Now that we are entering the darker age of censorship it will be more and more difficult to find articles criticizing the manufactured consensus. Eventually it will be impossible. AI will make sure of that with or without keywords. Anjoy a dose of rebelliousness while you still can!
Authored by John Murawski via RealClear Wire,
As
the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive
commitments to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, the persistent
effort to silence climate change skeptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back.
This summer the International Monetary Fund summarily canceled a presentation
by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows
the existence of a climate “crisis.” The head of the nonprofit with
which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other
members have been delisted from LinkedIn for their dissident views.
Meanwhile, a top academic journal retracted published research doubting a climate emergency after negative coverage in legacy media. The move was decried
by another prominent climate dissenter, Roger Pielke Jr., as “one of
the most egregious failures of scientific publishing that I have seen” –
criticism muffled because the academic says he has been blocked on Twitter (now X) by reporters on the climate beat.
The climate dissenters are pressing their case as President Biden, United
Nations officials, and climate action advocates in media and academia
argue that the “settled science” demands a wholesale societal
transformation. That means halving U.S. carbon emissions by
2035 and achieving net zero emissions by 2050 to stave off the
“existential threat” of human-induced climate change.
In response last month, more than 1,600 scientists, among them two Nobel physics laureates, Clauser and Ivar Giaever of Norway, signed a declaration stating that there is no climate emergency,
and that climate advocacy has devolved into mass hysteria. The skeptics
say the radical transformation of entire societies is marching forth
without a full debate, based on dubious scientific claims amplified by
knee-jerk journalism.
Many of these climate skeptics reject the
optimistic scenarios of economic prosperity promised by advocates of a
net-zero world order. They say the global emissions-reduction targets
are not achievable on such an accelerated timetable without lowering
living standards and unleashing worldwide political unrest.
“What advocates of climate action are trying to do is scare the bejesus out of the public so they’ll think we need to [act] fast,” said Steven Koonin, author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
“You
have to balance the certainties and uncertainties of the changing
climate – the risks and hazards – against many other factors,” he adds.
These
dissenters don’t all agree on all scientific questions and do not speak
in a single voice. Clauser, for example, is a self-styled “climate
denialist” who believes climate is regulated by clouds,
while Pielke, a political scientist at the University of Colorado in
Boulder, and Bjørn Lomborg, the former director of the Danish
Environmental Assessment Institute, acknowledge humans are affecting the climate but say there is sufficient time to adapt.
The dissenters do, however, agree that the public and government
officials are getting a one-sided, apocalyptic account that stokes fear,
politicizes science, misuses climate modeling, and shuts down debate.
They
also say it is a troubling sign for scientific integrity that they are
systematically sidelined and diminished by government funding agencies,
foundation grant-makers, academic journals, and much of the media.
Delving into their claims, RealClearInvestigations reviewed a sampling
of their books, articles, and podcast interviews. This loose coalition
of writers and thinkers acknowledges that the climate is warming, but
they typically ascribe as much, if not more, influence to natural cycles
and climate variability than to human activities, such as burning
fossil fuel.
Among their arguments:
• There is
no climate crisis or existential threat as expressed in catastrophic
predictions by activists in the media and academia. As global
temperatures gradually increase, human societies will need to make
adjustments in the coming century, just as societies have adapted to
earlier climate changes. By and large, humans cannot control the
climate, which Pielke describes as “the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob.”
• Global
temperatures are increasing incrementally, and have been for centuries,
but the degree of human influence is uncertain or negligible.
Climate skeptics themselves don’t agree on how much humans are
contributing to global warming by burning fossil fuels, and how much is
caused by natural variability from El Niño and other cycles that can
take centuries to play out. “The real question is not whether the globe
has warmed recently,” writes Koonin, “but rather to what extent this
warming is being caused by humans.”
• Rapidly replacing
fossil fuels with renewables and electricity by mid-century would be
economically risky and may have a negligible effect on global warming.
Some say mitigation decrees – such as phasing out the combustion engine
and banning gas stoves – are not likely to prevent climate change
because humans play a minor role in global climate trends. Others say
mitigation is necessary but won’t happen without capable replacement
technologies. It’s unrealistic, they say, to force societies to rely on
intermittent energy from wind and solar, or wager the future on
technologies that are still in experimental stages.
• The
global political push to kill the fossil fuel industry to get to “net
zero” and “carbon neutrality” by 2050, as advocated by the United Nations and the Biden administration, will erase millions of jobs and raise energy costs, leading to a prolonged economic depression and political instability.
The result would be that developing regions will pay the highest price,
while the biggest polluters (China and India) and hostile nations (like
Russia and Iran) will simply ignore the net-zero mandate. This could be
a case where the cure could be worse than the disease.
• Despite the common refrain in the media,
there is no evidence that a gradually warming planet is affecting the
frequency or intensity of hurricanes, storms, droughts, rainfall, or
other weather events. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has expressed low confidence such weather events can be linked to human activities. Still, “it is a fertile field for cherry pickers,” notes Pielke.
• Extreme weather events, such as wildfires and flooding, are not claiming more human lives than previously.
The human death toll is largely caused by cold weather, which accounts
for eight times as many deaths as hot weather, and overall
weather-related mortality has fallen by about 99% in the past century.
“People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before,”
statistician and author Bjørn Lomborg has said.
• Climate
science has been hijacked and politicized by activists, creating a
culture of self-censorship that’s enforced by a code of silence that
Koonin likens to the Mafia’s omerta. In her 2023 book, “Climate
Uncertainty and Risk,” climatologist Judith Curry asks: “How many
skeptical papers were not published by activist editorial boards? How
many published papers have buried results in order to avoid highlighting
findings that conflict with preferred narratives? I am aware of
anecdotal examples of each of these actions, but the total number is
unknowable.”
• Slogans such as “follow the science” and “scientific consensus” are misleading and disingenuous.
There is no consensus on many key questions, such as the urgency to
cease and desist burning fossil fuels, or the accuracy of computer
modeling predictions of future global temperatures. The apparent
consensus of imminent disaster is manufactured through peer pressure,
intimidation, and research funding priorities, based on the conviction
that “noble lies,” “consensus entrepreneurship,” and “stealth advocacy”
are necessary to save humanity from itself. “One day PhD dissertations
will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic,” Pielke predicts.
•
The warming of the planet is a complicated phenomenon that will cause
some disruptions but will also bring benefits, particularly in
agricultural yields and increased vegetation. Some climate skeptics, including the CO2 Coalition, say CO2 is not a pollutant – it is “plant food.”
Curry,
the former Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, expresses a common theme among the climate
refuseniks: that they are the sane, rational voices in a maelstrom of quasi-religious mania.
“In the 1500s, they used to drown witches in Europe because they blamed them for bad weather.
You had the pagan people trying to appease the gods with sacrifices,”
Curry said. “What we’re doing now is like a pseudoscientific version of
that, and it’s no more effective than those other strategies.’
The
climate change establishment occasionally concedes some of these
points. No less an authority than the newly appointed head of the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has urged the climate
community to cool its jets: “If you constantly communicate the message
that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyzes people and
prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,”
Jim Skea recently said to German media. “The world won’t end if it
warms by more than 1.5 degrees [centigrade]. It will however be a more
dangerous world.”
In testimony
before the Senate Budget Committee in June, Pielke said human-caused
climate change is real and “poses significant risks to society and the
environment.” But the science does not paint a dystopian, catastrophic
scenario of imminent doom, he added.
“Today, there is general
agreement that our current media environment and political discourse are
rife with misinformation,” Pielke testified. “If there is just one
sentence that you take from my testimony today it is this: You are being
misinformed.”
Still, the overwhelming impression
conveyed is one of impending disaster, with the menace of global warming
rhetorically upgraded in July by U.N. Secretary-General António
Guterres to “global boiling.” Climate scientists announced in July that the planet is the hottest it’s been in 120,000 years, an old claim that gets recycled every few years. Meanwhile, three vice-chairs
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of mass
starvation, extinction, and disasters, saying that if the temperature
rises 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels, “children under 12 will
experience a fourfold increase in natural disasters in their lifetime,
and up to 14% of all species assessed will likely face a very high risk
of extinction.”
Many of these predictions are based on computer
models and computer simulations that Pielke, Koonin, Curry, and others
have decried as totally implausible. Koonin’s book suggests that some
computer models may be “cooking the books” to achieve desired outcomes,
while Pielke has decried
faulty scenarios as “one of the most significant failures of scientific
integrity in the twenty-first century thus far.” Curry writes in her
book that the primary inadequacy of climate models is their limited
ability to predict the kinds of natural climate fluctuations that cause
ice ages and warming periods, and play out over decades, centuries, or
even millennia.
Another critique is the use of computer models to correlate extreme weather events to multi-decade climate trends in an attempt to show that the weather was caused by climate, a branch of climate science called climate attribution studies.
This type of research is used to bolster claims that the frequency and
intensity of heat waves, floods, hurricanes, and other extreme weather
events could not have happened without climate change. An example is research recently cited by the BBC
in an article warning that if the global temperature rises another 0.9
centigrade, crippling heat waves that were once exceedingly rare will
bake the world every two-to-five years.
One question
looms: Does a warming climate contribute to heat records and heat waves,
such as those that were widely reported in July as the hottest month on
record and taken as overwhelming proof that humans are overheating the
planet? The United States experienced extreme heat waves in the 1930s,
and the recent spikes are not without precedent, climate dissenters say.
Pielke, however, concedes that
IPCC data signal that increases in heat extremes and heat waves are
virtually certain, but he argues that the societal impacts will be
manageable.
Koonin and Curry say that the global heat spikes in July were likely caused by a multiplicity of factors, including an underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcanic explosion
last year that increased upper atmosphere water vapor by about 10%, a
relevant fact because water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas. Another
factor is the warming effect of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, which
has shifted to an active phase recently.
Koonin
says that greenhouse gas emissions are a gradual trend on which weather
anomalies play out, and while it’s tempting to confuse weather with
climate, it would be a mistake to blame July’s heat waves on human
influence.
“The anomaly is about as large as we’ve ever seen, but not unprecedented,” Koonin explained on a podcast.
“Now, what the real question is, why did it spike so much? Nothing to
do with CO2 – CO2 is … the base on which this phenomenon occurs.”
Climate dissent comes with the occupational hazard of being tarred as a propagandist and stooge for “Big Oil.” Pielke was one of seven academics investigated by a U.S. Congressman in 2015 for allegedly failing to report funding from fossil fuel interests (He was cleared). A New York Times review of Lomborg’s 2020 book, “False Alarm,” described it as “mind pollution.”
Climate advocates see climate skepticism as so dangerous that Ben Santer, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, publicly cut ties
with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory two years ago after the
federal research facility invited Koonin to discuss his skeptical book,
“Unsettled.” Santer, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, said allowing
Koonin’s views to go unchallenged undermined the credibility and integrity of climate science research. For similar reasons, the IMF postponed Clauser’s July presentation so that it could be rescheduled as a debate.
Another
critique: scientists arbitrarily forcing the facts to fit a prescribed
catastrophic narrative, often by ignoring plausible alternative
explanations and relevant factors. That’s what climate
scientist Patrick Brown said he had to do to get published in the
prestigious journal Nature, by attributing wildfires to climate change
and ignoring other factors, like poor forest management and the
startling fact that over 80% of wildfires are ignited by humans. Brown publicly confessed to this sleight-of-hand in a recent article in The Free Press.
“This
type of framing, with the influence of climate change unrealistically
considered in isolation, is the norm for high-profile research papers,”
Brown wrote. “When I had previously attempted to deviate from the
formula, my papers were rejected out of hand by the editors of
distinguished journals, and I had to settle for less prestigious
outlets.”
These frustrations serve as a reminder that the world
has entered what the United Nations and climate advocates call the
make-or-break decade that will decide
how much the Earth’s temperature will rise above pre-industrial levels.
This decisive phase is “unfolding now and will intensify during the
next several years,” according to Rice University
researchers. “Accordingly, what happens between now and the late 2020s,
in all likelihood, will fundamentally determine the failure or success
of an accelerated energy transition.”
In response to this call
for global action, political leaders in Europe and North America are
vowing to reengineer their societies to run on wind, solar, and
hydrogen. In this country, California is among a dozen states that have
moved to ban the sale of new gasoline-engine cars in 2035, while states like Virginia and North Carolina have committed to carbon-free power girds by mid-century.
In the most detailed net-zero roadmap to date, the International Energy Agency in 2021 identified more than 400 milestones
that would have to be met to achieve a net-zero planet by mid-century,
including the immediate cessation of oil and gas exploration and
drilling, and mandated austerity measures such as reducing highway speed
limits, limiting temperature settings in private homes, and eating less
meat.
In the IEA’s net zero scenario,
global energy use will decline by 8% through energy efficiency even as
the world’s population adds 2 billion people and the economy grows a
whopping 40%. In this scenario, all the nations of the world – including
China, India, Russia, and Saudi Arabia – would have to commit to a
net-zero future, generating 14 million jobs to create a new energy
infrastructure. Nearly half the slated emissions reductions will
have to come from experimental technologies currently in demonstration
or prototype stages, such as hydrogen, bioenergy, carbon capture, and
modular nuclear reactors. Reading this bracing outlook, one
could almost overlook the IEA’s caveat that relying on solar and wind
for nearly 70% of electricity generation would cause retail electricity
prices to increase by 50% on average and destroy 5 million jobs, of
which “many are well paid, meaning structural changes can cause shocks
for communities with impacts that persist over time.”
A critique of the IEA’s scenario
issued this year by the Energy Policy Research Foundation, a think tank
that specializes in oil, gas, and petroleum products, warned of
“massive supply shocks” if oil supplies are artificially suppressed to
meet arbitrary net zero targets. The report further stated that “if the
world stays committed to net zero regardless of high costs – the
recession will turn into an extended depression and ultimately impose
radical negative changes upon modern civilization.” (Disclosure: The
report was commissioned by the RealClearFoundation, the nonprofit parent
of RealClearInvestigations.)
Already, societies have fallen
behind their emissions reduction targets, and it’s widely understood
that fast-tracking net zero is an unattainable goal. Transforming
existing energy infrastructures within several decades would require
installing the equivalent of the world’s largest solar farm every day, according to
the International Energy Agency. Carbon-free energy accounts for only
18% of total global consumption, and fossil fuels are still increasing, according to a recent analysis. The IEA reported this year
that investments in oil exploration and drilling have rebounded to
pre-pandemic levels, while global coal demand reached an all-time high
last year. Globally nations are spending more on clean energy than on
fossil fuels, but fossil fuels are still vital to economic growth; for
instance, the IEA noted that 40 gigawatts of new coal plants were approved in 2022, the highest figure since 2016, almost all of them in China.
“We live in this world of exaggerated promises and delusional pop science,” Vaclav Smil, the University of Manitoba environmental scientist and policy analyst, told The New York Times last year. “People don’t appreciate the magnitude of the task and are setting up artificial deadlines which are unrealistic.”
A
government push to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by cutting back on
livestock farming has led to public protests in the Netherlands, a
conflict over resources that Time magazine predicts will spread elsewhere:
“This may be just the beginning of much wider global unrest over
agriculture. Scientists say dealing with climate change will require not
just gradual reform, but a rapid, wholesale transformation of the
global food system.”
Climate dissidents say what happened in the
Netherlands is a foretaste of the political backlash that is inevitable
when net-zero policies start becoming implemented and people have to
travel across state lines to buy a gasoline-powered car.
“The urgency is the stupidest part of the whole thing – that we need to act now with all these made-up targets,” Curry said. “The transition risk is far greater than any conceivable climate or weather risk.”
To
Koonin, these challenges indicate that the catastrophic climate
narrative will collapse when put to the test of practicality and
politics. The more sensible route, he said, is a slow-and-steady
approach.
“There’s going to be a deep examination of science and
the cost-benefit issues,” he said. “We will eventually do the right
thing, but it’s going to take a decade or so.”
John Murawski
reports on the intersection of culture and ideas
for RealClearInvestigations. He previously covered artificial
intelligence for the Wall Street Journal and spent 15 years as a
reporter for the News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) writing
about health care, energy and business. At RealClear, Murawski reports
on how esoteric academic theories on race and gender have been shaping
many areas of public life, from K-12 school curricula to workplace
policies to the practice of medicine.
