Tag: Global warming

The Great Climate Global Coup d’état.

I want to get one thing straight from the outset. Until the emergence of the Covid event I, like millions of other people, was convinced of the veracity of man-made climate change. But around three years ago, I began to re-evaluate my position. After having researched the subject in great detail, I am now convinced that the purpose of the climate change narrative is to fulfill a political agenda.

As is the case with the Covid event, this agenda is about divesting more and more power away from nation states and their citizens to the bloated and corrupt United Nations bureaucracy, which is essentially controlled by the rich and powerful.

The global warming/climate change idea is a project of the (very) elitist Club of Rome, whose members have included Al Gore, Ted Warner, George Soros, Bill Gates and members of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families.

The Club of Rome is the active division of a group of entities serving a globalist agenda, which have played the major part in the establishment of the United Nations, the European Union and NATO. They include the World Economic Forum, the Committee on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Trilateral Commission.

The global warming project enables further enrichment of the already very wealthy, through the carbon trading scheme (Al Gore was projected to become the first carbon millionaire). However, United Nations publications such as Agenda 21 make it very clear that climate alarmism has another purpose: to enable and justify expansion of UN bureaucracy, the empowerment of NGOs, inevitably controlled by the globalists, and to control and contain the populace, all in the name of the Earth and the ill-defined ‘sustainability’.

Far from being a conspiracy theory, man-made climate change is actually a proveable conspiracy enacted by a criminal cabal. In the Club of Rome’s own words:

‘The Global Warming debate… is a concept by the New World Order to justify the dismantling the industrial society and returning the mass of humanity to obedient serfdom.”

Descent into farce

The climate change descent into farce began around four years ago when the Guardian published a letter entitled, Climate change is real. We must not offer credibility to those who deny it, whereby a motley crew of journalists, politicians, activists and academics announced their refusal to debate anthropogenic global warming sceptics: 

”If ‘balance’ means giving voice to those who deny the reality of human-triggered climate change, we will not take part in the debate”, they said.

The reason for this step, we are told, is that on the one hand there is an overwhelming scientific consensus and on the other, that there is a lobby, heavily funded by vested interests, that exists simply to sow doubt to serve those interests.

Apparently, scepticism represents ‘fringe views’ which should be ignored. Giving AGW sceptics a platform is said to be akin to showcasing flatearthers. This is despite the fact that the official position of the Flat Earth Society is that it supports the climate alarmist narrative. (Of course it was sceptics who first argued that the world wasn’t flat).

The purpose of the Guardian letter was to justify the already well-established practice of refusing to engage in debate on man-made climate change, by marginalising and belittling opponents, and to deplatform them.

Because of the shortage of real scientists prepared to put their names to the letter, we had the unedifying spectacle of the likes of Clive Lewis and Peter Tatchell declaring that they are above debating atmospheric physics with scientists of the calibre of  Eric Karlstrom or Nobel Laureate, Ivar Giaever.

This exercise in dishonest narcissism demeans all who have signed or lent their support to it. Academics who speak out against the globalist narrative on climate change do so at the expense of their careers.

As I will show below, counter-arguments from AGW sceptics such as Tim Ball and Mark Steyn, have never been discredited. Of the 15 or so professors who signed the Guardian letter, the majority work in unrelated fields such as economics, law or psychotherapy.

The same applies to others with impressive sounding qualifications – Dr Teresa Belton, for example, wrote her thesis on the effects of television and video on children. In the case of 90% of the signees – academics, journalist, politicians, activists – the very idea that they could sensibly debate with serious climate scientists is ludicrous.

The letter in question comes out of the University of East Anglia and was drafted by Dr Rupert Read, Green Party politician and Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. A large number of signees have connections to the University. 

The UEA is notorious as the centre of the Climategate scandal, whereby emails between scientists at the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and their colleagues around the world revealed a consistent, deliberate effort to skew, hide or destroy data.

James Taylor wrote:

”Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: Prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions. These scientists view global warming as a political ’cause’ rather than a balanced scientific inquiry; and many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.”

Dr Eric T. Karlstrom was far less circumspect, describing AGW as a scam:

”Man-made climate change (Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW) is a scam and a hoax and until the average joe and jane wakes up to the truth this nonsense will continue to corrupt the scientific community, which depends on grants from those same economic and political powers, and more importantly will corrupt politicians worldwide who too are dependent upon them for campaign contributions.”

The climate change project was officially launched in the US on June 23, 1988 when NASA’s James Hansen told a Congressional committee that global warming had begun: that the then-current heat wave in Washington was caused by the relationship between ‘the greenhouse effect and observed warming.

To get the point across, Hansen and sponsor 98ii+68/Senator Tim Wirth chose what promised to be an exceptionally hot day and then sabotaged the air conditioning in the meeting room the night before.

Man-made climate change is one of those plain sight conspiracies like the Covid ‘pandemic’, where the primary movers hardly bother to conceal the contrived nature of the project, or the vast sums of money they make from it.

The Club of Rome in 1990 put out a report called The First Global Revolution saying:

”In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…”(p. 75).

The motivation, then, was not to solve an urgent problem, but to find a threat, real or not, that would ‘unite’ people. And divert them from real issues.

The Club of Rome, founded in 1967, has been described as being at the apex of the New World Order pyramid. It drives the global climate change project as well being concerned with population control and vaccinations. Members are world leaders and captains of industry, and have included Al Gore, Tony Blair, George Soros and other people you’d buy a used car from.

Anthropogenic Climate Change: the Official Position

The International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) was founded with the task of providing the world with an objective, scientific view of climate change. Major points of its 2007 report are as follows:

  • Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.
  • Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming.
  • Anthropogenic warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change.

Notable achievements of the UN and its Kyoto Protocol include the creation of an international carbon market.

Scientific rejection of the IPCC’s position

The IPCC’s findings were opposed by scientists worldwide. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, for example, slammed the IPCC report as ‘dangerous nonsense’  and produced a list of pillars of wisdom to counter the UN IPCC climate report.

Over the past few thousand years, the climate in many parts of the world has been warmer and cooler than it is now. Civilizations and cultures flourished in the warmer periods. A major driver of climate change is variability in solar effects, such as sunspot cycles, the sun’s magnetic field and solar particles. Evidence suggests warming involving increased carbon dioxide exerts only a minor influence.

Since 1998, global temperature has not increased. Projection of solar cycles suggests that cooling could set in and continue to about 2030. Most recent climate and weather events are not unusual; they occur regularly. For example, in the 1930s the Arctic experienced higher temperatures and had less ice than now. Stories of impending climate disaster are based almost entirely on global climate models. Not one of these models has shown that it can reliably predict future climate.

The Kyoto Protocol, if fully implemented, would make no measurable difference to
world temperatures. The trillions of dollars that it will cost would be far better spent on solving known problems such as the provision of clean water, reducing air pollution, and fighting malaria.

Climate is constantly changing and the future will include coolings, warmings, floods, droughts, and storms. The best policy is to make sure we have in place disaster response plans that can deal with weather extremes.

In essence, proponents of the theory of significant anthropogenic climate change need to show two things: There is significant and dangerous global warming and that said global warming is caused by human activity, ie greenhouse gas emissions, primarily co2 emissions. Whereas sceptics need only show one thing: global climate is not significantly or dangerously affected by human activity.

Like all narratives pushed by the powerful onto the masses, the global warming hoax is supported by relentless fallacious argument, so that the public are battered with endless ad hominem, cherry-picking and appeals to authority.

Much of the data is suspect, to put it mildly, and a very large part of the ‘debate’ consists of apocalyptic scenarios, with threats of doom unless the public pours more money into the coffers of those profiting from the carbon hoax.

The Data

Petition Slide01 Warming

[Source of image]

The IPCC’s position is still that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years, increasing at an exponential rate as we pump more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. Many scientists disagree, pointing to higher temperatures in the 30s, and a cooling since 1998150 graphs from 122 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals indicate modern temperatures are not unprecedented, unusual, or hockey-stick-shaped — nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability.

Data to promote the idea of runaway global warming has been questioned, for example the graphs used by NOAA ( National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and NASA have been shown to have been ‘updated’, as it were.

Temperature Graphs2

In 2015, German professor Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert accused NASA of ‘Massive’ Temperature Alterations’, i.e. of intentionally and systematically rigging the official government record of global temperatures: ”A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own data sets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.”

In 2008, the Telegraph reported NASA as claiming October as the hottest on record, by using September figures. The name ‘hockey stick graph’ was coined for figures showing a long-term decline followed by an abrupt rise in temperature, specifically applied to the findings of ‘a little known climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues’ as described here by the Atlantic Council.

HockeystickT_comp_61-90.pdf

Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick obtained part of the programme that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the programme not do conventional principal component analysis but it handles data in such a way that whatever data was fed in, it produced a hockey stick. 

Mann has queried their findings, but refused to provide necessary additional data (McIntyre and McKitrick’s adventures with Mann are described here). Michael Mann has been suing various critics for libel, including Mark Steyn, whose  A Disgrace to the Profession is a compilation of scientific commentary on Michael Mann and his work.

Steyn has also termed Mann a Big Climate huckster), and also emeritus Professor Dr. Tim Ball, who likewise suggested Mann was guilty of data fraud. Mann has been reported as being in contempt of court in the Ball case for failing to provide essential data.

HockeystickT_comp_61-90Tim Ball.pdf

When the promised global warming failed to eventuate, the phrase ‘global warming’ gave way to ‘climate change’. So when cherry-picked claims of extreme heat are met with examples of low temperatures, they are countered with, ‘there you go, extreme climate change!’.Carbon Dioxide.

The cause of ‘runaway global warming’ is, according to alarmists, the production of CO2.  Not carbon monoxide, note, the one that is poisonous (we’re not worried about that), but carbon dioxide, which is necessary for plant life, and which greenhouse owners often add to improve the growth of their vegetables.

Scientists have pointed out in vain that the level of carbon dioxide has been far higher in the past, during the Cambrian period about 18 times higher. Moreover, during the glaciation of the late Ordocivian period, CO2 concentrations were nearly 12 times higher than today, according to one report. This study has similar results.

Winter is Coming

From the early 14th to the mid nineteenth century, Europe and other parts of the world experienced what is called the Little IceAge. It led to much misery, with cold and hunger from the failure of crops, political upheaval, and the decolonisation of Greenland.

In 1484, Pope Innocent VIII recognized the existence of witches and echoed popular sentiment by blaming them for the cold temperatures and resulting misfortunes plaguing Europe. (N.b. Greenland still has not recovered from the Little Iceage). For some years, scientists have been predicting the coming of a new mini-iceage.

In 2009 Professor Henrik Svensmark, Director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Technical University of Denmark, advised that ‘global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning – enjoy global warming while it lasts‘.

The response of British institutions like the Met Office and University of East Anglia has been interesting. In 2012 they released data that showed that the warming trend ended in 1948, but insisted that cooling from natural sources will be offset by carbon emissions.

Climate Alarmism

Evidence of the Earth cooling has not given any pause to alarmist claims of dramatic warming, which have been present from the outset. In 1989 Nasa’s James Hansen was predicting that global temperatures would rise up to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.

In his film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore warned that increasing carbon dioxide emissions would spur catastrophic global warming that would cause more extreme weather, wipe out cities and cause ecological collapse. (The claims and predictions of An Inconvenient Truth were scrutinised 10 years on by Michael Bastasch in An Inconvenient Review).

In his review of the book that accompanied Gore’s film, Hansen claimed:

”As explained above, we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions”.

To give a sense of urgency, the global warming threat has been described in the most extravagant terms. Hansen warned of a ‘global warming time bomb’ when he spoke to the Club of Rome in 2009.  The concept of a ‘tipping point’ came into vogue, the peak of climate alarmism.

Marc Morano prepared a full list of apocalyptic declarations,  exclaiming ‘Hours, days, months, years, millennium  – the Earth is serially doomed’. Here are some examples:

It is suggested that the only authentic climate ‘tipping point’ is the one proposed by New Zealand’s Augie Auer, who predicted in 2007 that it was all going to be a joke in five years time. (Auer reckoned without the powerful forces behind the climate hoax.)

The Melting of the Polar Icecaps

Poles 2018-04-10181524_shadow.png

[Source of image: Climate Science In A Death Spiral For At Least 10 Years]

Melting of the icecaps would be a truly dramatic event, a serious indication of warming. Accordingly, climate alarmists have seized on this ‘danger’, in defiance of all the evidence.  In 2007 — during his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech — Al Gore mooted that the northern icecap could be gone by 2014.

One study estimated that [the North polar ice cap] could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. In 2015 NASA data indicated that the polar icecaps were not receding, but in fact growing.

This did not deter Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University from predicting in 2016 that the icecap at the North Pole would be completely melted in the next year or two, ie by the end of summer 2018 at the latest. Nearly five years on, the Polar caps are still here.

Others are sure that the icecaps will be gone by at least 2050. This view is expounded in an article by Gilbert Mercier, who is sure that by 2100, the countryside will be parched earth and major cities like London and New York will be under water.

Another catastrophist who has repeatedly been proven wrong is Dr. Guy McPherson, Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. McPherson is described in his biography as an ”award-winning scientist and the world’s leading authority on abrupt climate change.”

Recently, McPherson claimed in a podcast that ‘abrupt climate change’ will result in the extinction of humans by 2026. Six years ago, McPherson wrote an article where he made a similar dramatic catastrophic prediction. The article included a timeline for virtual human extinction within 9-33 months from the date the article in question was published.

Conveniently, McPherson deleted the article. However, in a 2018 [Video] McPherson predicted that humans would be extinct by 2028 and that the arctic would be ice-free by 2019.

Disappearing snowfalls

On March 20, 2000, the Independent reported that snowfalls were a thing of the past. ‘Global warming is simply making the UK too warm for heavy snowfalls. ”Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”, they claimed.

The source of these claims was Dr. David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, of Climategate fame. The Independent article appears to be gone from the Web, melted away as it were, but was well reported, and certainly criticised.

Similar false claims were made by arguably the world’s leading climate doomsayer, Al Gore who has reportedly made $330m as a result of advocating on behalf of the alarmist cause. Gore made his fortune when he set up a green investment firm that’s now said to be worth $36bn, paying him $2m a month.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claimed that Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, would be snow free within a decade. In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Gore’s hyperbole was off the scale. In the speech, he warned about ”rain bombs” and ”boiling oceans.”

Gore’s psuedo-scientific hyperbole and the appeals to moral authority championed by his acolytes, have rarely been critiqued by journalists. Meanwhile, catastrophic warnings about the alleged impacts of ‘runaway climate change’ and the moral imperative to act against it, have become normalized across much of the panoply of social media.

Cherry-picking

Apocalyptic predictions are supported by a relentless reporting of supposedly extraordinary events proving a trend towards global warming. The cherry-picking in many cases is both obvious and ludicrous, and often the actual facts open to question.

A few years ago, for example, it was proclaimed that Nawabshah, Pakistan, had provided the hottest shaded temperature ever recorded for a reliable weather station in April, anywhere on Earth. ”It’s only May, and this year is setting new standards in terrifying extreme temperatures”. Coincidentally, it was also recorded that 2018 had the coldest April in the US for 30 years.

At the same time New Zealand and Australia (the Daily Mail always nice pictures, if nothing else) were predicting the coldest winter on record.

Needless to say, these predictions failed to come to pass. It is probable that one could find (or contrive) an extreme temperature somewhere on the globe at any time in history.

The 97% Consensus

The claim of ‘overwhelming scientific consensus’ is long debunked. The much vaunted 97% of the world’s scientists support the AGW thesis seems to be based on a figure of 76 people. In any case, given the huge numbers of scientists who have declared climate alarmism to be a hoax (see, for example, the American petition signed by 31,000 scientists, or this list of 1000 scientists), it is hard to see where this 97% could come from. 

Nonetheless, the consensus claim is a mantra repeated over and over again in the face of unwelcome factual evidence.

One might well ask, who cares?

The argument is an appeal to authority, a red herring fallacy, and the beliefs of a claimed 97% of ‘scientists’ don’t actually change the scientific facts. As often happens with the use of fallacious argument, the premise is completely false as well. It is clear that there has been concerted and substantial opposition from scientists to the AGW narrative and the carbon fraud. Essentially the 97% claim is a bare-faced lie, designed to make sceptics look like loonies.

Over 31,000 American scientists signed a petition in response to the 1997 Kyoto Accord: There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

Attached to the petition is a summary of peer-reviewed research with 132 references. Marc Morano has given a breakdown of more than 1000 international scientists who dissented over man-made global warming claims from 2008 to 2010. Morano refers to, for example:

  • U. S. Senate Minority Report:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims:  Scientists Continue to Debunk ‘Consensus’ in 2008 & 2009.
  • 712 Prominent scientists from 40 countries signed the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, sponsored by the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). The 2008 declaration states in part, ‘Global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life’.
  • In 2009, more than 100 international scientists rebuked President Obama’s view of man-made global warming. The scientists wrote: ‘Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect.’
  • December 8 2009, an Open Letter to the UN Secretary-General from 166+ scientists declared ‘the science is NOT settled’.
  • 2010, 130 German Scientists called climate fears ‘pseudo religion’ and urged the Chancellor to ‘reconsider’ her views.
  • In 2010, more than 260 scientists who are members of the American Physical
    Society (APS) endorsed the efforts of skeptical Princeton University Physicist Dr.
    Will Happer to substantially amend the APS alarmist statement on man-made
    global warming.
  • A Japan Geoscience Union symposium survey in 2008 showed 90 per cent of
    the participants do not believe the IPCC report.

The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008. It prominently featured the voices of scientists sceptical of man-made global warming fears.

This report from the conference, by someone, who does not himself appear to question the AGW narrative declares that ‘skeptical scientists overwhelmed the meeting, with ‘2/3 of presenters and question-askers hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC’ (full reports here & here ].

Professor Larry Bell of Houston University has also debunked the 97% claim, reporting.

  • A 2010 survey of media broadcast meteorologists conducted by the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication found that 63% of 571 who responded believe global warming is mostly caused by natural, not human, causes. Those polled included members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the National Weather Association.
  • A more recent 2012 survey published by the AMS found that only one in four respondents agreed with UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent warming. And while 89% believe that global warming is occurring, only 30% said they were very worried.
  • A March 2008 canvas of 51,000 Canadian scientists with the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysics of Alberta (APEGGA) found that although 99% of 1,077 replies believe climate is changing, 68% disagreed with the statement that ‘…the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.’ Only 26% of them attributed global warming to ‘human activity like burning fossil fuels.’ Regarding these results, APEGGA’s executive director, Neil Windsor, commented, ‘We’re not surprised at all. There is no clear consensus of scientists that we know of.’

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, and supervisor to James Hansen, Dr. John S. Theon has called Hansen an embarrassment, and added himself to the list of NASA scientists who dissent from man-made climate fears. Others include:

  • Aerospace engineer and physicist Dr. Michael Griffin, the former top administrator of NASA,
  • Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA,
  • Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut,
  • Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt,
  • Award-winning NASA Astronaut and Physicist Walter Cunningham of NASA’s Apollo 7,
  • Chemist and Nuclear Engineer Robert DeFayette was formerly with NASA’s Plum Brook Reactor,
  • Hungarian Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA’s Ames Research Center,
  • Climatologist Dr. John Christy,
  • Climatologist Dr. Roy W. Spencer,
  • Atmospheric Scientist Ross Hays of NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility].

Rather than there being a consensus of 97% of scientists who believe in climate alarmism, the opposite is more likely to be true: that 97% of scientists of integrity and without a financial interest believe that AGW alarmism is fraudulent.

The World Climate Declaration

The alarmist narrative took a huge hit in August last year when over 1,100 scientists and professionals put their names to the ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD). The authors, drawn from across the world, led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever, reject the claim that there is a ‘climate emergency’.

The WCD posit that the ‘scientific consensus’ on man-made climate change is part of a politically-driven media agenda and that grant-dependent academics have degenerated the discipline into a discussion based on beliefs, rather than sound self-critical science.

In particular, the WCD are critical of climate models, noting that they ”are not remotely plausible as global policy tools.” The WCD contend that these models exaggerate the negative effects of carbon dioxide. They instead emphasize that the gas is beneficial for nature and agriculture; that it increases global crop yields, promotes growth in plant biomass and is essential to all life on Earth.

It is also the contention of the WCD that historic climate models have overstated the projected negative impacts of climate change compared to real world events and note that insufficient emphasis is placed on the empirical scientific method. In addition, the WCD declare that there is no statistical evidence that climate change is intensifying hurricanes, floods and droughts, or making them more frequent.

Intimate ties

Investigative journalist and researcher, Whitney Webb, argues that the prevailing AGW consensus is intimately tied to corporate interests embodied in the UN’s annual ‘COP’ gatherings.

Commenting on the recent COP26 event in Glasgow, Webb said:

”COP is about setting up the financial infrastructure for a completely new economic system based on CBDCs and the financialization of ‘natural capital’ and ‘human capital’ into new asset classes. It’s about complete economic domination of the planet, not about ‘saving’ it.”

What Webb evokes is the endless corporate drive to privatise the planet , the tendency for capitalists to seek control of ecosystems as ‘financial assets’, and deny the rights of people around the world to benefit from nature.

Webb highlights how legitimate ecological and environmental concerns are being usurped by a nefarious decades-long Malthusian climate change agenda in the pursuit of profits and population control.

This agenda, identified in the Club of Rome’s The First Global Revolution report, draws parallels with the way in which the Covid event, as Dr Mike Yeadon recently pointed out, has been politically weaponized to engineer societal instability and economic crisis.

Dr Yeadon’s credentials are impeccable. He has a degree in biochemistry and toxicology and a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology. He has spent over 30 years leading new medicines research in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leaving Pfizer in 2011 as Vice President & Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory, the most senior research position in this field in Pfizer.

Dr Yeadon argues the main reason for the lies about the novel virus is a desire for total predictability and control, with the clearly articulated intention of transforming society.

Yeadon says the intention is to:

”dismantle the financial system through lockdowns and furlough, while the immediate practical goal of lockdown was to provide the causus belli for injecting as many people as possible with materials designed not to induce immunity, but to demand repeat inoculation, to cause injury and death, and to control freedom of movement.”

Yeadon added:

”It’s a huge crime, extensively planned…. I believe that the perpetrators (who could be all or any of Gates, Fauci, Farrar, Vallance, CEPI, EcoHealth Alliance, DARPA and numerous others) planted the controversy about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 .”

Both the climate change and Covid hoaxes are best understood as joint coordinated criminal conspiracies enacted by governments’ who have imposed the policy agenda’s of their private-public policy-making partners. Their purpose is to engender a global coup d’état.

Thanks to Dr Barbara McKenzie at https://barbaramckenzie.wordpress.com/ for her wisdom and courage.

Green washing & the psychology of denial

By Daniel Margrain

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In 1978, the Australian social scientist, Alex Carey, pointed out that the twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: “the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

In order to defend their interests against the forces of democracy, the giant polluting corporations that dominate much of the domestic and global economies recognize the need to manipulate the public through media propaganda by manufacturing their consent. This is largely achieved through coordinated mass campaigns that combine sophisticated public relations techniques which ensure business interests take precedence over environmental and social justice issues.

Following on from my previous article, in which I alluded that to deny the science linking carbon emissions to global warming is akin to denying the links between smoking and lung cancer and HIV and Aids, I want in this piece to focus on some of the techniques multinational corporations use that manage to convince some of us that these kinds of links are bogus.

The 97 per cent consensus among climate scientists that warming is real and man-made, is one of the most effective tools for persuading the public about the need to take action to prevent it. This is why, from the denier industry perspective, the corresponding need to counter it with false propaganda is imperative. As I explained, one of the denier strategies is to cynically exploit the space that exists between public perception and scientific fact, sometimes referred to as the “consensus gap.”

Fomenting uncertainty & cherry-picking

One of the ways in which corporate deniers set out to achieve this, is to deceive the public through media campaigns and lobbying strategies. The standard line organisations take is to foment uncertainty in relation to the science. This involves the claim that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics and that if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason.

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company’s official documents, lists 124 organisations who have taken this approach. They have either taken money from Exxon or have worked closely with those that have.

Some of the other tactics deniers adopt is the cherry-picking of evidence, their citing of fake experts, the misrepresentation of the findings of others and the deflection of arguments away from the relevant topic. The mass media also play a part in the deception by constantly amplifying the views of the tiny minority of climate scientists who argue that man-made global warming is not happening, whilst ignoring and marginalizing the vast majority of experts who say it is.

As one writer put it:

“[They] proffer what they demurely call ‘disturbing questions’, though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues in documents and photos, torturing the data ­- as the old joke goes about economists — till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories…is contemptuously brushed aside.”

Green washing

One of the more systematic approaches is the adoption by the corporations of an indoctrination technique known as green washing. The green washing of products and lifestyles is a public relations strategy used to divert public attention away from unethical environmental practices, thus seeking to legitimize decisions that would otherwise expose corporations to intense public scrutiny. Almost two decades ago, the Transnational Resource and Action Centre, for instance, highlighted how carbon polluting corporations pay lip service to eliminating fossil fuels by using renewable energy investments to give themselves a “clean and green” image.

The following insightful commentary involving an exchange between an elderly customer and a young cashier at a shop in the UK posted to the Neil Young Times by an anonymous writer, highlights with clarity the extent to which the green washing phenomena has been successful in deceiving a young generation of environmental activists and “socially and environmentally aware” individuals:

“Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the older woman that she should bring her own shopping bags because plastic bags weren’t good for the environment. The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green thing back in my earlier days.”

The cashier responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”

The old woman replied: “You’re right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day. Back then, we returned milk bottles, pop bottles and beer bottles to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over and over. So they really were recycled. We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the green thing back in our day.”

“We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every shop and office building. We walked to the grocery store and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in our day.”

“Back then, we washed the baby’s nappies because we didn’t have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have the green thing back in our day.”

“Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the county of Yorkshire . In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we packaged a fragile item to send in the post, we used wadded up old newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.”

“Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right. We didn’t have the green thing back then.”

“We drank water from a fountain or a tap when we were thirsty instead of demanding a plastic bottle flown in from another country. We accepted that a lot of food was seasonal and didn’t expect that to be bucked by flying it thousands of air miles around the world. We actually cooked food that didn’t come out of a packet, tin or plastic wrap and we could even wash our own vegetables and chop our own salad. But we didn’t have the green thing back then.”

“Back then, people took the tram or a bus, and kids rode their bikes to school or walked instead of turning their mothers into a 24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint.”

“But isn’t it sad that the current generation laments how wasteful we old folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?”

The fact that human actions have resulted in a planet that is warmer than it has ever been in the last 100 years and that the public appear to be indifferent to the likely catastrophic consequences, would seem to suggest, that the displacement strategies of the corporations described above are succeeding.

David Bellamy

They have been ably assisted in this endeavor over the last decade not least as a result of the publicity to the denialist cause that was generated by the world renowned ecologist, David Bellamy. In April, 2005, Bellamy claimed in a letter to New Scientist that “555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation have been growing since 1980.”

Environmentalist, George Monbiot checked Bellamy’s claim with the World Glacier Monitoring Service who responded with four words: “This is complete bullshit.” A few hours later, they sent Monbiot an email:

“Despite his scientific reputation, he [Bellamy] makes all the mistakes that are possible. He had cited data that was simply false, he had failed to provide references, he had completely misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies show unequivocally that most of the world’s glaciers are retreating.”

Monbiot then challenged Bellamy in a TV studio debate. During the extraordinary exchange, Monbiot revealed that Bellamy had reproduced falsified and fabricated data and accused the Botanist of committing scientific fraud.

Cognitive psychology

The kinds of corporate denialism, deception and green washing outlined raise some interesting related psychological issues. It seems highly probable that most people, if asked, would admit to being concerned about global warming and would accept that increasing the rate at which carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere changes the climate.

When, however, people are asked at elections what issues they are most concerned about, climate change barely features. So there appears to be a disconnect, on the one hand, between how people feel about climate change, and on the other, the extent to which it is at the forefront of their minds.

Environmentalist George Marshall attempts to make sense of this apparent dichotomy:

“It’s clear that we form our opinions on the basis of the science, but also that the process is more complex than that. In order to understand people’s needs in terms of the science of climate change, we also need to draw on the science of cognitive psychology, the science of sociology or social anthropology. We have to recognize that in terms of the former, there are different processes of the brain for processing information and that there are parallel processes. One deals with information and data – the rational side – and the other is what psychologists refer to as ‘affective reasoning’ which dominates our decision-making driven by cues, signals and above all, bias.”

Marshall continues:

“The process of attention and dis-attention is extremely important to how we operate. Increasingly, the research is suggesting that the process of dis-attention is more important to our functioning than attention. So it’s our ability to not pay attention to things that’s fundamental to the way we operate.”

It’s this latter process that’s particularly important in terms of how climate change is often perceived in terms of social signals. People have a tendency to conform to the views of their peer groups and it’s this kind of social pressure that can lead to confirmation bias. Also, it’s these kinds of false perceptions that lead people to accept that whilst climate change is acknowledged as a problem, it’s nevertheless perceived as a future problem rather than a problem in the present.

Thinking Fast and Slow

This is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, as “a perfect combination of biases.” Not only are we biased against the future because we are short-sighted but, according to Kahneman, we are also cost-averse against a backdrop in which solutions to climate change involve huge financial costs. He also says that climate change invokes uncertainty.

However, as Marshall infers, as real as the perfect combination of biases outlined by Kahneman are to people, they only reflect a perception. They are not an illustration of reality. The truth is climate change is happening in the present and was happening in the past. Moreover, as Marshall argues, the cost issue is debatable, and with every scientific institution agreeing about man-made climate change, it’s certainties are unquestionable.

What appears to emerge from Kahneman’s analysis is that attempts to tackle climate change have been deliberately set up to fail. We make excuses not to confront it because it’s perceived to be a problem that exists somewhere in the future, is open to interpretations of biases and is regarded as having a multitude of potential interpretive causes.

Ultimately, climate change won’t be tackled because we have never recognized in any serious way, the need for it to be tackled. We live in a bubble of self-delusion in which the perceived short-term imperatives of the market have been prioritized above the need for the existence of a sustainable planet to ensure our long-term future.

The penetration of the market into all our lives and forms of thinking, is indicative of a self-obsessed culture guided by narrow short-term economic interests which will almost certainly lead to catastrophic social and environmental costs.

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