No matter how easy it is to penetrate the falsehoods and recognize the fallacies spewing from these evil people, they know only a small minority will ever do so and they are deliberately targeting only those, who do not….or cannot…as they are the majority of the population.
These same evil people seek to enhance the ignorance of those they wish to manipulate by the elimination of contrary ideas and information on all easily accessible media outlets, either by direct censorship, or by countering with targeted misinformation tuned to trigger the emotional conditioning of their targets.
Simple smears often work, as the counter to them is often too complex for the targets to fathom. Tweaking emotion is what these evil people are all about, as they have spent decades preparing the majority to react exactly as they do. How? By the deliberate injection of irrational values into the populace, which are then unconsciously adopted by the majority, who never realize their nature…or the fact their emotion state is directly governed by them.
If I were to tell you a fact, which contradicts your emotional conditioning and sense of Reality, would you not just immediately reject it. Would you ignore the immediate negative emotional reaction to this fact, or would you make an effort to check its validity? What if virtually all the sources you may use to check the “fact’s” validity…those easily at hand…, quickly deny the fact, or simply do not present any contextual information, which allows you to effectively check it at all? What if accepting the “fact” would put you at odds with the rest of your friends and associates, even with the clubs and organizations to which you belong?
Even if the FACT is found to be TRUE, chances are good people will simply allow themselves to “forget” that it is…and return to a less agitated emotional state, where the fact no longer exists.
Here is one possible example of a fact you have may been conditioned to reject:
“Atmospheric CO2, Natural & Man Made, has absolutely nothing to do with Global Warming, or Climate Change, whatsoever.”
Ed Berry wrote; “In 1990, IPCC’s First Assessment Report made global headlines. It claimed human CO2 caused global warming and warned the world must reduce its CO2 emissions by 60 percent immediately to save the planet”.
H L Mencken had that all figured out when he wrote; “The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it” — H L Mencken