Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Dec 20, 2020 1:35 pm Post subject:
by email wrote:
Much as one might prefer to stay on neutral ground, unfortunately, if you want to understand the bigger picture, it isn't possible.
There are three key reasons why you have to take the climate scam into account:
the use and abuse of dodgy science; science used to support an agenda rather than the other way around
the same bad actors appear - in the climate scam as in the globalist WEF plot to control us forever
the policies that result from the scam
The global illness is just a pretext to terrify us, destroy our economy and justify what comes next - ie The Great Reset aka Build Back Better.
1. The Science
As far as I know both attached graphs are based on the same data. The Hockey Stick was manipulated deliberately so as to smooth out the Medieval Warm Period and the Maunder Minimum and the Dalton Minimum. They don't want the awkward questions.
I am aware of the idea that Tiffany mentioned which is that the Medieval warming was not universal. But it still happened - the Vikings were farming Greenland - and it happened without manmade carbon being involved. And why the extreme cold, such as when there were C17th ice fairs on the Thames?
Regardless of whether or not CO2 is rising, correlation does not equal causation.
Even now we see incredible variations in the weather, from one day to the next - extremes of heat, cold, wet, dry. None of which is explained by a constant production of manmade toxins, but is explicable when looking at the jet stream. I have never seen a convincing argument that explains how CO2 influences the jet stream.
There is also a massive hole in the atmosphere above the Antarctic which does not suggest a greenhouse.
What this particular Psy-Op means is that people do not look at the real driver of climate which is the Sun. I don't bother with people like Icke for my info. I go straight to the scientists - Dr Willie Soon https://www.heartland.org/about-us/who-we-are/willie-soon
- I strongly recommend watching any talk by him. He is v funny apart from anything); Prof Richard Lindzen (Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT); Dr John Christy (a climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville who oversees NASA’s satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures); Dr Roy Spencer (Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville); Dr Tim Ball (a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada) who successfully had his libel case brought by Dr Michael Mann dropped.
Polar Bears are not in decline - Dr Suzanne Crockford
Sea ice is not shrinking - the Greenland glacier is growing
Sea levels are not rising - Nils Axel Morner (former head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University.)
Coral reefs are not dying - Prof Peter Ridd
There is no consensus in science. There are only hypotheses. Being led by the data means being led by tools of propaganda and that is how we are now seeing science being abused. Back in the day, the scandal was the discovery of the UEA emails (climate gate). Dr Michael Mann was the bad actor involved then. He has also been the bad actor involved in the sacking of Dr Crockford and tried to unsuccessfully sue Dr Tim Ball. Mann is v close to Gore et al.
Michael Shellenberger is one activist who has seen the light -
Science similarly abused under the Covid regime: BMJ on the politicisation of medical science. Witless and UnBalanced select the data they want to frighten the people. SAGE mostly made up of psychologists - why?!
2. Bad Actors
Curious how the same bad actors crop up in the climate scam at the top of the tree as in the current Club of Rome/UN/WEF scam. People like Bloomberg, Mark Carney former BofE governor; companies like Goldman Sachs.
They are desperate to force us to accept that we are unacceptable consumers of carbon and so should be controlled accordingly.
Tedros at WHO seized the opportunity to talk climate change as soon as possible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5DrVKCmIFU
- as if that has anything to do with a disease?!?
Groups like XR are just tools of these people, as is Greta T.
Rosa Koire and Rupert Darwell as well as James Delingpole have all written about this.
3. The Policies
Same guilt trip emotional blackmail ("killing people if you don't wear a mask"/"killing the planet if you don't adopt Agenda 2030"): we can be monitored as biohazards and as carbon consumers.
$11trn has been shaken out of the Pension Funds from Big Oil into 'green schemes' - the eco ones that rely on rare earths, child labour and damaging extraction methods.
The Great Reset is a fusion of UN Sustainable Development Goals, ie climate change, with WEF's 4th Industrial Revolution.
Crashed our economies and seized our resources.
'Build Back Better' with everything digitised, tracked and traced. And businesses denied finance if they do not conform to the carbon requirements.
Not suggesting that there aren't pollution problems. But the loss of the carbon car is the loss of freedom to go where and when we want. Electric cars, esp driverless ones, can more easily be controlled.
WEF never addresses the issue of control. Who owns the data? Who owns the land we are no longer allowed to inhabit [Nature Needs Half]. On Exmoor where there are plans to stop farmers grazing so that we can meet our UN biodiversity commitment, they are calling it out as a way of creating a playground for the super rich.
Socialism for most, but global elitism carries on for them.
The latest fear porn from WEF -
This is Earth in the next 100 years if we don't act on climate change | Ways to Change the World
9,989 views•14 Oct 2020
I research and write about science and technology in policy, politics and in sport
Super Snow Moon
The full super snow moon rises, Saturday, Feb. 8, 2020, at Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. (AP ... [+] ASSOCIATED PRESS
A climate advocacy group called Skeptical Science hosts a list of academics that it has labeled “climate misinformers.” The list includes 17 academics and is intended as a blacklist. We know of this intent because one of the principals of Skeptical Science, a blogger named Dana Nuccitelli, said so last Friday, writing of one academic on their list, “if you look at the statements we cataloged and debunked on her [Skeptical Science] page, it should make her unhirable in academia.”
That so-called “unhirable” academic is Professor Judy Curry, formerly the chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, and a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society. By any conventional academic metric, Curry has compiled an impressive record over many decades. The idea that she would be unhirable would seem laughable.
But there is nothing funny about Skeptical Science. Today, Curry should be a senior statesperson in the atmospheric sciences community. Instead, she is out of academia. She attributes that, at least in part, to being placed on the Skeptical Science blacklist and its use, as expressed by Nuccitelli, to make her “unhirable.”
I asked Professor Curry about this situation. She explained, “In 2012 I was informed by my Dean that the administration wanted me to step down as Chair. While there were several reasons for this, one obvious reason was extreme displeasure by several activist climate scientists who had a very direct pipeline to the Dean.”
So Curry stepped down and started looking for administrative positions at other universities, “At the time, I was getting numerous inquiries from academic headhunters encouraging me to apply for major administration positions, ranging from Dean to Vice Chancellor for Research. I applied for several of these, and actually interviewed for two of them. I did not make it to the final short list.”
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The headhunter gave Curry the following feedback from the universities: “They thought I was an outstanding candidate, looked excellent on paper, articulated a strong vision, and interviewed very well in person. The show stopper was my public profile in the climate debate, as evidenced by a simple Google search.”
Indeed, in my own Google search of “Judy Curry,” and confirmed by others on my Twitter timeline, the Skeptical Science blacklist page for her appears on the first page of Google results, and for me it was the top listing.
How can it be that a website, founded by an Australian cartoonist named John Cook and run mainly by volunteer non-academics and amateur scientists, can rise to the position of not just claiming to arbitrate who is and who is not an appropriate hire for universities, but actually fulfilling that role?
Skeptical Science emerged in 2007, the peak of the climate blogging era. It was also a time when the pursuit of “climate skeptics” (or “deniers”) really took off. The website soon found a large audience and was promoted as an ally in the battle against climate skeptics and deniers. For instance, according to Wikipedia, “The Washington Post has praised it as the "most prominent and detailed" website to counter arguments by global warming deniers.”
But the main legitimizing factor in the rise of Skeptical Science as a powerful climate advocacy group was its endorsement by prominent scientists, such as by widely-known climate scientists Michael Mann of Penn State University and Katherine Hayhoe, of Texas Tech. Like Skeptical Science, Mann and Hayhoe focus much of their advocacy efforts on identifying and denigrating so-called climate skeptics or deniers.
The American Geophysical Union (AGU), a leading scientific association that includes many climate scientists, has routinely endorsed Skeptical Science. The AGU has even invoked the Skeptical Science blacklist, as recently as last December, when one of its writers dismissed an Australian academic by observing simply that he “has his own page on John Cook’s Skeptical Science site.” The mere fact of being listed on the Skeptical Science blacklist appears to be sufficient to be dismissed on the official website of the AGU, where Curry was elected a Fellow.
But what has happened to Curry is just the tip of the iceberg.
Upon discussing on Twitter the Skeptical Science claim that their “debunking” of Curry should make her “unhirable in academia,” a follower of mine pointed to a trove of hacked internal discussions among the Skeptical Science team. In those discussions from around 2010-2012, my father, Roger Pielke, Sr. — also a prominent atmospheric scientist — was mentioned some 3,700 times. Correspondingly, my father is also listed on the Skeptical Science blacklist.
I have read those internal discussions and what I saw is incredibly disturbing, for academic freedom and for simple human decency.
Let me take a step back and explain why I believe that it is appropriate to discuss the content of these hacked discussions. (Note: These hacked discussions are different than the Photoshopped imagery found in 2013 on an unprotected Skeptical Science website showing several Skeptical Science team members with their faces super imposed upon Nazi soldiers, with John Cook as Heinrich Himmler. According to Rob Honeycutt of Skeptical Science, those images were prepared as an in-group joke to make fun of a climate skeptic who appears on another of their lists, and were not intended for the public.)
The discussions in the hacked conversations – like those in the Wikileaks releases, those of President Emanuel Macron’s hacked conversations, or even the Climategate emails – are legitimately in the public interest.
There are at least three reasons for this. One, the hacked forum reveals that Skeptical Science – a foreign advocacy group — in collaboration with the Center for American Progress (a DC-based progressive advocacy group), improperly obtained Congressional testimony in advance from several U.S. scientists and were engaged to help Democrats in the House to impeach the testimony of these scientists. Second, the leaked discussions reveal a coordinated effort to lobby U.S. elected officials by a foreign-based entity. While such coordination may or may not meet the legal definition of “lobbying,” the appropriateness of such foreign influence efforts in U.S. politics is certainly fair to question. Third, Skeptical Science has positioned itself as a public arbiter of truth, including rendering judgments as to who is or who is not employable by universities. Their claims to service in the public interest mean that evidence contrary to such claims is also in the public interest.
For these reasons I have made the judgment that discussing the leaked discussions relevant to their stated public interest mission – and which have been in the public domain for many years – is not only fair, it is important. As the editor of the Times of London wrote in 1852, “We are bound to tell the truth as we find it, without fear of consequences.”
Knowing full well the considerable power and influence wielded by Skeptical Science and their allies, I am fearful indeed, but truth matters more. And the truth here is ugly.
The internal discussions among the Skeptical Science team, with the 3,700 mentions of Pielke Sr., reveal a years-long campaign to destroy his reputation, and to elevate their stature at his expense. The effort was coordinated and brutal.
In one representative exchange, they said, “We are HUNTING Pielke” and in another, “We are trying to bring him down,” and still another, “My vote is to take the b****** down!” Across 3,700 mentions in the dataset, there is no shortage of such expressed intent to damage, if not end, my father’s distinguished career.
Their strategy was sinister. They sought to define Pielke Sr. as a “climate denier,” and to use his prominent status in the field as the basis for elevating their own by then taking him down. Often they commented on how pleased they were to be able to use the stature of Pielke Sr. to elevate their own profile in the climate debate, “"The fact that Pielke even acknowledges SkS is a good thing."
At times the Skeptical Science team was confused at why Pielke Sr. was engaging with them: “Why does a scientist of Dr. Pielke's stature choose to spend so much of his time and enrgy posting on SkS? Doesn't he have more important things to do?”
What they did not understand is that Pielke Sr. is a science nerd and is willing to talk atmospheric science with anyone – alarmist, skeptic, expert, non-expert – 24/7/365. They took advantage of this openness to discussion, and perhaps his naivete as to their motives, to seek to destroy him. They went so far as to strategically have one team member contact him by email on multiple occasions to appear friendly and engage in a side discussion to see if they could gather further information via a good cop/bad cop routine.
Some of the discussions of Pielke Sr. veered into the paranoid, with Skeptical Science team members on several occasions fantasizing that Pielke Sr. was perhaps the point man in a global climate denier conspiracy. If only they could somehow access his university emails, one mused, “Look, if the deniers' emails are exposed I have no doubt that what we see will be unbelieveable, mind blowing, maybe even criminal. Why none has tried legitimitely (i.e., through FOIA) to access their emails is beyond me.”
The idea that Pielke Sr. is a climate denier is laughable. Skeptical Science consistently interpreted Pielke Sr.’s willingness to engage with their mortal enemies (such as Anthony Watts of the skeptical blog WattsUpWithThat) not as a sign of a magnanimous senior statesman willing to help anyone bring their ideas to the peer-reviewed literature, but as evidence of some sort of deep and irreparable moral turpitude. The hacked discussions are infused with such Manichean paranoia.
As time went by the Skeptical Science team’s attitude toward Pielke Sr. became increasingly unhinged and personal. John Cook, the founder of Skeptical Science, wrote, “"I'm finding myself very annoyed when I think about Pielke, having trouble thinking purely rationally and strategically when I think about him.” One team member expressed some concern about their attacks, “It looks like a great lion being mobbed by snarling jackals. I don't like it.”
But in the end, the political aims of Skeptical Science meant that Pielke Sr. needed to be destroyed: “he lends the camouflage of scientific respectability to what is likely to be a very dangerous policy of fossil-fuel appeasement. I don't care how Pielke is behaving: I'm playing to win."
And win they have.
Even given my obvious biases, Pielke Sr. is undoubtedly a giant in the atmospheric sciences. It is hard to find any scientist of his generation with a stronger record of achievement. He was an early pioneer of computer modeling of weather, contributing to demonstrably better weather forecasts. He was also a leader in recognizing the role of land surface processes in regional and global climate. A full recounting of his achievements would span many columns here. At a time when he should be receiving lifetime achievement awards and celebrated for his contributions to science, he is instead ostracized and is still being denigrated by Skeptical Science and their followers.
My bias is not simply familial. You see, I am also on the Skeptical Science blacklist. Rarely does a day go by that this is not used on social media or, at times, in personal interactions to illustrate my lack of fitness to participate in scientific discussions, to damage my career and reputation.
Like Curry and Pielke Sr., I have seen firsthand the consequences of a public and behind-the-scenes campaign by Skeptical Science against me. Despite the widespread aversion of professor blacklisting, in climate science at least, such blacklisting is allowed and even encouraged by the community, and as a result, it works.
I have been locked out from Twitter for sharing some of the information from the hacked Skeptical Science discussions. Several Skeptical Science team members have contacted me by email in the past hours with vaguely sinister but eminently deniable threats. I expect they will come after this column next. And if you hear that I have left academia, like Curry, you’ll know why.
Even so, everything here is true, and truth matters more than fear.
The sun’s activity is in free fall, according to a leading space physicist. But don’t expect a little ice age. “Solar activity is declining very fast at the moment,” Mike Lockwood, professor of space environmental physics at Reading University, UK, told New Scientist. “We estimate faster than at any time in the last 9300 years.”
Lockwood and his colleagues are reassessing the chances of this decline continuing over decades to become the first “grand solar minimum” for four centuries. During a grand minimum the normal 11-year solar cycle is suppressed and the sun has virtually no sunspots for several decades. This summer should have seen a peak in the number of sunspots, but it didn’t happen.
Lockwood thinks there is now a 25 per cent chance of a repetition of the last grand minimum, the late 17th century Maunder Minimum, when there were no sunspots for 70 years. Two years ago, Lockwood put the chances of this happening at less than 10 per cent (Journal of Geophysical Research, DOI: 10.1029/2011JD017013).
Little ice age
The Maunder Minimum coincided with the worst European winters of the little ice age, a period lasting centuries when several regions around the globe experienced unusual cooling. Tree ring studies suggest it cooled the northern hemisphere by up to 0.4 °C.
But Lockwood says we should not expect a new grand minimum to bring on a new little ice age. Human-induced global warming, he says, is already a more important force in global temperatures than even major solar cycles. Temperatures have risen by 0.85 °C since 1880, with more expected, according to the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There may still be noticeable consequences. For instance, long term cold winters in the UK are common when solar activity is low. And less solar activity can slow the jet stream, triggering a suite of interlinked extreme weather events like the Russian heatwave of 2010, and the devastating floods in Pakistan that same year.
Isotope trail
There have been 24 grand solar minima in the past 10,000 years. Their history is reconstructed by looking for isotopes like carbon-14 that cosmic rays generate in the atmosphere. Solar activity boosts the solar wind which deflects cosmic rays coming at Earth, so less solar activity means more cosmic rays and more of these isotopes.
How the isotopes vary over time can be measured by looking at things like tree rings, which absorb carbon-14, or ice cores, which accumulate beryllium-10.
The current long-term decline in solar activity set in after the last grand solar maximum peaked in 1956, says Lockwood. The decline has accelerated recently, and the absence of sunspots this summer has set alarm bells ringing.
The precise extent to which solar cycles influence global temperatures is still debated, including whether the recent decline may have helped cause the current hiatus in the pace of global warming.
“Mike is probably right that there is a chance of the sun returning to a level of activity similar to the Maunder Minimum,” says atmospheric physicist Joanna Haigh of Imperial College. But she adds: “Even under the most optimistic scenario [of minimal global warming and a deep solar minimum] the solar cooling would only just offset greenhouse gas warming. So no ice age.”
It is more likely that it will simply reduce the warming a little, and set us up for greater warming if it receded.
News Pamphlet illustration depicting the Great Flood in the Bristol Channel Jan 1607
The British Library
Bristol chronicle 1564 entry Freeze and Plague
University of Bristol
Flood Plaque Jan 1607 – Plaque in Kingston Seymour, one of the churches flooded in Jan 1607 (plaque says 1606 because the start of the year was normally taken to be 25 March in this period)
University of Bristol
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Press release issued: 1 February 2021
Historians from the University of Bristol have discovered contemporary accounts of numerous weird weather events that happened in the Bristol area around the turn of the 16th/17th century including devastating floods, massive snowfalls and frosts that saw rivers frozen for months.
The detail comes from a chronicle that was acquired by Bristol Archives in 1932 but then declared as ‘unfit for production’ due to its extremely fragile nature. Access to the manuscript was very limited making it difficult to investigate its contents.
Using digital photography, a team led by Dr Evan Jones from the University of Bristol’s Department of History, has now painstakingly transcribed the document which is named 09594/1.
Chronicle writing dates back to the early medieval period and record events of a community that are relevant to it as a reference work for future readers. Early chronicles were mostly produced by religious communities but as time went on town clerks and private families kept them as well. They recorded the most memorable events of that particular year – such as wars, rebellions, plagues and fires.
Dr Jones and his team concluded that 09594/1 was probably not begun until the late 17th century. It was then updated regularly until 1735 by different people (probably from the same family). It also includes detail dating back as far as the 13th century which would have been taken from older chronicles or manuscripts.
What drew the researchers’ particular attention amongst the more expected entries, was a vivid series of descriptions of extreme weather-related events that occurred in the Bristol area from the 1560s to the 1620s.
Together with an environmental scientist from University College London (UCL), the Bristol researchers have written about what they discovered, and the impact of this climatic deterioration on the city of Bristol, in the Royal Meteorological Society’s journal Weather.
Four hundred years ago, England experienced some of its worst weather ever. In the depths of the Little Ice Age (1300-1800), huge volcanic eruptions in the Americas pushed dust and gases high into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. The related cooling phase is known as the ‘Grindelwald Fluctuation’ (1560-1630).
The chronicle entries, seemingly written by a Jacobean weather enthusiast, describe how Bristol and its wider region was affected. Crop failures, famines, great freezes, floods, unseasonal blizzards, tempests and droughts all feature in the accounts of these ‘strangely altered’ times.
Examples include:
1596: A great famine in diverse places and in the city of Bristol all kinds of grain were very dear so that the poor was in very great want.
1603: This year upon the fourth of October was the greatest snow that ever was known by the memory of man.
1607-8: November the 20th 1607 began a frost which lasted till February 8 following at which time the River of Severn and Wye were so hard frozen that people did pass on foot from side unto the other and played gambols and made fires to roast meat upon the ice.
1610-11: The winter proved very stormy in so much that it occasioned the greatest shipwrecks that ever was known in England.
These are just a few of the chronicle’s entries, the severity of which can be corroborated from other sources. Some of the events were even illustrated in news pamphlets - the popular press of the day.
It was not just in Bristol that the weather was extreme. The Freeze of 1607-8 led to the first Frost Fair upon the Thames in London. The storms and famines discussed in the Bristol chronicle wrecked shipping and caused mass starvation across the world.
In Shakespeare’s England, tempests were well known and the ‘strange alterations of times and seasons’ was recognised by the journalists of the day. As one 1613 news pamphlet reports: ‘We have within these few years, as well within this our native country of England as in foreign nations, been most grievously stricken... by dry summers, and parching heats, droughts...to cause barrenness with scarcity, then freezing and cold winters’.
Professor Anson Mackay, one of the co-authors of the article from UCL, said: “The Little Ice Age was the coldest period since the start of the Holocene (almost 12,000 years ago).
“The cooling period from 1300-1800 was a time of global climatic change, but one that was very different to modern global warming. Back then, volcanic eruptions and changes in the world’s ocean circulation all played a role. Today, increases in greenhouse gases are the driving force behind global warming.”
Dr Jones added: “What I love about this chronicle is the vividness of the language. But the author was still trying to be measured and fact-based. Contemporary observers didn’t have objective systems of weather measurement, but they made an honest attempt to evaluate these events in relative terms.”
One such episode was the Great Flood of 1607, recorded in the chronicle. The flood is currently being studied by Rose Hewlett, the article’s third author, who notes that the height of the water can still be seen on flood markers in churches around the estuary.
The chronicle states that in Bristol itself ‘all the lower part were drowned about four or five foot’ while the flood 'came so fast and high at Henbury that the waters continued a long time a fathom deep that the people were obliged to abide on the trees two or three days’.
What these colourful accounts suggest is that the Grindelwald Fluctuation did not just make the world cold. The disturbed global climate led to more catastrophic weather events.
This, suggests Professor Mackay, is where this study holds lessons for today. He added: “Modern climate change isn’t just making the world warmer, it is also causing more severe weather, which will only get worse. Current modelling suggests that weather-related fatalities in Europe could increase fifty-fold in the coming decades.
“If this proves correct, the news headlines of the future could be as bleak as those of the seventeenth century.”
Further information
Paper
‘Weird weather in Bristol during the Grindelwald Fluctuation (1560-1630)’ by E. T. Jones, R. Hewlett and A. W. Mackay in Weather.
Chronicle transcription
Evan T. Jones (ed.), Bristol Annal: Bristol Archives 09594/1 (2019)
Hockey stick graph
The pioneering 'hockey stick' graph collected proxy temperature data from tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores
It is a persuasive image. The "hockey stick" graph shows the average global temperature over the past 1,000 years. For the first 900 years there is little variation, like the shaft of an ice-hockey stick. Then, in the 20th century, comes a sharp rise like the stick's blade.
The graph was a pioneering attempt to put together data from hundreds of studies of past temperature using "proxies" from analysing things like tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores. The resulting shape, first published by Professor Mike Mann of Pennsylvania State University in 1998, has become a symbol of the conflict between mainstream climate scientists and their critics. The deniers say it is a lie. Climate scientist stand by it.
As yet, the university has not confirmed the authenticity of the emails apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit. Nevertheless the emails reveal that in 1999 there were huge rows about whether the new graph, should be given prominence in the next IPCC report due in 2001. The revelation raises questions about the transparency of the IPCC process.
On 22 September 1999, Met Office scientist Chris Folland, an IPCC lead author, alerted key researchers that a diagram of temperature change over the past thousand years "is a clear favourite for the policy makers' summary". But there were two competing graphs – Mann's hockey stick and another, by Phil Jones, Keith Briffa and others, which sought to ascertain temperatures over the past millennium using, among other things, tree rings, ice cores and coral.
Mann's graph was clearly the more compelling image of man-made climate change. Jones and Briffa's "dilutes the message rather significantly," said Folland. "We want the truth. Mike [Mann] thinks it lies nearer his result."
But Briffa did not. Three hours later, he sent a long and passionate email. "It should not be taken as read that Mike's series is THE CORRECT ONE," he warned. "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data', but in reality the situation is not quite so simple... For the record, I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago."
The row had been going on for months. Most of the correspondence is missing. But in April 1999, Ray Bradley, a co-author with Mann on the hockey stick study, was apologising for Mann's stance. "I would like to dissociate myself from Mike Mann's view [expressed in a complaint Mann had made the previous summer to the journal Science]… I find this notion quite absurd. I have worked with the UEA group for 20+ years and have great respect for them. Of course, I don't agree with everything they write, and we often have long (but cordial) arguments about what they think versus my views, but that is life… As for thinking that is it 'better that nothing appear, than something unacceptable to us'… as though we are the gatekeepers of all that is acceptable in the world of paleoclimatology seems amazingly arrogant."
Mann and Briffa eventually settled their differences. And the hockey stick was given pride of place in the IPCC report, alongside the claim that "it is likely that the 1990s have been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium". Most researchers, including Briffa, now believe that statement was correct. But the emails reveal how deeply controversial it was at the time.
• This article was amended on 9 February 2010. In the original, the graph competing with Mike Mann's "hockey stick" depiction was said to be by Keith Briffa. This has been corrected. A paragraph referring to a Ray Bradley remark in April 1999 has been amended to make clear that he was referring to an earlier complaint to the journal Science by Mike Mann. The original final sentence - saying that no reader of the IPCC report would have guessed the extent of the controversies described in the story above - has been deleted, because these controversies were widely discussed by those in the field.
by GRÉGOIRE CANLORBE · OCT 28, 2017
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20604491_527762360889101_3787449182197163589_nIstván Markó (1956 – 2017) was a professor and researcher in organic chemistry at the Université catholique de Louvain. Prof. Dr. Marko was an outspoken defender of the skeptical view on the issue of human-caused/anthropogenic global warming, appearing in numerous French-language media on the Internet, in public debates and diverse English-language blog postings. He also joined with Anglo-Saxon climate skeptics, publishing several articles together on Breitbart News.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Climate activism is thought of as Marxism’s Trojan horse, a way for its followers to proceed with their face masked, in the never-ending holy war that Marxism claims will be necessary to establish communist totalitarianism. Yet it was actually Margaret Thatcher, the muse of conservative libertarianism, who kick-started the IPCC. How do you make sense of this?
István Markó: More precisely, Margaret Thatcher, although a trained chemist and therefore aware of the mendacious character of such an allegation about carbon dioxide (CO2), was the first proponent to use the excuse of climate implications posed by CO2 to achieve her political ends. At the time, that is, in the mid-1980s, Thatcher was waging war with the almighty coal union. In those days, the UK coal unions were remunerating themselves with public monies and by lobbying via the Labour Party had managed to pass an enormous number of laws and subsidies to keep an industry afloat that was no longer profitable on its own.
While facing a strike by the British miners, chaired by Arthur Scargill, (nick-named “Arthur the Red”) who was later to found and lead the Socialist Labor Party, Thatcher thought it worthwhile to enshrine the thesis of warming linked to CO2 emissions to wind up the trade unionists holding her country hostage. But she was not really the initiator of the IPCC. The “kick-off,” as you call it, came more from personalities who were involved in hard ecologism,[1] such as Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the UN Commission responsible for the famous 1987’s report “Our Common Future,” or Canadian Maurice Strong, who ranks among the founding members of the IPCC.
The belief in a catastrophic greenhouse effect due to CO2 emissions provided Thatcher with an additional asset, in her arm wrestling with the union, to set up the United Kingdom to get out of coal and to transition to nuclear energy. It was a belief she knew to be unfounded, but one she largely helped to entrench and popularize. One can, admittedly, deplore Thatcher’s strategy based on a perversion of science. The fact remains that, at that time, the electric power generation industries, notably that from coal, did not do so under very clean conditions. Even though CO2 has absolutely nothing to do with a poison, there existed then a real pollution associated with coal burning due to a lack of modern emission control technology.
Indeed, the combustion of coal not only produces innocuous CO2 emissions, it is accompanied by sulfurous and nitrogenous waste, produces SO2 emissions, SO3 emissions, and NOx emissions, ejects fine particles, and leaves nominally radioactive ashes (despite the fact that the epidemiological evidence and data for any serious health harms are still very controversial and hard to come by). Since the 1980s, the treatment of industrial pollution has however evolved. Today an electrical utility power generation plant that uses coal as a raw material now results in very little environmental pollution.
Grégoire Canlorbe: According to you, a person sensitive to pastoral charms, smitten with lounges of greenery and variegated grass beds, can only celebrate the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. Could you come back to the necessity to stop demonizing CO2 as a “Satanic gas” in view of the objective data of chemistry?
István Markó: Again, CO2 is not, and has never been, a poison. Each of our exhalations, each of our breaths, emits an astronomical quantity of CO2 proportionate to that in the atmosphere (some >40,000 ppm); and it is very clear that the air we expire does not kill anyone standing in front of us. What must be understood, besides, is that CO2 is the elementary food of plants. Without CO2 there would be no plants, and without plants there would be no oxygen and therefore no humans. The equation is as simple as that.
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Plants need CO2, water, and daylight. These are the mechanisms of photosynthesis, to generate the sugars that will provide them with staple food and building blocks. That fundamental fact of botany is one of the primary reasons why anyone who is sincerely committed to the preservation of the “natural world” should abstain from demonizing CO2. Over the last 30 years, there has been a gradual increase in the CO2 level. But what is also observed is that despite deforestation, the planet’s vegetation has grown by about 20%. This expansion of vegetation on the planet, nature lovers largely owe it to the increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
If we study, however, what has been happening at the geological level for several million years, we realize that the present period is characterized by an extraordinarily low CO2 level. During the Jurassic, Triassic, and so on, the CO2 level rose to values sometimes of the order of 7000, 8000, 9000 ppm, which considerably exceeds the paltry 400 ppm that we have today. Not only did life exist, in those far-off times when CO2 was so present in large concentration in the atmosphere, but plants such as ferns commonly attained heights of 25 meters. Reciprocally, far from benefiting the current vegetation, the reduction of the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere would be likely to compromise the health, and even the survival, of numerous plants. To fall below the threshold of 280 or 240 ppm would plainly lead to the extinction of a large variety of our vegetal species.
In addition, our relentless crusade to reduce CO2 could be more harmful to nature as plants are not the only organisms to base their nutrition on CO2. Phytoplankton species also feed on CO2, using carbon from CO2 as a building unit and releasing oxygen. By the way, it is worth remembering that ~70% of the oxygen present today in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton, not trees: contrary to common belief, it is not the forests, but the oceans, that constitute the “lungs” of the earth.
About the supposed link between global warming and CO2 emissions, it is simply not true that CO2 has a major greenhouse effect. It is worth remembering, here too, that CO2 is a minor gas. Today it represents only 0.04% of the composition of the air; and its greenhouse effect is attributed the value of 1. The major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor which is ten times more potent than CO2 in its greenhouse effect. Water vapor is present in a proportion of 2% in the atmosphere. Those facts are, in principle, taught at school and at university, but one still manages to incriminate CO2 alongside this learning, in using a dirty trick that presents the warming effect of CO2 as minor but exacerbated, through feedback loops, by the other greenhouse effects.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Many theories that claim to be scientific amount to an elaboration, more or less rigorous from the logical point of view, more or less robust from the experimental point of view, destined to justify some feelings inherently found in those very theories. Besides, people letting themselves be swayed by their feelings rather than by arguments, the persuasive power of a theory will come essentially from the feelings it expresses—and not from the logico-experimental varnish that covers them.
Beyond political interests, what then are the feelings that inspire the anthropogenic global warning thesis and that render it so appealing?
István Markó: As a scientist, I naturally hope that I can manage to confine myself into the field of what Vilfredo Pareto used to call the logico-experimental method, and that I do not let myself be skewed, without my knowledge, by feelings interfering with the seriousness of my theories and the validity of my experimentations. But my feelings are very certainly at stake when I examine the militant’s speech about the thesis of anthropogenic warming and the strange influence it exerts on governments and public opinion.
To begin, I believe in science: I mean that I believe in the possibility of objectively knowing reality through science. I believe that there are truth and falsehood, that science allows us to distinguish between the two, and that truth must be known; that scientific knowledge must be placed in the hands of the population. I also believe in freedom. I believe that every man is entitled to lead his life and to manage his goods as he sees fit, that he is the only possessor of himself, and that statist socio-economic control is as morally reprehensible as it is harmful in its social, economic, and environmental consequences.
I note two things distressing me: firstly, the population is increasingly misinformed scientifically; and secondly, the media and governments take advantage of this to propagate a theory that is doubtful, namely that of anthropogenic warming, and to promote coercive measures on its behalf. Few people take the time to get vital information about the actual CO2 footprint; and few people, more generally, are still interested in science. I deeply regret that our Western societies have succeeded in cultivating such mistrust of science: such a reluctance to have confidence in its capacity to know the world objectively and to transform it positively.
The theory of anthropogenic warming claims to be scientific; but if people accept this theory, if they hold it to be true, it is clearly not out of interest for science. Such a fragile theory, in view of the CO2 facts I have presented to you above, could never have been accepted by people who truly care about science; and who possess a deep understanding in that field. In my eyes, there are two main reasons—or if you prefer, two main types of feelings—that make people let themselves be seduced by the theory of anthropogenic warming so readily. In the first place, the Catholic religion is in decline in the Western world; and what I call ecologism comes to replace it.
In the second place, Westerners have a pronounced taste for self-flagellation; and the theory of anthropogenic warming provides justification for that tendency, possibly anchored in our Judeo-Christian heritage. So, on the one hand, we have religious feelings: faith in a new system of thought, which is ecologism; the veneration of a new divinity, which is benevolent and protective Nature. On the other hand, we have a feeling of guilt, expressed in our conviction that, if the climate warms up, it is our fault; and that if we do not immediately limit our CO2 emissions, we will have sullied and disfigured our planet.
Grégoire Canlorbe: The following facts are commonly presented to us as proving the planet is warming, whether it has anything to do with the toxicity of CO2. Firstly, the level of seas and oceans would increase year after year, engulfing entire islands, while the level of glaciers and polar caps would decrease; secondly, temperatures would register a gradual augmentation, while the frequency of extreme weather events and the area affected by droughts would also reach increasingly high levels; thirdly, the resurgence of some diseases such as that of anthrax, in Russia, would follow the return of bacteria freed by thawing of permafrost in the north.
Which of those commonly accepted facts do you judge to be substantiated?
István Markó: Over the last 12,000 years, what we have witnessed is an oscillation between warm and cold periods, thus periods with rising and declining sea levels. Incontestably, sea and ocean levels have been on the rise since the end of the Little Ice Age that took place approximately from the beginning of the 14th century until the end of the 19th century. At the end of that period, global temperatures started to rise. That being said, the recorded rise is 0.8 degrees Celsius and is, therefore, nothing extraordinary. If the temperature goes up, ocean water obviously dilates and some glaciers recede. This is something glaciers have always done, and not a specificity of our time.
Thus, in Ancient Roman times, glaciers were much smaller than the ones we know nowadays. I invite the reader to look at the documents dating back to the days of Hannibal, who managed to cross the Alps with his elephants because he did not encounter ice on his way to Rome, (except during a snow storm just before arriving on the Italian plain). Today, you could no longer make Hannibal’s journey. He proved to be capable of such an exploit, precisely because it was warmer in Roman times.
Sea levels are currently on the rise; but this is an overestimated phenomenon. The recorded rise is 1.5 millimeters per year, namely 1.5 cm every ten years, and is, therefore, not dramatic at all. Indeed, it does happen that entire islands do get engulfed; but in 99% of the cases, that is due to a classic erosion phenomenon[2] and not to rising sea levels. As far as the Italian city of Venice is concerned, the fact it has been faced with water challenges is not due to any rise of the lagoon level; and is just the manifestation of the sad reality that “the City of the Doges” is sinking under its weight on the marshland. Once again, the global sea and ocean levels are rising; but the threat effectively represented by that phenomenon is far from being tangible. I note that the Tuvalu islands, whose engulfment was previously announced as imminent, not only have not been engulfed, but have seen their own land level rise with respect to that of waters around them.
Still another phenomenon we tend to exaggerate is the melting of the polar caps. The quantity of ice in the Arctic has not gone down for 10 years: one may well witness, from one year to the other, ice level fluctuations, but on average that level has remained constant. Right after the Little Ice Age, since the temperature went up, the Artic started to melt; but the ice level in the Arctic finally settled down. Besides, ice has been expanding in Antarctica over the last 30 years; and similarly, we observe in Greenland that the quantity of ice increased by 112 million cubic kilometers last year. On a global scale, glaciers account for peanuts, with most of the ice being located in Antarctica and on Greenland. One cannot but notice an almost unchanged ice level over hundreds of years.
Many other climate myths and legends exist. From storms to tornados, extreme events are going down all around the world; and when they occur, their level is much lower, too. As explained by MIT physicist Richard Lindzen, the reduction of the temperature differential between the north hemisphere and the equatorial part of our planet makes cyclonic energy much smaller: the importance and frequency of extreme events thus tend to decrease. But once again, the rise of temperatures shows a magnitude considerably lower with respect to that we currently project.
If you look at satellite data and weather balloon measurements, you then note that the temperature rise around the world is relatively modest; that it is much lower than the rise that is predicted for us by authorities, and that these predictions rely on calculations that are highly uncertain. This is because the simulation inputs cannot take into account past temperatures (for which there is no precision data[3]), except by subjectively adjusting x, y, z data that are not always known. The recent temperature spikes measured by satellites and balloons are part of a classic natural phenomenon which is called El Niño. This short-term phenomenon consists of a return of the very warm waters at the surface of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The heat thus liberated in the atmosphere pushes up the global temperature and CO2 plays no role in that process.
Another issue I would like to raise: present deserts, far from expanding, are receding; and they are receding due to the higher quantity of CO2 available in the air. It turns out that greenhouse operators voluntarily inject three times as much CO2 in the commercial greenhouse as it is present in the atmosphere. The result we can observe is that plants grow faster and are bigger, that they are more resistant to diseases and to destructive insects, and that their photosynthesis is way more efficient and that they therefore consume, less water. Similarly, the rise of CO2 level in the atmosphere makes that plants need less water and thus that they can afford to colonize arid regions.
Regarding diseases and other weird phenomena hastily attributed to climate warming, there is a website—“globalwarminghoax.com,” if I recall —that collects the different rumors and contemplations on this theme. The fact that masculine fertility decreases; the fact that birds’ wings shrink; the fact that a shark showed up in the North Sea; absolutely anything is likely to be connected to climate change if one displays enough intellectual dishonesty. That is where honest journalists come into play: your role is to investigate on the true reason of phenomena and to demystify the ready-made thinking that financial and political forces ask the media to channel slavishly.
Climate-related diseases are relatively rare; and even malaria does not directly depend on the climate, but rather on the way we enable the parasite to reproduce and the mosquito to flourish in the place where we are located. If you find yourself in a swampy area, the odds you will get malaria are high; if you have drained the system and you no longer have that wetland, the odds you will catch the disease are very low. In the end, automatically blaming the resurgence of some disease on climate change comes down to removing the personal responsibility from the people involved: such as denying that their refusal of vaccinations, for instance, or their lack of hygiene, may be part of the problem.
Grégoire Canlorbe: In his 1993’s speech, in Liechtenstein, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was alarmed by the disadvantages associated with the blossoming of industry and mass consumption. “The first neglected point, only recently discovered,” he affirmed, considering both the communist regimes and also the capitalist economies, “is that an unlimited Progress does not sit well with the limited resources of the planet; that nature must be preserved rather than overly exploited; that we are making a flashy rampage through an environment that is also our common destiny.”
Solzhenitsyn claimed the abundance of inexpensive consumer goods, the progress of industry, the pursuit of material ease, all that has desiccated the soul of Westerners. “The victory of scientific and technical civilization has breathed a sort of spiritual insecurity into us. Its gifts enrich us, but also hold us in slavery. All is interests, we are compelled to look after ours, all is struggle for material goods; but an inner voice tells us that we have left there something pure, superior, and fragile.”
How do you respond to that archipelago of acerbic views?
István Markó: Solzhenitsyn’s analysis, which castigates what he calls “the scientific and technical civilization,” seems to me to be imbued with a curious defiance with respect to science and the technological progress: that same mistrust, in fact, which has spread like wildfire in our Western societies. I imagine that Solzhenitsyn’s pessimistic bias stems from his dark and painful life under the Soviet regime. I do not know whether one should also recognize in his speech typically Orthodox-Slavic traits of thought: be that as it may, his anguish before the scientific, industrial, and material development is somewhat reminiscent of some passages by Dostoyevsky.
To begin, those who convey the idea that the finite character of resources renders infinite growth impossible, leave out of account the ability of the human being to innovate in our technology, to enrich our knowledge of nature, and to enhance our extraction strategies. Let us take the case of this finite resource that is petroleum: one notices, firstly, that new reserves are regularly discovered; secondly, that the depleted oil reserves, (originally tapped by conventional drilling) are exploited by more advanced methods which improve the yield and recovery rate of remaining, formerly unrecoverable oil; and thirdly, that the “peak oil,” which Malthusians constantly say is about to be reached, is constantly postponed. On the other hand, humankind devises recycling methods that let us glimpse the possibility, in a more or less surrealist future, to build growth on perpetually and integrally recycled resources.
I agree that we must preserve our environment; and avoid over exploitation. But what we must also understand is that Nature does not give anything spontaneously: resources are not available by themselves; they must always be fetched, extracted, by means of some technology. Moreover, Nature is not hospitable by itself. To survive and prosper, we had to adapt to our environment, and adapt our environment. The environmental record of communist regimes, which fail, or have failed, in everything, is indeed disastrous; and Solzhenitsyn’s mistrust of “the scientific and technical civilization” arguably comes from there.
To blame mass consumption and industrial progress as such leaves me perplexed, were it only because it is waste, not consumption itself, which is the real problem. As much as the struggle against waste seems to me to be well-founded and necessary, the struggle against the “consumer society,” which happened to inspire a certain terrorism, seems to me irrelevant. I recall that it is notably mass consumption derived from the industrial exploitation of fossil resources that have liberated Western society from poverty and from a whole series of tasks that previously degraded him. The victory of medicine, which is so often praised, would never have been possible, without the chemistry of fossil resources. It is the chemical and industrial advances in pesticides, insecticides, and fertilizers that have enabled us to master our environment.
Unless one deems degrading and enslaving the very fact of improving our living conditions, none can seriously blame science, technology, and consumption for holding us in slavery. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism seems to avoid denying the economic and sanitary benefits of “progress.” That is, it seems to focus on the psychological consequences. But even from that point of view, one easily exaggerates the deleterious effects associated with scientific and technological development and the resulting material comfort and mass consumption. Pathological behaviors, such as addiction, are the work of a minority of consumers: they are therefore exceptional and accidental; and not a sort of congenital disease of “consumer societies.”
As to the idea that having a comfortable life would create in us a moral desert, that it would make us greedy and heartless, this notion does not stand up to scrutiny either. It is enough to note to what extent people in opulent societies give to charitable organizations of all kinds. Ironically, Asian societies, which have remained faithful to their spiritual traditions, today cultivate a much greater respect for science and technology than that which prevails in the secularized West. It is therefore false to claim, as Solzhenitsyn seems to do, that the spirituality of people atrophies as their way of life is more centered on science and technology.
That said, there are indeed psychological drawbacks that I think can be legitimately attributed to material comfort. Over generations it gradually disposes people who take their comfort for granted, to lose sight of the inhospitable and dangerous world in which they live. Blinded by the ease of their standard of living, and the facilities stemming from their scientific, industrial, and technological advancement, Westerners have finally forgotten a fundamental law: this world gives nothing without effort. Again, the reason we are able to inhabit this planet in conditions that are so favorable to our health and to our hygienic wellbeing, as well as to our economic and demographic development, is that we have rendered our environment hospitable.
Gaia does not take us under her protection; nor is she that delicate and innocent goddess, offended by blood and toil, raped by factories, mines, and urban groups, which ecologists celebrate. I mentioned above the colonization of deserts by plants thanks to the greater amount of CO2 available to them. Colonization genuinely comes from Nature itself, not the human being; it is not so much that humans “invented” colonization, or industry, commerce, war, or even infanticides; we only inherited those behaviors from Nature. If the reader does not take me seriously on infanticides, let him think of the polar bears that do not hesitate to kill their own offspring and to take their heads away for the evening meal.
Grégoire Canlorbe: You seem to have a very special tenderness for China, where you have travelled extensively. The Chinese generation IV nuclear system particularly seems to catch your attention. Drawing on your onsite experience and your research, do the environmental/energy policies of China and its semi-planned version of a capitalist economy deliver, in your eyes, superior results than those obtained in Russia and in the Western world?
István Markó: As a visiting professor at two Chinese universities, I have extensively travelled in China; and I must confess, as you say, that I have a special affection for that country. Russia’s openness to the capitalist economy was far too brutal and hasty: it led to what I would be tempted to call mafia-type capitalism. The Chinese understood this well. Instead of “liberalizing” like mad, with those unfortunate consequences, they have preferred to opt for a smooth transition from communist totalitarianism to semi-planned capitalism.
Key members of the Chinese government are all trained as scientists or engineers: they are leaders who can reason in a logical way, who can analyze and dissect a problem scientifically; and since they do not have to worry about organizing an election campaign every two or five years, they are in a position to make decisions over the long term. That type of elite production is an undoubtable force of Chinese capitalism; and the development of fourth-generation nuclear, as you rightly point out, is one of the great successes to their credit.
Having said that, I feel obliged to state that I am not candid about the fate of political and social freedoms there. I note, however, that freedom of expression is advancing at breakneck speed. In particular, I witnessed demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that were in the purest European style, and that did not result in any of the participants being shot or beheaded. In 1993, a doctoral student who wanted to come to Belgium could only do so if his family remained hostage on Chinese soil. Today, there is no longer any problem for his family to accompany him.
china-trump On the Chinese internet, speech is uninhibited; and nearly each young person owns one, or even two mobile phones, things are said and transmitted at a phenomenal rate. There are, admittedly, restrictions, but not more in China than elsewhere. Admittedly, Google and Facebook have been blocked, but the fault lies with the owners. I do not contend that China is the paradise of freedom: all I want to point out is that China is evolving towards freedom and that it respects science, while in the West, we are evolving towards communism, the atrophy of freedom of expression, and contempt of science. Donald Trump seems to know that; and he seems to be the natural alpha leader that America needs to stamp its process of decadence, and to maintain its leadership against the Chinese competitor.
Two things deserve to be said about the ecological balance of China. Contrary to what is suggested by a certain pessimistic prejudice, the Chinese are increasingly rich. One notices the emergence of a veritable middle class, and as they get richer, their environmental concerns increase. But the Chinese, both elites and “ordinary citizens,” do not care about global warming – their concern deals with air quality, the preservation of forests, the safeguard of threatened species, and not with a hypothetical warming of the climate that should be counteracted. Moreover, the Chinese have understood that the future of electricity and power generation lies in nuclear or fossil energies, and certainly not in intermittent ‘renewable’ energies.
The wind industry, over which ecologists swoon, produces highly unpredictable output, depending on the intensity of the wind. Even under good atmospheric conditions, wind delivers too little electricity to be a profitable industry on its own. Warren Buffet, who owns one of the largest wind farms in Iowa, said it without embarrassment: “On wind power, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. This is the only reason to build them. They do not make sense without the tax credit.” The ecological balance is just as bad: onshore wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands, even millions of birds and bats per year. As for wind turbines at sea, they kill many marine mammals, again in the utmost indifference of ecologists.
We are plagued, in Europe, by a morbid fear of nuclear power. The Chinese, but also the Russians and the Indians, know that this fear is irrational, and that renewables that can only provide intermittent energy, are not a viable alternative. They are developing their nuclear industry at a brisk pace and are already experimenting with the next-generation, thorium-fueled nuclear reactor. As for the Germans and the French, and soon the Belgians, alas, they are regressing! They are horrified by the Fukushima accident, encouraged by silly elites, and so they are destroying their wonderful energy/power generation industrial parks, becoming the laughing stock of emerging countries. I recall that the earthquake and the tsunami of 2011 certainly caused numerous victims, about 20,000 deaths. But no one has died because of the nuclear industrial accident as such.
In the United States, there currently happens to be an upsurge in funding for what one calls small modular units. But China assuredly possesses leadership in the nuclear industry. They are in first place before the Russians and the Indians. The Chinese regularly build nuclear power plants, having become masters in that field, they do so faster and faster. They are, today, in the process of devising two thorium-based nuclear pilots. They know that its combustion results in highly radioactive products, with long life spans; but they have managed to solve that problem and find a way to obtain ultimate products that are very weakly radioactive.
Besides this, the Chinese are on the way to becoming leaders in the conquest of space. They built their own platforms, which they managed to send into space and they also have their own launchers, which are extremely reliable, and which are much cheaper, for example, than the Ariane launchers. If the Chinese are such high performers and so innovative, it is because, like the Indians and the Russians, they have faith in science: they have faith in the ability of science to embellish their future and to create a better world. In Europe, there was a time when we, too, had faith in science; and faith in an evolution of our societies that would rest on science. Today we have not only turned our backs on science, we are choked and infantilized by bureaucrats who suck the living forces of the old continent.
Grégoire Canlorbe: According to a recurring affirmation on your part, the panda (a short while ago endangered) constitutes an “error of nature.” You see it as a creature too ill-adapted to its environment and too convoluted in terms of survival or reproduction strategies. Could you tell us more about it? Ultimately, where does the responsibility of human beings stop and where does that of Mother Nature herself begin in her children’s extinction?
István Markó: It occurred to me to come up with the expression “error of nature” to qualify the panda. Belonging to the family of Ursidae, the panda is normally an herbivore. It feeds almost exclusively on bamboos, a certain type of bamboo, in fact, which has a variable energy capacity according to the time of the year. Moreover, the panda is a solitary animal, which avoids seeking the company of its congeners, and which therefore rarely leaves its own territory. Those two facts concur to render the reproduction of the panda highly unlikely. On top of this, it is more unlikely as the fertility time of a female panda is only about three days per year.
Firstly, when she is fertile, the female must move off to meet a male disposed to mate with her, and she must do quickly. Secondly, when she ends up with a male, the latter declines the proposition in nine out of ten cases, and this is because at that time of year, their bamboo food source has very poor energy quality. The male panda therefore prefers to rest. No wonder as his testosterone level, at that time of year, is also very low. In addition, pandas care very little about their children. For all those reasons, I think that the panda is a naturally endangered species: a species condemned by nature and saved by the human being.
Among the species that disappear every year, some do so for natural reasons, others owe their extinction to the activity of the human being. That second scenario is the minority, in reality. As in the case of dodo, the species that disappear, or have disappeared, through the fault of the human being are generally insular. Once their biotope has been reduced, they have few possibilities of defending themselves. It is utterly true that there are about 800 species, over the last 600 years that may have disappeared, but the figures that we are hammered with ad nauseam, by environmental activists, the tens of thousands of species supposed to disappear every year, are essentially pulled out of a magical hat.
One day I wrote an e-mail to WWF asking them to enumerate, preferably in Latin, the names of the species that disappeared in the current year, as well as to indicate the location of the cadavers. To this day, I have never received an answer! And for a very simple reason, NGOs want to frighten us and make us feel guilty with baseless allegations. In addition, we should remember it so happens quite regularly that species believed to have disappeared resurface – the coelacanth, for instance, but also the Guinea wolf.
Grégoire Canlorbe: The utopia of a worldwide caliphate, revived in the era of information and of the instantaneous and globalized networking, is all the less anachronistic as it echoes the Gaianist and “warmist” dream to confine the reins of sustainable development to a global government. Do you see a convergence of struggles looming between totalitarian ecologism and Islam?
István Markó: Many persons, generally those coming from the former Eastern Bloc, let themselves be seduced by the idea that the resolution of our environmental problems would be that of global governance. In many respects, ecologism is also the communism of the 21st century. In the same way as Islam, it occupies the place left vacant by the decline of Marxism-Leninism. I do not know if a convergence of struggles between Islamists and ecologists will actually take shape; however, I note that we already have the equivalent, on a smaller scale, of the global ecological caliphate. I am thinking of the European Union, which gives us a foretaste of the bureaucratic, global, and totalitarian governance that the United Nations manifestly endeavors to establish.
Since we are talking about globalization, envisioned in its political aspect, the prospect of a world government, but also in its economic and, say, informational aspect—the networking, sometimes instantaneous, of humans, goods, and ideas—I would like to opine a possible perverse effect. As cultures and mentalities mingle, the Westerners’ ecologist (or Gaianist) religion, as well as their penchant for repentance, seem to even reach some of the Asian peoples. Japan, which emerged spiritually emasculated from the Second World War, is more conducive to letting itself be invaded by that Western sanctification of the self-denial of ecologism.
Grégoire Canlorbe: At the Austrian World Summit, in June 2017, Arnold Schwarzenegger described the fate he would reserve to a climate change skeptic in a scenario as follows. “In a movie, it would have been simpler. One would have said: ‘Who thinks the greenhouse gases are not polluters?’ And the one who would have answered: ‘Yes, I do.’ I would have strapped his mouth to the exhaust pipe of a truck [and] turned on the engine.”
As for you, what treatment would you appreciate to see a devotee of anthropogenic warming enduring on screen?
István Markó: Having myself practiced bodybuilding in my youth, I am a great admirer of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man and his cinematography. But I suspect his chemical knowledge, at least what he shows of it, to be a bit light, in contrast to that of Swedish screen star Dolph Lundgren, who at least graduated in chemical engineering. When it comes to getting an enlightened advice in politics or philosophy, I would rather trust Jean-Claude Van Damme.[4]
Arnold expresses himself here completely ignoring that all greenhouse gases are not poison. To strap a car’s exhaust pipe to the mouth of someone and to turn on the engine will only result in blowing up the lungs of the person, which does not have much to do with the greenhouse effect. For my part, the worst ‘punishments’ I would wish upon a devotee of anthropogenic warming, on-screen or in reality, is to be confronted with honest information, data and figures that are not manipulated, which oblige him to recognize the vacuity of his dogma.
Going back to Arnold, among the gases that come out of a powered engine, one finds some that are noxious pollutants—for example, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, or ozone—but carbon dioxide is not part of them. Amongst those polluting gases, all do not have a greenhouse effect. Regarding sea level rise, in many places, notably in Europe, the level of the earth is rising with respect to that of waters. This is a classical geological phenomenon which is known as rebound, due to the fact that at the end of the last glaciation, the enormous quantities of ice that covered the European and North American continent melted, allowing the land that was pushed down by their weight to rise slowly.
We are told that the level of water will increase throughout the world and increase to the point that it will overwhelm a large part of our continents. As Hans von Storch, one of the world’s leading climate modelers, has shown, the models supporting those forecasts are, for 98% of them, totally false. We are told that the air we breathe in the big cities has never been so polluted. One only must review the documents oneself about the air that people used to breath in London in the 1960s to realize how much urban pollution has diminished. In Peking, often castigated for poor air quality, there happens, every now and then, a fog reminiscent of the London smog. But even that pollution in Peking is far from competing with that which, a short while ago, reigned in London.
We are warned against glyphosate, we are called upon to banish it, but I am ready to drink ten grams of glyphosate in front of you. The truth is that glyphosate is a product half as toxic as salt. In practice, it is not more polluting for our environment than it is carcinogenic to our organism. Behind the anti-glyphosate campaign, you find all kinds of NGOs that I call eco-terrorists; and that are ready to do everything, even banishing scientific truth itself, to destroy Monsanto. I am neither a partisan nor an enemy of that firm, but I deplore the unjustified animosity surrounding a truly brilliant product. This animosity is fueled by a shameful propaganda on the part of the Avaaz and other Greenpeace type groups.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add a thing or two?
István Markó: I would like to thank you for the relevance of your questions. I was recently in Santa Barbara, California, where I had the opportunity to eat with plates and cutlery made of corn, which are thus biodegradable. This is an initiative that I welcome, and that has nothing to do with the vain, costly, and spiritually lethal struggle against CO2 emissions. If there is one final message I would like to convey, it is that we have to be concerned about the real ecological problems — noxious pollutants, unmanaged waste, untreated human sewage. We have to cease letting ourselves be manipulated by causes that purport to be good for our planet, but that are simply pretexts for enslaving and tying up humanity.
God knows there are abominable things happening to our planet! Think about the pollution of the oceans and the “seventh continent;” think about the extinction of some marine species like codfish, which is the victim not only of overfishing, but of the proliferation of seals whose hunting has been prohibited. We must preserve our environment, it goes without saying. We must also exercise our critical mind and identify the real problems, otherwise our good feelings for ‘saving the planet’ are only arrogant, hypocritical, and stupid tears.
The agreement of the Paris COP 21 was not signed to save the planet and to prevent us from roasting due to an imaginary temperature increase of +2°C. Behind all that masquerade is hidden, as always, the ugly face of power, greed, and profit. All the industrialists who are in favor of that commitment, which will ruin Europe and immensely impoverish its citizens, do so for the good reason they find in it a huge and easy source of income. As for NGOs, when they are not simply motivated by greed, their motive consists in a resolutely Malthusian ideology. Their object is to return the world to a very small population, on the order of a few hundred million people. To do so, they impoverish the world, remove the power of fossil fuel energies, and thus ensure that the number of deaths increases.
solzhenitsyn-thatch_785322c
Alexander Solzhenitsyn meeting Margaret Thatcher in 1983
That conversation was originally published by Watts Up With That, the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change, in October 2017. An edited version was also published by Breitbart News Network, in October 2017.
[1] « Ecologism is a new political ideology based on the position that the non-human world is worthy of moral consideration, and that this should be taken into account in social, economic, and political systems. » Brian Baxter http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/ecologism
[2] The island shores are eroded by the persistent pounding of the ocean waves. This is perceived as ‘sinking’ or as ‘sea level rise’ but upward creep of the waters is is due to island soil being washed away.
[3] Historic temperatures are determined by ‘proxies’ – using broad estimates drawn from various geological, carbon-14, tree-ring or other natural indicators. Modern thermometers were invented in the early 1700’s. Still today with high precision instruments, no measurements less than 1°C can be accurately measured. Marko famously wrote of the 2016 ‘hottest year ever’ claim by the WMO that : “The World Meteorological Organization – another emanation of the United Nations and which is also, like the IPCC, an intergovernmental forum – declares 2016 the year the warmest of history. Knowing that 2016 is supposedly hotter by 0.02°C than 2015 and that the margin of error on this value is 0.1°C, we see the absurdity of this statement. For those who don’t understand, this means that the variation in temperature can be of + 0.12°C (global warming) or -0.08°C (global cooling). In short, we can’t say anything and WMO has simply lost its mind.”
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wmo-confirms-2016-hottes t-year-record-about-11°c-above-pre-industrial-era
[4] The Belgian martial arts expert and movie star is known for his support of Trump and for his concern for the protection of natural species.
by GRÉGOIRE CANLORBE · OCT 28, 2017
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20604491_527762360889101_3787449182197163589_nIstván Markó (1956 – 2017) was a professor and researcher in organic chemistry at the Université catholique de Louvain. Prof. Dr. Marko was an outspoken defender of the skeptical view on the issue of human-caused/anthropogenic global warming, appearing in numerous French-language media on the Internet, in public debates and diverse English-language blog postings. He also joined with Anglo-Saxon climate skeptics, publishing several articles together on Breitbart News.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Climate activism is thought of as Marxism’s Trojan horse, a way for its followers to proceed with their face masked, in the never-ending holy war that Marxism claims will be necessary to establish communist totalitarianism. Yet it was actually Margaret Thatcher, the muse of conservative libertarianism, who kick-started the IPCC. How do you make sense of this?
István Markó: More precisely, Margaret Thatcher, although a trained chemist and therefore aware of the mendacious character of such an allegation about carbon dioxide (CO2), was the first proponent to use the excuse of climate implications posed by CO2 to achieve her political ends. At the time, that is, in the mid-1980s, Thatcher was waging war with the almighty coal union. In those days, the UK coal unions were remunerating themselves with public monies and by lobbying via the Labour Party had managed to pass an enormous number of laws and subsidies to keep an industry afloat that was no longer profitable on its own.
While facing a strike by the British miners, chaired by Arthur Scargill, (nick-named “Arthur the Red”) who was later to found and lead the Socialist Labor Party, Thatcher thought it worthwhile to enshrine the thesis of warming linked to CO2 emissions to wind up the trade unionists holding her country hostage. But she was not really the initiator of the IPCC. The “kick-off,” as you call it, came more from personalities who were involved in hard ecologism,[1] such as Norwegian Gro Harlem Brundtland, who chaired the UN Commission responsible for the famous 1987’s report “Our Common Future,” or Canadian Maurice Strong, who ranks among the founding members of the IPCC.
The belief in a catastrophic greenhouse effect due to CO2 emissions provided Thatcher with an additional asset, in her arm wrestling with the union, to set up the United Kingdom to get out of coal and to transition to nuclear energy. It was a belief she knew to be unfounded, but one she largely helped to entrench and popularize. One can, admittedly, deplore Thatcher’s strategy based on a perversion of science. The fact remains that, at that time, the electric power generation industries, notably that from coal, did not do so under very clean conditions. Even though CO2 has absolutely nothing to do with a poison, there existed then a real pollution associated with coal burning due to a lack of modern emission control technology.
Indeed, the combustion of coal not only produces innocuous CO2 emissions, it is accompanied by sulfurous and nitrogenous waste, produces SO2 emissions, SO3 emissions, and NOx emissions, ejects fine particles, and leaves nominally radioactive ashes (despite the fact that the epidemiological evidence and data for any serious health harms are still very controversial and hard to come by). Since the 1980s, the treatment of industrial pollution has however evolved. Today an electrical utility power generation plant that uses coal as a raw material now results in very little environmental pollution.
Grégoire Canlorbe: According to you, a person sensitive to pastoral charms, smitten with lounges of greenery and variegated grass beds, can only celebrate the increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air. Could you come back to the necessity to stop demonizing CO2 as a “Satanic gas” in view of the objective data of chemistry?
István Markó: Again, CO2 is not, and has never been, a poison. Each of our exhalations, each of our breaths, emits an astronomical quantity of CO2 proportionate to that in the atmosphere (some >40,000 ppm); and it is very clear that the air we expire does not kill anyone standing in front of us. What must be understood, besides, is that CO2 is the elementary food of plants. Without CO2 there would be no plants, and without plants there would be no oxygen and therefore no humans. The equation is as simple as that.
Capture d’écran 2017-10-28 à 15.09.05
Plants need CO2, water, and daylight. These are the mechanisms of photosynthesis, to generate the sugars that will provide them with staple food and building blocks. That fundamental fact of botany is one of the primary reasons why anyone who is sincerely committed to the preservation of the “natural world” should abstain from demonizing CO2. Over the last 30 years, there has been a gradual increase in the CO2 level. But what is also observed is that despite deforestation, the planet’s vegetation has grown by about 20%. This expansion of vegetation on the planet, nature lovers largely owe it to the increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
If we study, however, what has been happening at the geological level for several million years, we realize that the present period is characterized by an extraordinarily low CO2 level. During the Jurassic, Triassic, and so on, the CO2 level rose to values sometimes of the order of 7000, 8000, 9000 ppm, which considerably exceeds the paltry 400 ppm that we have today. Not only did life exist, in those far-off times when CO2 was so present in large concentration in the atmosphere, but plants such as ferns commonly attained heights of 25 meters. Reciprocally, far from benefiting the current vegetation, the reduction of the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere would be likely to compromise the health, and even the survival, of numerous plants. To fall below the threshold of 280 or 240 ppm would plainly lead to the extinction of a large variety of our vegetal species.
In addition, our relentless crusade to reduce CO2 could be more harmful to nature as plants are not the only organisms to base their nutrition on CO2. Phytoplankton species also feed on CO2, using carbon from CO2 as a building unit and releasing oxygen. By the way, it is worth remembering that ~70% of the oxygen present today in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton, not trees: contrary to common belief, it is not the forests, but the oceans, that constitute the “lungs” of the earth.
About the supposed link between global warming and CO2 emissions, it is simply not true that CO2 has a major greenhouse effect. It is worth remembering, here too, that CO2 is a minor gas. Today it represents only 0.04% of the composition of the air; and its greenhouse effect is attributed the value of 1. The major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor which is ten times more potent than CO2 in its greenhouse effect. Water vapor is present in a proportion of 2% in the atmosphere. Those facts are, in principle, taught at school and at university, but one still manages to incriminate CO2 alongside this learning, in using a dirty trick that presents the warming effect of CO2 as minor but exacerbated, through feedback loops, by the other greenhouse effects.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Many theories that claim to be scientific amount to an elaboration, more or less rigorous from the logical point of view, more or less robust from the experimental point of view, destined to justify some feelings inherently found in those very theories. Besides, people letting themselves be swayed by their feelings rather than by arguments, the persuasive power of a theory will come essentially from the feelings it expresses—and not from the logico-experimental varnish that covers them.
Beyond political interests, what then are the feelings that inspire the anthropogenic global warning thesis and that render it so appealing?
István Markó: As a scientist, I naturally hope that I can manage to confine myself into the field of what Vilfredo Pareto used to call the logico-experimental method, and that I do not let myself be skewed, without my knowledge, by feelings interfering with the seriousness of my theories and the validity of my experimentations. But my feelings are very certainly at stake when I examine the militant’s speech about the thesis of anthropogenic warming and the strange influence it exerts on governments and public opinion.
To begin, I believe in science: I mean that I believe in the possibility of objectively knowing reality through science. I believe that there are truth and falsehood, that science allows us to distinguish between the two, and that truth must be known; that scientific knowledge must be placed in the hands of the population. I also believe in freedom. I believe that every man is entitled to lead his life and to manage his goods as he sees fit, that he is the only possessor of himself, and that statist socio-economic control is as morally reprehensible as it is harmful in its social, economic, and environmental consequences.
I note two things distressing me: firstly, the population is increasingly misinformed scientifically; and secondly, the media and governments take advantage of this to propagate a theory that is doubtful, namely that of anthropogenic warming, and to promote coercive measures on its behalf. Few people take the time to get vital information about the actual CO2 footprint; and few people, more generally, are still interested in science. I deeply regret that our Western societies have succeeded in cultivating such mistrust of science: such a reluctance to have confidence in its capacity to know the world objectively and to transform it positively.
The theory of anthropogenic warming claims to be scientific; but if people accept this theory, if they hold it to be true, it is clearly not out of interest for science. Such a fragile theory, in view of the CO2 facts I have presented to you above, could never have been accepted by people who truly care about science; and who possess a deep understanding in that field. In my eyes, there are two main reasons—or if you prefer, two main types of feelings—that make people let themselves be seduced by the theory of anthropogenic warming so readily. In the first place, the Catholic religion is in decline in the Western world; and what I call ecologism comes to replace it.
In the second place, Westerners have a pronounced taste for self-flagellation; and the theory of anthropogenic warming provides justification for that tendency, possibly anchored in our Judeo-Christian heritage. So, on the one hand, we have religious feelings: faith in a new system of thought, which is ecologism; the veneration of a new divinity, which is benevolent and protective Nature. On the other hand, we have a feeling of guilt, expressed in our conviction that, if the climate warms up, it is our fault; and that if we do not immediately limit our CO2 emissions, we will have sullied and disfigured our planet.
Grégoire Canlorbe: The following facts are commonly presented to us as proving the planet is warming, whether it has anything to do with the toxicity of CO2. Firstly, the level of seas and oceans would increase year after year, engulfing entire islands, while the level of glaciers and polar caps would decrease; secondly, temperatures would register a gradual augmentation, while the frequency of extreme weather events and the area affected by droughts would also reach increasingly high levels; thirdly, the resurgence of some diseases such as that of anthrax, in Russia, would follow the return of bacteria freed by thawing of permafrost in the north.
Which of those commonly accepted facts do you judge to be substantiated?
István Markó: Over the last 12,000 years, what we have witnessed is an oscillation between warm and cold periods, thus periods with rising and declining sea levels. Incontestably, sea and ocean levels have been on the rise since the end of the Little Ice Age that took place approximately from the beginning of the 14th century until the end of the 19th century. At the end of that period, global temperatures started to rise. That being said, the recorded rise is 0.8 degrees Celsius and is, therefore, nothing extraordinary. If the temperature goes up, ocean water obviously dilates and some glaciers recede. This is something glaciers have always done, and not a specificity of our time.
Thus, in Ancient Roman times, glaciers were much smaller than the ones we know nowadays. I invite the reader to look at the documents dating back to the days of Hannibal, who managed to cross the Alps with his elephants because he did not encounter ice on his way to Rome, (except during a snow storm just before arriving on the Italian plain). Today, you could no longer make Hannibal’s journey. He proved to be capable of such an exploit, precisely because it was warmer in Roman times.
Sea levels are currently on the rise; but this is an overestimated phenomenon. The recorded rise is 1.5 millimeters per year, namely 1.5 cm every ten years, and is, therefore, not dramatic at all. Indeed, it does happen that entire islands do get engulfed; but in 99% of the cases, that is due to a classic erosion phenomenon[2] and not to rising sea levels. As far as the Italian city of Venice is concerned, the fact it has been faced with water challenges is not due to any rise of the lagoon level; and is just the manifestation of the sad reality that “the City of the Doges” is sinking under its weight on the marshland. Once again, the global sea and ocean levels are rising; but the threat effectively represented by that phenomenon is far from being tangible. I note that the Tuvalu islands, whose engulfment was previously announced as imminent, not only have not been engulfed, but have seen their own land level rise with respect to that of waters around them.
Still another phenomenon we tend to exaggerate is the melting of the polar caps. The quantity of ice in the Arctic has not gone down for 10 years: one may well witness, from one year to the other, ice level fluctuations, but on average that level has remained constant. Right after the Little Ice Age, since the temperature went up, the Artic started to melt; but the ice level in the Arctic finally settled down. Besides, ice has been expanding in Antarctica over the last 30 years; and similarly, we observe in Greenland that the quantity of ice increased by 112 million cubic kilometers last year. On a global scale, glaciers account for peanuts, with most of the ice being located in Antarctica and on Greenland. One cannot but notice an almost unchanged ice level over hundreds of years.
Many other climate myths and legends exist. From storms to tornados, extreme events are going down all around the world; and when they occur, their level is much lower, too. As explained by MIT physicist Richard Lindzen, the reduction of the temperature differential between the north hemisphere and the equatorial part of our planet makes cyclonic energy much smaller: the importance and frequency of extreme events thus tend to decrease. But once again, the rise of temperatures shows a magnitude considerably lower with respect to that we currently project.
If you look at satellite data and weather balloon measurements, you then note that the temperature rise around the world is relatively modest; that it is much lower than the rise that is predicted for us by authorities, and that these predictions rely on calculations that are highly uncertain. This is because the simulation inputs cannot take into account past temperatures (for which there is no precision data[3]), except by subjectively adjusting x, y, z data that are not always known. The recent temperature spikes measured by satellites and balloons are part of a classic natural phenomenon which is called El Niño. This short-term phenomenon consists of a return of the very warm waters at the surface of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The heat thus liberated in the atmosphere pushes up the global temperature and CO2 plays no role in that process.
Another issue I would like to raise: present deserts, far from expanding, are receding; and they are receding due to the higher quantity of CO2 available in the air. It turns out that greenhouse operators voluntarily inject three times as much CO2 in the commercial greenhouse as it is present in the atmosphere. The result we can observe is that plants grow faster and are bigger, that they are more resistant to diseases and to destructive insects, and that their photosynthesis is way more efficient and that they therefore consume, less water. Similarly, the rise of CO2 level in the atmosphere makes that plants need less water and thus that they can afford to colonize arid regions.
Regarding diseases and other weird phenomena hastily attributed to climate warming, there is a website—“globalwarminghoax.com,” if I recall —that collects the different rumors and contemplations on this theme. The fact that masculine fertility decreases; the fact that birds’ wings shrink; the fact that a shark showed up in the North Sea; absolutely anything is likely to be connected to climate change if one displays enough intellectual dishonesty. That is where honest journalists come into play: your role is to investigate on the true reason of phenomena and to demystify the ready-made thinking that financial and political forces ask the media to channel slavishly.
Climate-related diseases are relatively rare; and even malaria does not directly depend on the climate, but rather on the way we enable the parasite to reproduce and the mosquito to flourish in the place where we are located. If you find yourself in a swampy area, the odds you will get malaria are high; if you have drained the system and you no longer have that wetland, the odds you will catch the disease are very low. In the end, automatically blaming the resurgence of some disease on climate change comes down to removing the personal responsibility from the people involved: such as denying that their refusal of vaccinations, for instance, or their lack of hygiene, may be part of the problem.
Grégoire Canlorbe: In his 1993’s speech, in Liechtenstein, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was alarmed by the disadvantages associated with the blossoming of industry and mass consumption. “The first neglected point, only recently discovered,” he affirmed, considering both the communist regimes and also the capitalist economies, “is that an unlimited Progress does not sit well with the limited resources of the planet; that nature must be preserved rather than overly exploited; that we are making a flashy rampage through an environment that is also our common destiny.”
Solzhenitsyn claimed the abundance of inexpensive consumer goods, the progress of industry, the pursuit of material ease, all that has desiccated the soul of Westerners. “The victory of scientific and technical civilization has breathed a sort of spiritual insecurity into us. Its gifts enrich us, but also hold us in slavery. All is interests, we are compelled to look after ours, all is struggle for material goods; but an inner voice tells us that we have left there something pure, superior, and fragile.”
How do you respond to that archipelago of acerbic views?
István Markó: Solzhenitsyn’s analysis, which castigates what he calls “the scientific and technical civilization,” seems to me to be imbued with a curious defiance with respect to science and the technological progress: that same mistrust, in fact, which has spread like wildfire in our Western societies. I imagine that Solzhenitsyn’s pessimistic bias stems from his dark and painful life under the Soviet regime. I do not know whether one should also recognize in his speech typically Orthodox-Slavic traits of thought: be that as it may, his anguish before the scientific, industrial, and material development is somewhat reminiscent of some passages by Dostoyevsky.
To begin, those who convey the idea that the finite character of resources renders infinite growth impossible, leave out of account the ability of the human being to innovate in our technology, to enrich our knowledge of nature, and to enhance our extraction strategies. Let us take the case of this finite resource that is petroleum: one notices, firstly, that new reserves are regularly discovered; secondly, that the depleted oil reserves, (originally tapped by conventional drilling) are exploited by more advanced methods which improve the yield and recovery rate of remaining, formerly unrecoverable oil; and thirdly, that the “peak oil,” which Malthusians constantly say is about to be reached, is constantly postponed. On the other hand, humankind devises recycling methods that let us glimpse the possibility, in a more or less surrealist future, to build growth on perpetually and integrally recycled resources.
I agree that we must preserve our environment; and avoid over exploitation. But what we must also understand is that Nature does not give anything spontaneously: resources are not available by themselves; they must always be fetched, extracted, by means of some technology. Moreover, Nature is not hospitable by itself. To survive and prosper, we had to adapt to our environment, and adapt our environment. The environmental record of communist regimes, which fail, or have failed, in everything, is indeed disastrous; and Solzhenitsyn’s mistrust of “the scientific and technical civilization” arguably comes from there.
To blame mass consumption and industrial progress as such leaves me perplexed, were it only because it is waste, not consumption itself, which is the real problem. As much as the struggle against waste seems to me to be well-founded and necessary, the struggle against the “consumer society,” which happened to inspire a certain terrorism, seems to me irrelevant. I recall that it is notably mass consumption derived from the industrial exploitation of fossil resources that have liberated Western society from poverty and from a whole series of tasks that previously degraded him. The victory of medicine, which is so often praised, would never have been possible, without the chemistry of fossil resources. It is the chemical and industrial advances in pesticides, insecticides, and fertilizers that have enabled us to master our environment.
Unless one deems degrading and enslaving the very fact of improving our living conditions, none can seriously blame science, technology, and consumption for holding us in slavery. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism seems to avoid denying the economic and sanitary benefits of “progress.” That is, it seems to focus on the psychological consequences. But even from that point of view, one easily exaggerates the deleterious effects associated with scientific and technological development and the resulting material comfort and mass consumption. Pathological behaviors, such as addiction, are the work of a minority of consumers: they are therefore exceptional and accidental; and not a sort of congenital disease of “consumer societies.”
As to the idea that having a comfortable life would create in us a moral desert, that it would make us greedy and heartless, this notion does not stand up to scrutiny either. It is enough to note to what extent people in opulent societies give to charitable organizations of all kinds. Ironically, Asian societies, which have remained faithful to their spiritual traditions, today cultivate a much greater respect for science and technology than that which prevails in the secularized West. It is therefore false to claim, as Solzhenitsyn seems to do, that the spirituality of people atrophies as their way of life is more centered on science and technology.
That said, there are indeed psychological drawbacks that I think can be legitimately attributed to material comfort. Over generations it gradually disposes people who take their comfort for granted, to lose sight of the inhospitable and dangerous world in which they live. Blinded by the ease of their standard of living, and the facilities stemming from their scientific, industrial, and technological advancement, Westerners have finally forgotten a fundamental law: this world gives nothing without effort. Again, the reason we are able to inhabit this planet in conditions that are so favorable to our health and to our hygienic wellbeing, as well as to our economic and demographic development, is that we have rendered our environment hospitable.
Gaia does not take us under her protection; nor is she that delicate and innocent goddess, offended by blood and toil, raped by factories, mines, and urban groups, which ecologists celebrate. I mentioned above the colonization of deserts by plants thanks to the greater amount of CO2 available to them. Colonization genuinely comes from Nature itself, not the human being; it is not so much that humans “invented” colonization, or industry, commerce, war, or even infanticides; we only inherited those behaviors from Nature. If the reader does not take me seriously on infanticides, let him think of the polar bears that do not hesitate to kill their own offspring and to take their heads away for the evening meal.
Grégoire Canlorbe: You seem to have a very special tenderness for China, where you have travelled extensively. The Chinese generation IV nuclear system particularly seems to catch your attention. Drawing on your onsite experience and your research, do the environmental/energy policies of China and its semi-planned version of a capitalist economy deliver, in your eyes, superior results than those obtained in Russia and in the Western world?
István Markó: As a visiting professor at two Chinese universities, I have extensively travelled in China; and I must confess, as you say, that I have a special affection for that country. Russia’s openness to the capitalist economy was far too brutal and hasty: it led to what I would be tempted to call mafia-type capitalism. The Chinese understood this well. Instead of “liberalizing” like mad, with those unfortunate consequences, they have preferred to opt for a smooth transition from communist totalitarianism to semi-planned capitalism.
Key members of the Chinese government are all trained as scientists or engineers: they are leaders who can reason in a logical way, who can analyze and dissect a problem scientifically; and since they do not have to worry about organizing an election campaign every two or five years, they are in a position to make decisions over the long term. That type of elite production is an undoubtable force of Chinese capitalism; and the development of fourth-generation nuclear, as you rightly point out, is one of the great successes to their credit.
Having said that, I feel obliged to state that I am not candid about the fate of political and social freedoms there. I note, however, that freedom of expression is advancing at breakneck speed. In particular, I witnessed demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that were in the purest European style, and that did not result in any of the participants being shot or beheaded. In 1993, a doctoral student who wanted to come to Belgium could only do so if his family remained hostage on Chinese soil. Today, there is no longer any problem for his family to accompany him.
china-trump On the Chinese internet, speech is uninhibited; and nearly each young person owns one, or even two mobile phones, things are said and transmitted at a phenomenal rate. There are, admittedly, restrictions, but not more in China than elsewhere. Admittedly, Google and Facebook have been blocked, but the fault lies with the owners. I do not contend that China is the paradise of freedom: all I want to point out is that China is evolving towards freedom and that it respects science, while in the West, we are evolving towards communism, the atrophy of freedom of expression, and contempt of science. Donald Trump seems to know that; and he seems to be the natural alpha leader that America needs to stamp its process of decadence, and to maintain its leadership against the Chinese competitor.
Two things deserve to be said about the ecological balance of China. Contrary to what is suggested by a certain pessimistic prejudice, the Chinese are increasingly rich. One notices the emergence of a veritable middle class, and as they get richer, their environmental concerns increase. But the Chinese, both elites and “ordinary citizens,” do not care about global warming – their concern deals with air quality, the preservation of forests, the safeguard of threatened species, and not with a hypothetical warming of the climate that should be counteracted. Moreover, the Chinese have understood that the future of electricity and power generation lies in nuclear or fossil energies, and certainly not in intermittent ‘renewable’ energies.
The wind industry, over which ecologists swoon, produces highly unpredictable output, depending on the intensity of the wind. Even under good atmospheric conditions, wind delivers too little electricity to be a profitable industry on its own. Warren Buffet, who owns one of the largest wind farms in Iowa, said it without embarrassment: “On wind power, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. This is the only reason to build them. They do not make sense without the tax credit.” The ecological balance is just as bad: onshore wind turbines kill hundreds of thousands, even millions of birds and bats per year. As for wind turbines at sea, they kill many marine mammals, again in the utmost indifference of ecologists.
We are plagued, in Europe, by a morbid fear of nuclear power. The Chinese, but also the Russians and the Indians, know that this fear is irrational, and that renewables that can only provide intermittent energy, are not a viable alternative. They are developing their nuclear industry at a brisk pace and are already experimenting with the next-generation, thorium-fueled nuclear reactor. As for the Germans and the French, and soon the Belgians, alas, they are regressing! They are horrified by the Fukushima accident, encouraged by silly elites, and so they are destroying their wonderful energy/power generation industrial parks, becoming the laughing stock of emerging countries. I recall that the earthquake and the tsunami of 2011 certainly caused numerous victims, about 20,000 deaths. But no one has died because of the nuclear industrial accident as such.
In the United States, there currently happens to be an upsurge in funding for what one calls small modular units. But China assuredly possesses leadership in the nuclear industry. They are in first place before the Russians and the Indians. The Chinese regularly build nuclear power plants, having become masters in that field, they do so faster and faster. They are, today, in the process of devising two thorium-based nuclear pilots. They know that its combustion results in highly radioactive products, with long life spans; but they have managed to solve that problem and find a way to obtain ultimate products that are very weakly radioactive.
Besides this, the Chinese are on the way to becoming leaders in the conquest of space. They built their own platforms, which they managed to send into space and they also have their own launchers, which are extremely reliable, and which are much cheaper, for example, than the Ariane launchers. If the Chinese are such high performers and so innovative, it is because, like the Indians and the Russians, they have faith in science: they have faith in the ability of science to embellish their future and to create a better world. In Europe, there was a time when we, too, had faith in science; and faith in an evolution of our societies that would rest on science. Today we have not only turned our backs on science, we are choked and infantilized by bureaucrats who suck the living forces of the old continent.
Grégoire Canlorbe: According to a recurring affirmation on your part, the panda (a short while ago endangered) constitutes an “error of nature.” You see it as a creature too ill-adapted to its environment and too convoluted in terms of survival or reproduction strategies. Could you tell us more about it? Ultimately, where does the responsibility of human beings stop and where does that of Mother Nature herself begin in her children’s extinction?
István Markó: It occurred to me to come up with the expression “error of nature” to qualify the panda. Belonging to the family of Ursidae, the panda is normally an herbivore. It feeds almost exclusively on bamboos, a certain type of bamboo, in fact, which has a variable energy capacity according to the time of the year. Moreover, the panda is a solitary animal, which avoids seeking the company of its congeners, and which therefore rarely leaves its own territory. Those two facts concur to render the reproduction of the panda highly unlikely. On top of this, it is more unlikely as the fertility time of a female panda is only about three days per year.
Firstly, when she is fertile, the female must move off to meet a male disposed to mate with her, and she must do quickly. Secondly, when she ends up with a male, the latter declines the proposition in nine out of ten cases, and this is because at that time of year, their bamboo food source has very poor energy quality. The male panda therefore prefers to rest. No wonder as his testosterone level, at that time of year, is also very low. In addition, pandas care very little about their children. For all those reasons, I think that the panda is a naturally endangered species: a species condemned by nature and saved by the human being.
Among the species that disappear every year, some do so for natural reasons, others owe their extinction to the activity of the human being. That second scenario is the minority, in reality. As in the case of dodo, the species that disappear, or have disappeared, through the fault of the human being are generally insular. Once their biotope has been reduced, they have few possibilities of defending themselves. It is utterly true that there are about 800 species, over the last 600 years that may have disappeared, but the figures that we are hammered with ad nauseam, by environmental activists, the tens of thousands of species supposed to disappear every year, are essentially pulled out of a magical hat.
One day I wrote an e-mail to WWF asking them to enumerate, preferably in Latin, the names of the species that disappeared in the current year, as well as to indicate the location of the cadavers. To this day, I have never received an answer! And for a very simple reason, NGOs want to frighten us and make us feel guilty with baseless allegations. In addition, we should remember it so happens quite regularly that species believed to have disappeared resurface – the coelacanth, for instance, but also the Guinea wolf.
Grégoire Canlorbe: The utopia of a worldwide caliphate, revived in the era of information and of the instantaneous and globalized networking, is all the less anachronistic as it echoes the Gaianist and “warmist” dream to confine the reins of sustainable development to a global government. Do you see a convergence of struggles looming between totalitarian ecologism and Islam?
István Markó: Many persons, generally those coming from the former Eastern Bloc, let themselves be seduced by the idea that the resolution of our environmental problems would be that of global governance. In many respects, ecologism is also the communism of the 21st century. In the same way as Islam, it occupies the place left vacant by the decline of Marxism-Leninism. I do not know if a convergence of struggles between Islamists and ecologists will actually take shape; however, I note that we already have the equivalent, on a smaller scale, of the global ecological caliphate. I am thinking of the European Union, which gives us a foretaste of the bureaucratic, global, and totalitarian governance that the United Nations manifestly endeavors to establish.
Since we are talking about globalization, envisioned in its political aspect, the prospect of a world government, but also in its economic and, say, informational aspect—the networking, sometimes instantaneous, of humans, goods, and ideas—I would like to opine a possible perverse effect. As cultures and mentalities mingle, the Westerners’ ecologist (or Gaianist) religion, as well as their penchant for repentance, seem to even reach some of the Asian peoples. Japan, which emerged spiritually emasculated from the Second World War, is more conducive to letting itself be invaded by that Western sanctification of the self-denial of ecologism.
Grégoire Canlorbe: At the Austrian World Summit, in June 2017, Arnold Schwarzenegger described the fate he would reserve to a climate change skeptic in a scenario as follows. “In a movie, it would have been simpler. One would have said: ‘Who thinks the greenhouse gases are not polluters?’ And the one who would have answered: ‘Yes, I do.’ I would have strapped his mouth to the exhaust pipe of a truck [and] turned on the engine.”
As for you, what treatment would you appreciate to see a devotee of anthropogenic warming enduring on screen?
István Markó: Having myself practiced bodybuilding in my youth, I am a great admirer of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man and his cinematography. But I suspect his chemical knowledge, at least what he shows of it, to be a bit light, in contrast to that of Swedish screen star Dolph Lundgren, who at least graduated in chemical engineering. When it comes to getting an enlightened advice in politics or philosophy, I would rather trust Jean-Claude Van Damme.[4]
Arnold expresses himself here completely ignoring that all greenhouse gases are not poison. To strap a car’s exhaust pipe to the mouth of someone and to turn on the engine will only result in blowing up the lungs of the person, which does not have much to do with the greenhouse effect. For my part, the worst ‘punishments’ I would wish upon a devotee of anthropogenic warming, on-screen or in reality, is to be confronted with honest information, data and figures that are not manipulated, which oblige him to recognize the vacuity of his dogma.
Going back to Arnold, among the gases that come out of a powered engine, one finds some that are noxious pollutants—for example, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, or ozone—but carbon dioxide is not part of them. Amongst those polluting gases, all do not have a greenhouse effect. Regarding sea level rise, in many places, notably in Europe, the level of the earth is rising with respect to that of waters. This is a classical geological phenomenon which is known as rebound, due to the fact that at the end of the last glaciation, the enormous quantities of ice that covered the European and North American continent melted, allowing the land that was pushed down by their weight to rise slowly.
We are told that the level of water will increase throughout the world and increase to the point that it will overwhelm a large part of our continents. As Hans von Storch, one of the world’s leading climate modelers, has shown, the models supporting those forecasts are, for 98% of them, totally false. We are told that the air we breathe in the big cities has never been so polluted. One only must review the documents oneself about the air that people used to breath in London in the 1960s to realize how much urban pollution has diminished. In Peking, often castigated for poor air quality, there happens, every now and then, a fog reminiscent of the London smog. But even that pollution in Peking is far from competing with that which, a short while ago, reigned in London.
We are warned against glyphosate, we are called upon to banish it, but I am ready to drink ten grams of glyphosate in front of you. The truth is that glyphosate is a product half as toxic as salt. In practice, it is not more polluting for our environment than it is carcinogenic to our organism. Behind the anti-glyphosate campaign, you find all kinds of NGOs that I call eco-terrorists; and that are ready to do everything, even banishing scientific truth itself, to destroy Monsanto. I am neither a partisan nor an enemy of that firm, but I deplore the unjustified animosity surrounding a truly brilliant product. This animosity is fueled by a shameful propaganda on the part of the Avaaz and other Greenpeace type groups.
Grégoire Canlorbe: Thank you for your time. Would you like to add a thing or two?
István Markó: I would like to thank you for the relevance of your questions. I was recently in Santa Barbara, California, where I had the opportunity to eat with plates and cutlery made of corn, which are thus biodegradable. This is an initiative that I welcome, and that has nothing to do with the vain, costly, and spiritually lethal struggle against CO2 emissions. If there is one final message I would like to convey, it is that we have to be concerned about the real ecological problems — noxious pollutants, unmanaged waste, untreated human sewage. We have to cease letting ourselves be manipulated by causes that purport to be good for our planet, but that are simply pretexts for enslaving and tying up humanity.
God knows there are abominable things happening to our planet! Think about the pollution of the oceans and the “seventh continent;” think about the extinction of some marine species like codfish, which is the victim not only of overfishing, but of the proliferation of seals whose hunting has been prohibited. We must preserve our environment, it goes without saying. We must also exercise our critical mind and identify the real problems, otherwise our good feelings for ‘saving the planet’ are only arrogant, hypocritical, and stupid tears.
The agreement of the Paris COP 21 was not signed to save the planet and to prevent us from roasting due to an imaginary temperature increase of +2°C. Behind all that masquerade is hidden, as always, the ugly face of power, greed, and profit. All the industrialists who are in favor of that commitment, which will ruin Europe and immensely impoverish its citizens, do so for the good reason they find in it a huge and easy source of income. As for NGOs, when they are not simply motivated by greed, their motive consists in a resolutely Malthusian ideology. Their object is to return the world to a very small population, on the order of a few hundred million people. To do so, they impoverish the world, remove the power of fossil fuel energies, and thus ensure that the number of deaths increases.
solzhenitsyn-thatch_785322c
Alexander Solzhenitsyn meeting Margaret Thatcher in 1983
That conversation was originally published by Watts Up With That, the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change, in October 2017. An edited version was also published by Breitbart News Network, in October 2017.
[1] « Ecologism is a new political ideology based on the position that the non-human world is worthy of moral consideration, and that this should be taken into account in social, economic, and political systems. » Brian Baxter http://press.georgetown.edu/book/georgetown/ecologism
[2] The island shores are eroded by the persistent pounding of the ocean waves. This is perceived as ‘sinking’ or as ‘sea level rise’ but upward creep of the waters is is due to island soil being washed away.
[3] Historic temperatures are determined by ‘proxies’ – using broad estimates drawn from various geological, carbon-14, tree-ring or other natural indicators. Modern thermometers were invented in the early 1700’s. Still today with high precision instruments, no measurements less than 1°C can be accurately measured. Marko famously wrote of the 2016 ‘hottest year ever’ claim by the WMO that : “The World Meteorological Organization – another emanation of the United Nations and which is also, like the IPCC, an intergovernmental forum – declares 2016 the year the warmest of history. Knowing that 2016 is supposedly hotter by 0.02°C than 2015 and that the margin of error on this value is 0.1°C, we see the absurdity of this statement. For those who don’t understand, this means that the variation in temperature can be of + 0.12°C (global warming) or -0.08°C (global cooling). In short, we can’t say anything and WMO has simply lost its mind.”
https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/wmo-confirms-2016-hottes t-year-record-about-11°c-above-pre-industrial-era
[4] The Belgian martial arts expert and movie star is known for his support of Trump and for his concern for the protection of natural species.
The Daily Telegraph's front page story on Friday – "The worst flood damage could have been prevented" – didn't tell the half of it, writes Christopher Booker in this week's column.
Nor did the front page "exclusive" in the Daily Mail, asking: "Could Met Office have been more wrong?", a story reported on the Booker column last week, of how the Met Office forecast in November that the three months between December and February would most likely be drier than usual – and since repeated in other newspapers.
Writes Booker, devastating evidence has now come to light not just that the floods covering 65 square miles of the Somerset Levels could have been prevented; they were deliberately engineered by the Labour Government in 2009, knowingly regardless of the property and human rights of the thousands of people whose homes and livelihoods would be affected.
Furthermore that wildly misleading Met Office forecast in November led the Environment Agency to take a step which has made the flooding infinitely more disastrous than it need have been, turning what could have been a minor, short-lived inconvenience into a major disaster for the people of Somerset.
For reasons of space, Booker starts the story in 2005 with Labour's "floods minister", Elliot Morley, later to be jailed for fraudulently claiming £30,000 on his MP's expenses. But in fact the linear sequence starts in 1992 with the EU's Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC and then the Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000/60/EC.
The combined effects of these directives were profound. In the first instance, the Habitats Directive put wildlife conservation on the EU policy map and, through, the Natura 2000 programme, requiring progressive improvements in the conditions of designated conservation areas. Then, following a Commission Communication on 29 May 1995 (COM(95) 189 final) on the "wise use and conservation of wetlands", the WFD put wetlands "restoration" (i.e., flooding) very much on the policy map.
If these two directives were the first step towards disaster, the next was an EU-funded research project, designed to put clothes on the legislation, preparing detailed guidance for Member States on how to implement the law. With no concessions to originality, the project was called "Wise use of floodplains", with the research co-ordinated by the RSPB, alongside the WWF and the Environment Agency, along with international partners.
Running from 1 April 1999 until 1 April 2002 and funded to the tune of €2,108,110.30, with an EU contribution of €1,052,044.45, it had – as Autonomous Mind reveals - been set up under the aegis of RSPB Chief Executive Baroness Young, who was shortly to become Chief Executive of the Environment Agency, also becoming a Vice President of the RSPB. This was to be the start of what some suggest was the ethnic cleansing of the Levels, a plan to remove human habitation and create a new habitat for birds.
Tellingly, the study dealt specifically with the Somerset Levels and Moors, and the Parrett catchment, the concluding report setting out a "Parrett Catchment Project Action Strategy", which was presented to Elliot Morley at a major conference held in Somerset in February 2000.
The "Wise use of floodplains" project was followed by another, called Ecoflood, a title which perfectly illustrated the objective. At a more modest €350,014, it ran from 1 February 2003 to 31 July 2005. The outcome was the production of draft guidelines on "how to use floodplains for flood risk reduction".
Soon to be adopted by the Commission as formal Ecoflood guidelines, there was no doubt about the direction of travel. The Somerset Moors were to be re-flooded, turned into a "washland", returned to its previous, unprotected, undrained condition, as a means of preventing floods elsewhere. At least, that was the theory.
By now, the Habitats Directive and also the companion Birds Directive, had been fully integrated into British law, with the Conservation (Natural Habitats &c.) Regulations 1994, commonly known as the Habitats Regulations. Flood management operating authorities had a duty to comply with these Regulations. As competent authorities under the Regulations they were required to ensure they had regard to the requirements of the Habitats Directive when exercising their functions (Regulation 3(4)).
Locally, back in Somerset in the year 2000, supported by the European Union Regional Development Fund through the Joint Approach for the Management of Flooding (JAF) project, Somerset County Council set up the Parrett Catchment Project (PCP).
The project put climate change centre-stage, developed "to help manage deep and prolonged flooding, which is likely to become more frequent with climate change”. With the catchphrase, "A future when it rains", one of its objectives was to review "the feasibility of spreading floodwater across the Somerset moors".
Alongside this, the European Commission was consolidating its grip on flood policy, producing in July 2004 a communication (COM(2004)472 final) on flood risk management, ostensibly dealing with flood prevention, protection and mitigation.
Not least, the communication revealed that, "in order to promote the coherent implementation of the Water Framework Directive across the EU, the Water Directors from the (then) 25 Member States and the European Commission were meeting regularly "to work on a common implementation strategy". Floods policy was acquiring a truly European dimension.
This was followed the same month by a Defra consultation document in called "making space for water". It introduced "a new Government strategy for flood and coastal erosion risk management in England". The clue as to its provenance came on page 23, under the heading "European Dimension". It told us that flood risk management was being discussed at the EU level, and the themes under discussion were "all consistent with this consultation and the current approach in England".
By 2005, EU policy was spelled out in Defra's Guidance on Water Level Management Plans for European Sites, stressing the need to upgrade 95 percent of SSSIs (part of the Natura 2000 network) to "favourable condition" by 2010.
In pursuit of this, on 21 January 2005, under the heading "Saving wetland habitats: more money for key sites", Elliot Morley had announced a policy decision, directing that, in order to comply with the Habitats Directive, flooding in Somerset should be artificially promoted because, as he declared, "wildlife will benefit from increased water levels".
Co-opted into this scheme were the 13 Somerset Internal Drainage Boards (IDBs), ancient authorities responsible for keeping the Levels and the Moors drained, now to be suborned into reversing the process and flooding them. Nationwide, the IDBs were to be bribed with £2.3 million a year of taxpayers's money, to let the water in. In Somerset, there was to be even more.
That year, though, an independent evaluation of the Parrett Catchment Project warned that it was "still not completely clear" how much a deliberate increase in flooding would breach "the property rights and Human Rights" of all those whose homes and businesses would be damaged.
Events were now moving in Brussels, with the emergence of a specific EU directive on flood policy. This was Directive 2007/60/EC of 23 October 2007 on the assessment and management of flood risks, the so-called "Floods Directive".
Recital 14 spelled out the requirement that flood risk management plans should focus on prevention, protection and preparedness. But, "with a view to giving rivers more space", planners were required to "consider where possible the maintenance and/or restoration of floodplains", as well as "measures to prevent and reduce damage to human health, the environment, cultural heritage and economic activity". Restoration - i.e., flooding - of drained wetlands was now an EU policy objective.
Later, in December 2009, the Environment Agency and Defra jointly published a River Basin Management Plan for the Severn River Basin District and the South West River Basin Management Plan. These documents noted:
There is a separate planning process for flood and coastal erosion risk management introduced by the new European Floods Directive (Directive 2007/60/EC on the assessment and management of flood risks). This requires that the environmental objectives of the Water Framework Directive are taken into account in flood and coastal erosion plans. Implementation of the Floods Directive in England and Wales will be co-ordinated with the Water Framework Directive. The delivery plans and timescales for the two directives will be closely aligned.
There, in plain English, was a clear statement of the link between environmental objectives and flood planning.
By then, the Environment Agency needed no encouragement to make the link. In its March 2008 plan it had already decided that, "providing a robust economic case for maintenance works on the Somerset Levels and Moors remains a challenge" (p.131), largely as a result of the increased cost burden arising from the WFD, the Habitats Directive and the Waste Framework Directive.
Responding to a Treasury requirement that flood prevention expenditure should show an 8:1 cost-benefit ratio, the Agency pronounced that it was: "appropriate to look again at the benefits derived from our work, particularly focusing more on the infrastructure and the environmental benefits, which previous studies have probably underestimated".
We have, the Agency added, "international obligations to maintain and enhance the habitats and species in the Somerset Levels and Moors, and it is within this context that all decisions have to be made".
With that, it was clear that the decision had been made to abandon the Levels, and was preparing to scale down the infrastructure. Thus, the Agency claimed, it was "doubtful that all the pumping stations on the Somerset Levels and Moors are required for flood risk management purposes. Many pumping stations are relatively old and in some cases difficult to maintain. It is necessary to decide which ones are necessary particularly in the context of redistributing water".
Moving on then to consider its policy options, the Agency had detailed six, the last and least favourable being to: "take action to increase the frequency of flooding to deliver benefits locally or elsewhere, which may constitute an overall flood risk reduction". This policy option, they said, "involves a strategic increase in flooding in allocated areas" (p.142). The Levels were to be allowed to flood, as a matter of deliberate policy.
With the Government then implementing the Floods directive as the Flood Risk Regulations 2009, there, writ large, was Defra's "making space for water" policy. It was all that was needed, by way of legislative authority, for an already green-dominated Environment Agency to abandon the Somerset Levels and to allow them to flood.
To reinforce the change, Defra commissioned a research project costing £105,032, carried out by Nottingham University, which noted that "EU legislation is really driving change". The authors promoted an "ecosystem approach", an idea at the core of EU policy, driving the move away from traditional flood control into the "sustainability" camp.
The shift in policy can be seen with brutal clarity on the Commission website which gives priority to the "environment", citing a raft of EU measures, including the Water Framework Directive, the Habitats Directive, the Environmental Impact Assessment and the Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive. The Floods Directive is part of the package and this, we are sternly warned, has to be implemented by 2015.
Just so that there should be no doubts as to where the policy thrust lay, DG Environment in 2011 issued a note, stressing that flood risk management "should work with nature, rather than against it", building up the "green infrastructure" and thus offering a "triple-win" which included restoration (i.e., flooding) of the floodplain.
Meanwhile the Environment Agency had long since stopped properly dredging the River Parrett, which provided the main channel draining floodwater to the sea, because of the exorbitant cost of disposing of silt under EU Waste Framework Directive, and the complicated procedures required by the Habitats Directive and other EU law.
And Morley had already vetoed a proposal to build a new pumping station at Dunball Clyce, at the end of the massive King's Sedgemoor drain. Pumping at this strategic outlet would have allowed much more effective, 24-hour discharge of floodwater into the mouth of the Parrett estuary. Normally, only gravity discharge is possible through the Dunball Clyce (sluice), and then only at low tide.
Instead, an £8 million scheme to "restore" – i.e. increase flooding - on the Moors was implemented. The first part was the "restoration" of Southlake Moor next to Burrowbridge on the Parrett, first flooded in the winter 2009/10, thus fulfilling the requirements of the Habitat Directive. It had been made possible with the money Elliot Morley had provided back in 2005.
The Moor had been drained since the 13th century, but the plan now was to flood Somerset back into the Middle Ages. To achieve this, the scheme included the purchase of a 200 hectares area of farmland by Natural England, used to create a winter habitat for birds when, as the Met Office was already predicting, climate change brought drier winters.
This was where November's forecast came in, because it led the Environment Agency deliberately to flood Southlake Moor in the expectation of a dry winter, keeping the water levels up, to "maintain the conservation interest". Using a special inlet built for the purpose, water was poured in from the River Sowy, instead of being discharged to sea.
When, contrary to expectations, the rains of December and January poured down, this large expanse of water-sodden ground blocked the draining to the already horribly silted-up Parrett of a much larger area of farmland to the east. An area which could have been used as an emergency overspill was already full.
This was made even worse by the lack of that Dunball pumping station at the end of the King's Sedgemoor Drain, vetoed by Morley. As the water levels rose, there was no way of getting rid of the excess water, as the discharge sluice could only be operated at low tide.
Thus came about the disaster which has filled our television screens for weeks, The hydrology of this entire vast area had been sabotaged by the Labour Government's deliberate EU-compliant policy, directed by the Environment Agency, in partnership with Natural England and the RSPB.
000a Dunball-023 pumps.jpg
Only thanks to the intervention of Environment Secretary Owen Paterson are huge Dutch pumps at Dunball now belatedly pouring millions of gallons a day into the sea (pictured above), before dredging the Parrett can begin as soon as is practicable.
Interestingly, further north, where the Huntspill River system had been allowed to function without interference, there had been no local flooding. Thus, not only can we now see just how the flooding further south was deliberately engineered. It was done in blatant disregard for the rights of all those who live and work there.
The evidence is now so strong that they should seriously consider suing the Government for compensation for the damage they have suffered, which could well amount to hundreds of millions of pounds.
000a Booker-022 Deliberate.jpg
Description:
Writes Booker, devastating evidence has now come to light not just that the floods covering 65 square miles of the Somerset Levels could have been prevented; they were deliberately engineered by the Labour Government in 2009, knowingly regardless of the p
The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, 'unverified' data
By DAVID ROSE FOR THE MAIL ON SUNDAY
PUBLISHED: 22:57, 4 February 2017 | UPDATED: 00:28, 17 September 2017
The Independent Press Standards Organisation has upheld a complaint against this article. IPSO's adjudication is as follows:
Following an article published on 5 February 2017 in the Mail on Sunday, headlined 'EXPOSED How world leaders were duped over global warming', Bob Ward complained to the Independent Press Standards Organisation that the newspaper had breached Clause 1 (Accuracy) of the Editors' Code of Practice. IPSO upheld the complaint and has required the Mail on Sunday to publish this decision as a remedy to the breach.
The article reported on claims made by Dr John Bates, a climate scientist formerly employed at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), about a paper published in the journal Science that suggested that there had been no 'pause' in global warming in the 2000s. Dr Bates had published a blog criticising the way the data used for the paper had been analysed and archived. The article detailed at length the complainant's concerns with the data; it then characterised them as demonstrating 'irrefutable evidence' that the paper had been based upon 'misleading, unverified data'.
The article was illustrated with a graph. It plotted a red line, described as 'the 'adjusted' and unreliable sea data cited in the flawed 'Pausebuster' paper', and a blue line, described as 'the UK Met Office's independently verified record', which it said 'showed lower monthly readings and a shallower recent warming trend'. A note at the base of the graph stated that '0 represents 14°C'.
The complainant said that the significance of Dr Bates' concerns about the archiving procedures had been misrepresented in the article, and the newspaper had taken no steps to establish the veracity of Dr Bates' claims. World leaders had not been 'duped', as the headline said, and there was no 'irrefutable evidence' that the paper was based on 'misleading, unverified data', as the article had claimed.
The newspaper said that Dr Bates had shown it examples of both fully archived climate data and the less detailed version used for the paper; putting raw data on a website is not the same thing as full data archiving; therefore the evidence that the paper's data was unverified and misleading, was 'irrefutable'.
The Committee emphasised that its central concern was whether the article had accurately reported Dr Bates' concerns. It decided that the newspaper's claims that Dr Bates' testimony had provided 'irrefutable evidence' that the paper had been based on 'misleading, 'unverified' data', leading – as the headline claimed – to world leaders being 'duped' over global warming, and 'convinced' to invest billions in climate change, went much further than the concerns which Dr Bates had detailed in his blog or in the interview; they did not represent criticisms of the data collection process, but rather, were assertions of fact that the data had been demonstrated conclusively to be wrong and had a significant impact on the decision making of world leaders, with an additional implication this had been part of a wilful attempt to deceive.
The article claimed that because of the NOAA's 'failure to 'archive' the data, 'its results can never be verified'. The Committee did not consider that the article had made sufficiently clear that the failure to archive, had been a failure to archive the data through a particular method, and that the data had been made publicly available. In characterising Dr Bates' claims in this way the newspaper had failed to take care over the accuracy of the article, in breach of Clause 1 (i) and had then failed to correct these significantly misleading statements, in breach of Clause 1 (ii).
The graph which accompanied the article had provided a visual illustration of the newspaper's contention regarding the difference between the 'flawed' NOAA data and other, 'verified', data. The newspaper's failure to plot the lines correctly represented a breach of Clause 1 (i), and there had been a further failure to correct the significantly misleading impression created as a result. There was a further breach of Clause 1 on this point.
Data Science,Climate and satellites Consultant John J Bates, who blew the whistle to the Mail on Sunday +7
Data Science,Climate and satellites Consultant John J Bates, who blew the whistle to the Mail on Sunday
The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world's leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.
A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.
The report claimed that the 'pause' or 'slowdown' in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world's media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.
But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, 'unverified' data.
It was never subjected to NOAA's rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.
His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a 'blatant attempt to intensify the impact' of what became known as the Pausebuster paper.
His disclosures are likely to stiffen President Trump's determination to enact his pledges to reverse his predecessor's 'green' policies, and to withdraw from the Paris deal – so triggering an intense political row.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, US President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the world climate change conference +7
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, US President Barack Obama, French President Francois Hollande and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the world climate change conference
The PM, the Prince and 'the pause': David Cameron and Prince Charles attended the historic 2015 Paris climate change conference with 150 world leaders. Cameron committed Britain to an EU-Wide emission cut as a result. And Charles, writing in this paper last month, stated there was no pause in global warming, influenced by the flawed NOAA paper that made this claim +7
The PM, the Prince and 'the pause': David Cameron and Prince Charles attended the historic 2015 Paris climate change conference with 150 world leaders. Cameron committed Britain to an EU-Wide emission cut as a result. And Charles, writing in this paper last month, stated there was no pause in global warming, influenced by the flawed NOAA paper that made this claim
In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of 'insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy'.
Dr Bates was one of two Principal Scientists at NCEI, based in Asheville, North Carolina.
A blatant attempt to intensify paper's impact
Official delegations from America, Britain and the EU were strongly influenced by the flawed NOAA study as they hammered out the Paris Agreement – and committed advanced nations to sweeping reductions in their use of fossil fuel and to spending £80 billion every year on new, climate-related aid projects.
The scandal has disturbing echoes of the 'Climategate' affair which broke shortly before the UN climate summit in 2009, when the leak of thousands of emails between climate scientists suggested they had manipulated and hidden data. Some were British experts at the influential Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
LED TO THESE GREEN COMMITMENTS
Data published by NOAA, the world's top climate data agency, claimed global warming was worse than previously thought. The information was published to coincide with the Paris climate change conference in 2015, where world leaders agreed that...
$100bn be given every year in extra 'climate-related' aid to the developing world by rich nations
2 degrees C be set as the limit for maximum temperature rise above pre-industrial times
40% of CO2 emissions would be cut across the EU by 2030
£320bn… what the UK's pledges will cost our economy by 2030
NOAA's 2015 'Pausebuster' paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet's surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.
Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.
The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings 'unstable'.
The paper relied on a preliminary, 'alpha' version of the data which was never approved or verified.
A final, approved version has still not been issued. None of the data on which the paper was based was properly 'archived' – a mandatory requirement meant to ensure that raw data and the software used to process it is accessible to other scientists, so they can verify NOAA results.
Dr Bates retired from NOAA at the end of last year after a 40-year career in meteorology and climate science. As recently as 2014, the Obama administration awarded him a special gold medal for his work in setting new, supposedly binding standards 'to produce and preserve climate data records'.
Yet when it came to the paper timed to influence the Paris conference, Dr Bates said, these standards were flagrantly ignored.
The paper was published in June 2015 by the journal Science. Entitled 'Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus', the document said the widely reported 'pause' or 'slowdown' was a myth.
Less than two years earlier, a blockbuster report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which drew on the work of hundreds of scientists around the world, had found 'a much smaller increasing trend over the past 15 years 1998-2012 than over the past 30 to 60 years'. Explaining the pause became a key issue for climate science. It was seized on by global warming sceptics, because the level of CO2 in the atmosphere had continued to rise.
WHY OBAMA'S GREEN GURU WILL MAKE TRUMP SEE RED
NOAA's climate boss Thomas Karl, below left, had a hotline to the White House, through his long association with President Obama's science adviser, John Holdren.
Karl's 'Pausebuster' paper was hugely influential in dictating the world agreement in Paris and sweeping US emissions cuts. President Trump, above right, has pledged to scrap both policies – triggering furious claims by Democrats he is a climate 'denier' and 'anti-science'.
Thanks to today's MoS story, NOAA is set to face an inquiry by the Republican-led House science committee.
Some scientists argued that the existence of the pause meant the world's climate is less sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought, so that future warming would be slower. One of them, Professor Judith Curry, then head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said it suggested that computer models used to project future warming were 'running too hot'.
However, the Pausebuster paper said while the rate of global warming from 1950 to 1999 was 0.113C per decade, the rate from 2000 to 2014 was actually higher, at 0.116C per decade. The IPCC's claim about the pause, it concluded, 'was no longer valid'.
The impact was huge and lasting. On publication day, the BBC said the pause in global warming was 'an illusion caused by inaccurate data'.
One American magazine described the paper as a 'science bomb' dropped on sceptics.
Its impact could be seen in this newspaper last month when, writing to launch his Ladybird book about climate change, Prince Charles stated baldly: 'There isn't a pause… it is hard to reject the facts on the basis of the evidence.'
Data changed to make the sea appear warmer
The sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just 0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade. Individual measurements in some parts of the globe had increased by about 0.1C and this resulted in the dramatic increase of the overall global trend published by the Pausebuster paper. But Dr Bates said this increase in temperatures was achieved by dubious means. Its key error was an upwards 'adjustment' of readings from fixed and floating buoys, which are generally reliable, to bring them into line with readings from a much more doubtful source – water taken in by ships. This, Dr Bates explained, has long been known to be questionable: ships are themselves sources of heat, readings will vary from ship to ship, and the depth of water intake will vary according to how heavily a ship is laden – so affecting temperature readings.
Dr Bates said: 'They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and 'corrected' it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that's what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.'
ERSSTv4 'adjusted' buoy readings up by 0.12C. It also ignored data from satellites that measure the temperature of the lower atmosphere, which are also considered reliable. Dr Bates said he gave the paper's co-authors 'a hard time' about this, 'and they never really justified what they were doing.'
Now, some of those same authors have produced the pending, revised new version of the sea dataset – ERSSTv5. A draft of a document that explains the methods used to generate version 5, and which has been seen by this newspaper, indicates the new version will reverse the flaws in version 4, changing the buoy adjustments and including some satellite data and measurements from a special high-tech floating buoy network known as Argo. As a result, it is certain to show reductions in both absolute temperatures and recent global warming.
The second dataset used by the Pausebuster paper was a new version of NOAA's land records, known as the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), an analysis over time of temperature readings from about 4,000 weather stations spread across the globe.
The unstable land readings: Scientists at NOAA used land temperature data from 4,000 weather stations (pictured, one in Montana, USA). But the software used to process the figures was bug-ridden and unstable. NOAA also used 'unverified' data that was not tested or approved. This data as merged with unreliable sea surface temperatures +7
The unstable land readings: Scientists at NOAA used land temperature data from 4,000 weather stations (pictured, one in Montana, USA). But the software used to process the figures was bug-ridden and unstable. NOAA also used 'unverified' data that was not tested or approved. This data as merged with unreliable sea surface temperatures
The 'adjusted' sea readings: Average sea surface temperatures are calculated using data from weather buoys (pictured). But NOAA ¿adjusted¿ these figures upwards to fit with data taken from ships ¿ which is notoriously unreliable. This exaggerated the warming rate, allowing NOAA to claim in the paper dubbed the ¿Pausebuster¿ that there was no ¿pause¿ +7
The 'adjusted' sea readings: Average sea surface temperatures are calculated using data from weather buoys (pictured). But NOAA 'adjusted' these figures upwards to fit with data taken from ships – which is notoriously unreliable. This exaggerated the warming rate, allowing NOAA to claim in the paper dubbed the 'Pausebuster' that there was no 'pause'
This new version found past temperatures had been cooler than previously thought, and recent ones higher – so that the warming trend looked steeper. For the period 2000 to 2014, the paper increased the rate of warming on land from 0.15C to 0.164C per decade.
In the weeks after the Pausebuster paper was published, Dr Bates conducted a one-man investigation into this. His findings were extraordinary. Not only had Mr Karl and his colleagues failed to follow any of the formal procedures required to approve and archive their data, they had used a 'highly experimental early run' of a programme that tried to combine two previously separate sets of records.
This had undergone the critical process known as 'pairwise homogeneity adjustment', a method of spotting 'rogue' readings from individual weather stations by comparing them with others nearby.
However, this process requires extensive, careful checking which was only just beginning, so that the data was not ready for operational use. Now, more than two years after the Pausebuster paper was submitted to Science, the new version of GHCN is still undergoing testing.
Moreover, the GHCN software was afflicted by serious bugs. They caused it to become so 'unstable' that every time the raw temperature readings were run through the computer, it gave different results. The new, bug-free version of GHCN has still not been approved and issued. It is, Dr Bates said, 'significantly different' from that used by Mr Karl and his co-authors.
Dr Bates revealed that the failure to archive and make available fully documented data not only violated NOAA rules, but also those set down by Science. Before he retired last year, he continued to raise the issue internally. Then came the final bombshell. Dr Bates said: 'I learned that the computer used to process the software had suffered a complete failure.'
The reason for the failure is unknown, but it means the Pausebuster paper can never be replicated or verified by other scientists.
The flawed conclusions of the Pausebuster paper were widely discussed by delegates at the Paris climate change conference. Mr Karl had a longstanding relationship with President Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, giving him a hotline to the White House.
They were forced to correct it: 18 months after the ¿Pausebuster¿ paper was published in time for the 2015 Paris climate change conference, NOAA¿s flawed sea temperature dataset is to be replaced. The new version will remedy its failings, and use data from both buoys and satellites (pictured) ¿ which some say is the best data of all. The new version will show both lower temperatures and a lower warming trend since 2000 +7
They were forced to correct it: 18 months after the 'Pausebuster' paper was published in time for the 2015 Paris climate change conference, NOAA's flawed sea temperature dataset is to be replaced. The new version will remedy its failings, and use data from both buoys and satellites (pictured) – which some say is the best data of all. The new version will show both lower temperatures and a lower warming trend since 2000
Mr Holdren was also a strong advocate of robust measures to curb emissions. Britain's then Prime Minister David Cameron claimed at the conference that '97 per cent of scientists say climate change is urgent and man-made and must be addressed' and called for 'a binding legal mechanism' to ensure the world got no more than 2C warmer than in pre-industrial times.
President Obama stressed his Clean Power Plan at the conference, which mandates American power stations to make big emissions cuts.
President Trump has since pledged he will scrap it, and to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.
Whatever takes its place, said Dr Bates, 'there needs to be a fundamental change to the way NOAA deals with data so that people can check and validate scientific results. I'm hoping that this will be a wake-up call to the climate science community – a signal that we have to put in place processes to make sure this kind of nonsense doesn't happen again.
'I want to address the systemic problems. I don't care whether modifications to the datasets make temperatures go up or down. But I want the observations to speak for themselves, and for that, there needs to be a new emphasis that ethical standards must be maintained.'
He said he decided to speak out after seeing reports in papers including the Washington Post and Forbes magazine claiming that scientists feared the Trump administration would fail to maintain and preserve NOAA's climate records.
Dr Bates said: 'How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity – and failed.'
NOAA not only failed, but it effectively mounted a cover-up when challenged over its data. After the paper was published, the US House of Representatives Science Committee launched an inquiry into its Pausebuster claims. NOAA refused to comply with subpoenas demanding internal emails from the committee chairman, the Texas Republican Lamar Smith, and falsely claimed that no one had raised concerns about the paper internally.
Last night Mr Smith thanked Dr Bates 'for courageously stepping forward to tell the truth about NOAA's senior officials playing fast and loose with the data in order to meet a politically predetermined conclusion'. He added: 'The Karl study used flawed data, was rushed to publication in an effort to support the President's climate change agenda, and ignored NOAA's own standards for scientific study.'
Professor Curry, now the president of the Climate Forecast Applications Network, said last night: 'Large adjustments to the raw data, and substantial changes in successive dataset versions, imply substantial uncertainties.'
It was time, she said, that politicians and policymakers took these uncertainties on board.
Last night Mr Karl admitted the data had not been archived when the paper was published. Asked why he had not waited, he said: 'John Bates is talking about a formal process that takes a long time.' He denied he was rushing to get the paper out in time for Paris, saying: 'There was no discussion about Paris.'
They played fast and loose with the figures
He also admitted that the final, approved and 'operational' edition of the GHCN land data would be 'different' from that used in the paper'.
As for the ERSSTv4 sea dataset, he claimed it was other records – such as the UK Met Office's – which were wrong, because they understated global warming and were 'biased too low'. Jeremy Berg, Science's editor-in-chief, said: 'Dr Bates raises some serious concerns. After the results of any appropriate investigations… we will consider our options.' He said that 'could include retracting that paper'.NOAA declined to comment.
It's not the first time we've exposed dodgy climate data, which is why we've dubbed it: Climate Gate 2
Helena Christensen addresses demonstrators in the center of Copenhagen on climate change +7
Helena Christensen addresses demonstrators in the center of Copenhagen on climate change
Dr John Bates's disclosures about the manipulation of data behind the 'Pausebuster' paper is the biggest scientific scandal since 'Climategate' in 2009 when, as this paper reported, thousands of leaked emails revealed scientists were trying to block access to data, and using a 'trick' to conceal embarrassing flaws in their claims about global warming.
Both scandals suggest a lack of transparency and, according to Dr Bates, a failure to observe proper ethical standards.
Because of NOAA 's failure to 'archive' data used in the paper, its results can never be verified.
Like Climategate, this scandal is likely to reverberate around the world, and reignite some of science's most hotly contested debates.
Blowing up the graph show is disappears in 1961 artfully hidden behind the other colours
The reason? Because this is what it shows after 1961, a dramatic decline in global temperatures
Left, blowing up the graph show is disappears in 1961 artfully hidden behind the other colours. Right, the reason? Because this is what it shows after 1961, a dramatic decline in global temperatures
Has there been an unexpected pause in global warming? If so, is the world less sensitive to carbon dioxide than climate computer models suggest?
"Global Warming" is, and always was, a policy for genocidal reduction of the world's population. The preposterous claim that human-produced carbon dioxide will broil the Earth, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life, came out of a 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, organized by the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1974.
Mead—whose 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be a fraud—recruited like-minded anti-population hoaxsters to the cause: Sow enough fear of man-caused climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development. Mead's leading recruits at the 1975 conference were climate-scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak biologist George Woodwell, and the current AAAS president John Holdren—all three of them disciples of malthusian fanatic Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.[1] Guided by luminaries like these, conference discussion focussed on the absurd choice of either feeding people or "saving the environment."
Mead began organizing for her conference, "The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering," shortly after she had attended the United Nations Population Conference in Bucharest, Romania, in August 1974. She had already bullied American scientists with her malthusian view that people were imperiling the environment. She wrote in a 1974 Science magazine editorial that the Population Conference had settled this question:
At Bucharest it was affirmed that continuing, unrestricted worldwide population growth can negate any socioeconomic gains and fatally imperil the environment.... The earlier extreme views that social and economic justice alone can somehow offset population increase and that the mere provision of contraception can sufficiently reduce population—were defeated.[2]
The North Carolina conference, which took place Oct. 26-29, 1975, was co-sponsored by two agencies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health: the John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. (Mead had been a Scholar in Residence at the Fogarty Center in 1973.)
It was at this government-sponsored conference, 32 years ago, that virtually every scare scenario in today's climate hoax took root. Scientists were charged with coming up with the "science" to back up the scares, so that definitive action could be taken by policy-makers.
Global cooling—the coming of an ice age—had been in the headlines in the 1970s, but it could not easily be used to sell genocide by getting the citizens of industrial nations to cut back on consumption. Something more drastic and more personal was needed.
Eugenics and the Paradigm Shift
Mead's population-control policy was firmly based in the post-Hitler eugenics movement, which took on the more palatable names of "conservation" and "environmentalism" in the post-World War II period. As Julian Huxley, the vice president of Britain's Eugenics Society (1937-44), had announced in 1946, "even though it is quite true that radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable." Huxley was then director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
By the 1970s, the paradigm shift that obliterated the optimistic development policies of Franklin Roosevelt and of Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, was in full swing. The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, which removed the role of scientific advances, was drummed into the public consciousness. Nuclear energy, in particular, was under attack, because of its promise of virtually unlimited cheap energy to support a growing population. In the guise of protecting the world from potential terrorism, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty prohibited developing countries from acquiring civilian nuclear technologies.
In the United States, where nuclear plant construction was poised for takeoff, the dream of a nuclear-powered economy was under ferocious attack from the top down. The real "Dr. Strangelove," RAND nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, counseled U.S. Presidents on his strategy for winning a nuclear war, at the same time that he advocated an end to civilian nuclear energy. In one report after another, "experts" paid by the Ford Foundation, among others, argued that nuclear power was not economical, not safe, and just plain no good. Thus was scientific optimism ushered out.
The rock-sex-drugs counterculture of the '68ers lapped it up. Man was seen as just another animal, but an exceedingly greedy one, using up Mother Nature's resources and making a mess in the process. The unique cognitive ability of the human being, with its power to create new resources, to develop more advanced science and technology, and thus to provide better living standards was trashed.[3] Scientific pessimism invaded the scientific organizations.
Mead played a central role in this degeneration, from her obsession with spreading the "free love" message, to her participation in mind-control projects (the Cybernetics group at MIT) with her third husband, Gregory Bateson, intellectual author of the infamous MK-Ultra drug-brainwashing program.
The Endangered Atmosphere?
Mead's keynote to the 1975 climate conference set the agenda: Mankind had advanced over the years to have international laws governing the sea and the land; now was the time for a "Law of the Atmosphere." It was a naked solicitation of lying formulations to justify an end to human scientific and industrial progress.
Mead stated:
Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices—to drill a well, open a road, build a large airplane, make a nuclear test, install a liquid fast breeder reactor, release chemicals which diffuse throughout the atmosphere, or discharge waste in concentrated amounts into the sea—the whole planet may become endangered....
At this conference we are proposing that, before there is a corresponding attempt to develop a "law of the air," the scientific community advise the United Nations (and individual, powerful nation states or aggregations of weaker states) and attempt to arrive at some overview of what is presently known about hazards to the atmosphere from manmade interventions, and how scientific knowledge coupled with intelligent social action can protect the peoples of the world from dangerous and preventable interference with the atmosphere upon which all life depends....
What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats [sic].
Mead deplored the fact that some scientists might be so cautious to "protect their reputations" that they would not act. She described this as the "modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns." As for the thinking population, she deplored "those who react against prophets of doom, believing that there is not adequate scientific basis for their melanchology prophecies, [for they] tend to become in turn prophets of paradisiacal impossiblities, guaranteed utopias of technological bliss, or benign interventions on behalf of mankind that are none the less irrational just because they are couched as 'rational.' They express a kind of faith in the built-in human instinct for survival, or a faith in some magical technological panacea."
What Scientists Need To 'Invent'
Here's what Mead wanted the atmospheric scientists to do:
What we need to invent—as responsible scientists—are ways in which farsightedness can become a habit of the citizenry of the diverse peoples of this planet. This, of course, poses a set of technical problems for social scientists, but they are helpless without a highly articulate and responsible expression of position on the part of natural scientists. Only if natural scientists can develop ways of making their statements on the present state of danger credible to each other can we hope to make them credible (and understandable) to social scientists, politicians, and the citizenry.
...I have asked a group of atmospheric specialists to meet here to consider how the very real threats to humankind and life on this planet can be stated with crediblity and persuasiveness before the present society of nations begins to enact laws of the air, or plan for 'international environmental impact statements.' "
Throughout her presentation, Mead stressed the need for consensus, an end-product free from any troubling "internal scientific controversies" that might "blur the need for action."
Mead and her co-organizer William W. Kellogg (a climate scientist from RAND and later NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research), edited a report on the proceedings of the conference into a little book published a year later.[4] (The Mead-Kellogg team also came up, in 1976, with the idea that carbon dioxide emissions should be controlled "by assigning polluting rights to each nation"[5]—an early version of the cap-and-trade program of Al Gore.)
The conference proceedings identify the presenters and the rapporteurs for the sessions, but there is no list of all the participants. Some discord is reported in the audience (more than is "allowed" today in climate change circles!), and Margaret Mead steps in to push for "consensus." The editors note in their initial comment on the proceedings, "... we believe that we have captured something very close to consensus."
Mead's Propagandist Scientists
A few of the 1975 conference presenters stand out today as leading spokesmen for global warming:
Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, who was promoting the global cooling scare scenario in the 1970s, made himself notorious by telling Discover magazine in 1989: "To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."[6]
Schneider has been one of the most visible and voluble scientist-lobbyists for global warming, testifying to Congress, playing a prominent role in the Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and setting the standards by which it presents its opinions to the public without any hint of uncertainty. At Stanford University he has trained new generations of climate scare clones. He is also a close friend of The Population Bomb's Paul Ehrlich and wife, Anne Ehrlich, both at Stanford, whose anti-population philosophy he fully shares. He and Paul Ehrlich co-authored articles on the "limited carrying capacity" of the Earth, and challenged population advocate Julian Simon with a bet on how fast man would exhaust certain resources.
John Holdren, another Ehrlich collaborator at Stanford, is now a Harvard-based energy specialist, and the president of the AAAS. Holdren has co-authored several articles and books with Paul Ehrlich, elaborating on their formula (I = PAT) that the impact of an increase in population and consumption (affluence), although modified by technology, is degrading the environment. Therefore, population growth should stop. Their underlying assumption, like Mead's, was that technology cannot solve the problems created by "limitless" population growth. (Ehrlich's view, in fact, is that the United States can sustain only 150 million people; there are now 302 million of us.)
In December 2006, Holdren shepherded a radical global warming resolution through the AAAS board of directors, which was announced at the organization's annual meeting in February 2007, the first ever of such resolutions.[7] Its conclusions, the AAAS stated, "reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...."
Holdren is one of a small group of anti-nuclear "nuclear experts" who push technological apartheid—the doctrine that poorer nations cannot be allowed to gain knowledge of nuclear science.
Dr. George Woodwell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a global warming fanatic whose stated beliefs indicate that he abhors human beings in general, and whose zealousness in this cause leads him to bend the truth. Woodwell works closely with John Holdren at the Woods Hole Research Center, which Woodwell founded and of which Holden is a director.
To get the flavor of Woodwell's views: In a 1996 interview, he proclaimed: "We had an empty world that substantially ran itself as a biophysical system, and now that we have filled it up with people, and the sum of human endeavors which is large enough to affect global systems, it no longer works properly."[8] He attributes climatic changes and warming to "the crowding of people into virtually every corner of the Earth." "How will his plan for a 50 percent cut in [carbon dioxide] emissions happen?" the interviewer asks. Woodwell says it will require "a concerted effort on the part of the scientific and scholarly community; the public will have to be sufficiently enraged...." He stresses that the scientific community is going to have to exert pressure on the government to act.
Woodwell's 1989 article on global warming in Scientific American was illustrated with a drawing that showed seawater lapping at the steps of the White House.
Another example of his "bending" the truth: During the environmentalist campaign against DDT, Woodwell wrote a technical article for Science magazine in 1967 purporting to show that there were 13 pounds of DDT per acre of soil. He neglected to mention, however, that he measured the soil at the spot where the DDT spray trucks washed down! This detail came out in the official EPA hearings on DDT in 1972, but neither Woodwell nor Science magazine issued a retraction.[9]
Dr. James Lovelock is best known as the inventor (in the 1970s) of the Gaia thesis, which views the Earth as a whole as a living biological being. Lovelock's worry about global warming has led him to make dire predictions about what will happen: "Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable," according to one of his scenarios.[10]
But unlike the three other scientists above, who attended the 1975 Mead conference, Lovelock has called for nuclear power to slow the disaster that he warns is coming. Again, unlike the three others, Lovelock sees mankind as a "resource" for the planet, its "heart and mind."
During the 1975 Mead conference, Lovelock occasionally pooh-poohed some of the more hysterical suggested disasters of man-made warming. In a discussion on ozone depletion, for example, Lovelock strongly criticized the National Academy of Sciences report of the coming danger of skin cancers from increased ultraviolet radiation. "To speak of ultraviolet radiation as analogous to nuclear radiation is most misleading," he said.
(During this discussion, the report of the proceedings says, Mead called for a " 'ceasefire' in an attempt to avoid a premature polarization of the participants." Referring to the uncertainty of potential effects, she stated, "The time interval required before we begin to see clear evidence of a particular manmade effect on the enviromment may be long compared to the time in which society has to act.... A decision by policy-makers not to act in the absence of scientific information or expertise is itself a policy decision, and for scientists there is no possibility for inaction, except to stop being scientists.")
'Anticipating' Global Warming
Mead's co-editor of the proceedings, climatologist William Kellogg, notes that "the main purpose of this conference is to anticipate the call that will be made on scientists and leaders of government regarding the need to protect the atmospheric environment before these calls are made."
Kellogg outlines the difficulties of computer modelling of climate change and man's role because of the nonlinearities involved in climate, but he concludes that climate models "are really the only tools we have to determine such things." He then states,
The important point to bear in mind is that mankind surely has already affected the climate of vast regions, and quite possibly of the entire earth, and that its ever escalating population and demand for energy and food will produce larger changes in the years ahead.
Kellogg reviews the potential global warming disaster scenarios, which are actually what then became the scientific research agenda for the next 30 years. He himself had put forward arguments that the release of the energy necessary to support a "large, affluent world population could possibly warm up the earth excessively."
The issues Kellogg laid out are all too familiar today: warming that will melt "the Arctic Ocean ice pack and the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic." "What will happen to the mean sea level and the coastal cities around the world?" Kellogg asks.
Increased carbon dioxide was high on the list of man-related climate change disasters. It was admitted that there might be other factors involved, but,
It is concluded that, in cases where the societal risk is great, one should therefore act as if the unaccounted-for effects had been included, since we have no way of dismissing the very possibility that the calculated effect will prevail.
In the Conference summary of recommendations, Kellogg's thrust is repeated: Scientists and policy-makers must act now on man-caused climate change. "To ignore the possibility of such changes is, in effect, a decision not to act."
John Holdren repeated this idea: "How close are we to the danger point?" of ecological collapse, he asked. But then he went on to say that it doesn't matter, because we need to act now. He stated:
We already have reached the scale of human intervention that rivals the scale of natural processes.... Furthermore, many of these forms of intervention will lead to observable adverse effects only after time lags, measured in years, decades, or even centuries. By the time the character of the damage is obvious, remedial action will be difficult or impossible. Some kinds of adverse effects may be practically irreversible....
Should We Feed People?
One of the most telling discussions concerned the view of man as just another species competing for resources. The report of the summary session of the first day of the conference stated "that we as a species are trying to maintain ourselves at the expense of other species; there seems to be a conflict between preserving nature and feeding the rapidly increasing population. Is our major objective really to feed the population, or do we realize we cannot continue to feed the world at any price? Where do we strike a balance between preserving nature and feeding the world?"
Stephen Schneider's presentation, "Climatic Variability and Its Impact on Food Production," sounds the alarm:
There is a further fear that mankind's industrial and energy production activities may affect the climate and lead to enhanced probabilities of extreme vaiability. Thus the food-climate crisis could be very near-term and of major significance.... The smallest impact, and one we have already seen, is the triggering of higher prices for food by crop failures in one nation, such as the USSR in 1972, which had to be made up by North America.... Simultaneous crop failures in North America and the USSR could lead to even higher prices and widespread starvation throughout the world. Some estimates predict that upwards of 100 million people in developing countries could starve, while the more affluent countries would be just inconvenienced by a significant crop failure in North America.
As a gauge of the immorality of the conference participants, Schneider felt compelled to assert that "national energy and food policies must start with the assumption that population control by mass starvation or nuclear war is untenable"!
Like the other presenters at the conference, and the global warming faction today, Schneider fails to see how curbs on science and industry will kill people by preventing the economic development that permits a higher relative potential population density. Advances in science and technology are mentioned, but usually in the context of better energy savers and conservation, not in allowing more people to be supported at a better standard of living on a given amount of land.
Woodwell's presentation, "The Impact of Enviromental Change on Human Ecology," is even more alarmist. He writes:
A careful analysis of the extent to which the earth's net primary production is being used directly in support of man leads to the conclusion that, at present, as much as 50 percent of the net production is being used in support of human food supplies.... The fact that the toxic effects of human activities are spreading worldwide and reducing the structure of the biota is an indication that human activities at present exceed the capacity of the biosphere for repairing itself.
The Noösphere to the Rescue
Thirty-two years after this 1975 conference, the world's population, its science and technology, and its industry are dangerously in the grasp of Margaret Mead's minions, including those on the IPCC. A good part of the population is scared, as planned, by the potential effects of human-caused global warming. They are ready to react, as Mead demanded, to "warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane," and in the process tear down the very institutions and technologies that can obviate the perceived "limits to growth."
In the intervening 32 years, most of our scientific institutions have been taken over by an anti-science ideology, typified by the views of a Stephen Schneider or a John Holdren. How can there be a science when the mind and its capacity for creativity is denied, when man is put equal to beast, and when man's advancements are perceived as ruining the pristine confines of a limited world? Such pessimism is a formula for a "no future" world.
The question remains, will the reservoir of sanity, in particular in today's youth, who did not live through the greenwashing of the 1970s and 1980s, be able to force reality—climate reality and financial reality—on the rest of the population? Will the Noösphere, man's creative ability to change the Biosphere, prevail?
[1] The Population Bomb, published in 1968, was a campus bestseller among the 1968er generation. Ehrlich employs the repeatedly discredited argument of the British East India Company's Parson Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that population increases geometrically while food supply increases only arithmetically. Malthus was proved wrong in his own lifetime by the development of fertilizers and scientific farming, and repeatedly thereafter by the application of successive advances in mechanization, chemistry, and biochemistry to agriculture.
Describing the spirit of "gloom and misanthropy" into which the English population had fallen following the dashing of their hopes for progress in the French Revolution, Malthus's opponent Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: "Inquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus." (Author's introduction to "The Revolt of Islam," 1818.)
[2] Margaret Mead, "World Population: World Responsibility," Science, Sept. 27, 1974 (editorial), Vol. 185, No. 4157. The only opposition to the Rockefeller/Club of Rome policy presented at the Bucharest conference came from Helga Zepp-LaRouche.
[3] See, for example, "The New Environmentalist Eugenics," by Rob Ainsworth, EIR, March 30, 2007.
[4] The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering, Margaret Mead, Ph.D. and William W. Kellogg, Ph.D., eds. Fogarty International Center Proceedings No. 39, 1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, DHEW Publication No. [NIH] 77-1065).
[5] Cited in P.C. Sinha, Atmospheric Pollution and Climate Change (Anmol Publications PVT, 1998).
[6] Schneider made this statement in an interview with Discover magagzine, October 1989.
[7] The text of the shamefully unscientific AAAS resolution, which closely follows Mead's 1975 prescription, reads in part: "The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.
"The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years.... As expected, intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on vulnerable ecosystems and societies. These events are early warning signs of even more devastating damage to come, some of which will be irreversible.
"Delaying action to address climate change will increase the environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs.... Developing clean energy technologies will provide economic opportunities and ensure future energy supplies.
"The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations."
[9] Woodwell's original article is "DDT Residues in an East Coast Estuary: A Case of Biological Concentration of a Persistent Insecticide," Science, May 12, 1967, pp. 821-824. His admission that there was only 1 pound of DDT found per acre appears in the transcript of the EPA's 1972 hearings on DDT, p. 7,232. He also managed to measure DDT in the forests at a site near an airstrip where crop-dusting airplanes tested and calibrated their DDT spraying equipment.
Daniel's Guide To
THE CASE AGAINST MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE
How the Environmental Movement is being Manipulated for Nefarious Ends
& The Urgent Need to Prepare for the Approaching 'Grand Solar Minimum'
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.†The Club of Rome, ‘The First Global Revolution’, 1991
“Ignorance is the root cause of all evil. And since only knowledge eradicates ignorance, it is our duty and moral obligation to educate ourselves and, having done so, to share what we’ve learnt with others.†Anon (from Mark Passio’s seminar on Natural Law)
SUMMARY OF THE ESSAY
My Story
Six months ago I was a firm believer in manmade climate change but, due to the spur of recent events and having unlimited access to the internet for the first time, I have done a huge amount of research, reading, and speaking with others about many issues including this one. As a result, what’s really going on in the world has become clearer to me and I wish to share my findings and conclusions on the ‘climate change’ issue with you (along with related issues) from a place of love and openheartedness.
I do not need anyone to agree with my conclusions but I hope there can be open and cordial debate on a topic where debate has been curtailed. Inquiry and debate are the lifeblood of science.
The Real Environmental Emergency
I want to emphasise that making a case against manmade climate change does NOT mean making a case that there is not an environmental emergency. In fact, it means rather than our energies and resources being channelled into the diversion of ‘climate change’ as framed, they are freed up to be focussed on the real issues and causes of planetary ill-health. From that place, we can build meaningful solutions.
Six Pillars
The case against manmade climate change rests on six main pillars:
(1) Climate change is caused by the Sun
The driver of planetary climate change is the Sun, through sunspot cycles and the Birkeland currents (also known as the ‘solar wind’). As a result of this fluctuating solar activity, there have been periods in human history when the Earth has been much warmer than today such as the ‘Holocene Maximum’ in the Bronze Age and the ‘Medieval Warm Period’. Life on the planet including human life thrived during these times. And there’s been periods when it’s been much colder such as the ‘Maunder Minimum’ in the 1600’s. We are currently moving into a ‘Grand Solar Minimum’ which will bottom out in the early 2030’s and is likely to result in food shortages, economic contraction and population migration.
In the manmade climate change world, no-one’s talking about the great ball of fire in the sky and what it’s doing. This climate theory and the consequent climate models do not take account of the Sun’s activity. This is a glaring omission which renders the theory and the models fundamentally flawed. After all, the most important object in the solar system is the Sun.
(2) The level of atmospheric CO2 follows temperature
In the manmade climate change world, we are told that global temperature changes follow the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. If CO2 goes up, temperature goes up and vice versa. But the problem with that is that there is a time lag between temperature changes and those changes being mirrored by CO2. In other words, the temperature goes up and several hundred years later CO2 goes up. This is because the relationship is the opposite to what we’re told. The majority of CO2 in the atmosphere comes from the oceans. When the temperature of the Earth increases as a result of sunspot activity, it takes a long time for the oceans to slowly heat up and subsequently release more CO2. Equally, when temperatures fall as a result of a decrease in the Sun’s activity, the oceans slowly cool down and absorb more CO2. This action occurs in the same way with a fizzy drink.
(3) The remit and operation of the UN IPCC
The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the ‘IPCC’), set up by oil man and Rockefeller-backed Maurice Strong, is a political body cloaked as a scientific body. Furthermore, from the outset the IPCC controlled the debate by limiting its charter “to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.†In other words, before any of the science had been done, the IPCC’s assumption was that manmade activity was responsible while the role of the Sun and other natural processes were excluded from consideration, thus thwarting free inquiry based on reason and evidence.
(4) CO2 is the gas of life
Carbon dioxide is a natural gas which comprises 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere and humans produce 4% of that. Termites produce ten times more CO2 than humans so why no war on termites? CO2 is not a pollutant. Some scientists (whose analyses are reported in this essay) say it is a greenhouse gas but a weak one that water vapour and clouds have a far more significant heating effect than CO2. In other words, they say that the effect that manmade CO2 has on climate is negligible. Forecaster Piers Corbyn says CO2 causes zero heating effect in the atmosphere. I think Corbyn’s explanation is more plausible. Either way, it’s clear that, rather than being the villain, CO2 is the gas of life. Plants need CO2 to grow and life is based on carbon and water. We are actually in a CO2 famine right now levels of the gas have been much higher in the past 540m years and life has flourished. Any increase in the amount of CO2 (even many times over) would be beneficial, enabling plants to grow faster and grow more easily in arid areas.
(5) Agenda 21 / Agenda 30 & the Great Reset
The fifth consideration is the agenda behind the notion of manmade climate change. This is where the word ‘nefarious’ that I’ve used in the subtitle of this essay comes into play. It’s Agenda 21 / Agenda 30. This is an all encompassing programme under the banner of the United Nations which sounds laudable to bring about sustainability. But, in fact, when this is examined in detail along with the history of how it came about, it becomes clear the agenda is to bring about total control by the powers-that-be of the world’s natural resources, including you and me. This plan involves moving the global human population out of the countryside into smart cities where people will ‘own nothing and be happy’ and be under total surveillance and control.
Agenda 21 / 30 dovetails with the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ and the ‘Great Reset’ agendas of the World Economic Forum, which include the push to merge humans with Artificial Intelligence (known as ‘transhumanism’).
(6) Climategate and the censorship of dissenting voices
In 2009, a whistleblower released emails showing how climate academia was manipulating and destroying data, along with blocking publication of articles which didn’t support their anthropogenic global warming agenda. This became known as ‘Climategate’.
The Real Climate Emergency
It’s critical to know that we’re entering a Mini Ice Age or ‘Grand Solar Minimum’ (bottoming out in the early 2030’s), the effect it’s having on weather and climate, and what this means in terms of our energy needs and our ability to grow food in different parts of the world. We need to be preparing for this now.
The main links in this essay
As you’ll see, this essay is peppered with links. If you’re only able to check out a few of them (at least initially), I would recommend watching these videos:
• The 2007 Channel Four documentary ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ
• A one hour presentation by Piers Corbyn in May 2017:
https://www.bitchute.com/video/S08CgODrMwR4/
• 46 min talk by Richard D Hall in 2015 (in four parts) entitled ‘What is the true cause and the real reason for debt?’
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=201&part=1&gen=11
• Interview of Sandi Adams concerning Agenda 21 / Agenda 30
If all you do is read the above summary and watch these six videos with an open mind, I guarantee that you will learn a lot of fascinating and important stuff, indeed I would say critical stuff, because I did.
Last but not least, you can download a free 24 page pamphlet by Piers Corbyn and Philip Foster entitled “Man-Made Climate Change Does not Exist!†(2019) from this link: https://bit.ly/30TfVWN
This explains in an accessible way with graphs and diagrams why CO2 does not drive climate, how the climate is actually driven by the Sun, and what to expect as we go into the Mini Ice Age.
“While it’s very easy to spot the propaganda that you disagree with, it’s far more difficult to spot propaganda when you agree with it.†- Mark Crispin Miller, NYU Professor
--
You are Powerful, You are Beautiful, You are Free
_________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
'Rick Duarte
Decm9emboer5n so8r5g, g202100628 ·
MOTHER NATURE DOES NOT CONTROL THE WEATHER ANYMORE
By Rick Duarte * December 8, 2016
Whatever Mother Nature has dished-out in the past, Man now has the technology and capability of making it a hundred times worse.
On April 28, 1997, U.S. Secretary of Defense, William Cohen held a Department of Defense news briefing, proclaiming: "Others are engaging even in a eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of eletromagnetic waves." What Cohen failed to clarify was those "others" (those other nations) included the United States.
You see, Weather Wars is not, nor has it ever been a "conspiracy theory". The fact of the matter is Weather Warfare has been going on for a very long time now. In earnest, it began with Operation Popeye.
Operation Popeye was a highly classified weather modification program in Southeast Asia during 1967–1972. The cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War ran from March 20, 1967 until July 5, 1972. It extended the monsoon season, specifically over areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation was used to induce torrential rainfall and extend the East Asian Monsoon season in support of U.S. government efforts to thwart the advancement of North Vietnamese troops into South Vietnam.
On May 14, 2014, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said (with Secretary of State John Kerry at his side): “We have 500 days to avoid climate chaos. And I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject and I’m sure that with them, with a lot of other friends, we shall be able to reach success in this very important matter.”
Now let me translate Fabius' coded message for you. Translation: "We have 500 days BEFORE we unleash climate chaos on your ass and on this planet!"
The end of those 500 days came on September 28, 2015. From that day forward, all Hell has broken loose here on planet Earth. It has quite literally become Dante's Hell on Earth, with Man-made Floods, Hurricanes, Hailstorms and Earthquakes.
Tesla was prophetic when he said:
YOU WILL LIVE TO SEE MAN-MADE HORRORS BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION
For nearly a year now, WEATHER WARS founders, Rick Duarte and Nigel Gray, have been documenting and posting the nefarious weather machinations of the Lords, "The Lords of Weather Wars". As much as we'd like to go back in time and repost them, our future postings will paint the picture for you. A very clear picture for sure.
So sit back and enjoy! You're about to enter The Twilight Zone...HORRORS BEYOND YOUR COMPREHENSION.
Dr. Rosalie Bertell wrote me that indeed there has been a development of military technologies in the decades after world War II that are able to produce earthquakes and even more seemingly natural catastrophes, like hurricanes, floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, changes in the sea-currents and in whole weather-systems, including the melt down of the Arctic! – They are using the knowledge of Nicola Tesla, famous, but officially neglected Serbian inventor in the fields of electricity and electromagnetism during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Rosalie even told me that the Haitian case [Haiti's M.7.0 Earthquake on January 12, 2010] could very well have been an example for an artificially induced earthquake, because the heating of the ionosphere which is needed to produce the earthquake by sending strongly pulsed electromagnetic waves through our heaven and back to earth, leaves plasma-lights like auroras in the sky – and this happened near Haiti at the time shortly before the earthquake.
ENVIRONMENTAL MODIFICATION TECHNIQUES (ENMOD) AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Prof. Michel Chossudovsky * 11/12/13 & 12/5/09
Once more, environmental modification techniques which can trigger tsunamis, typhoons and earthquakes are excluded from the Warsaw discussion on climate change.
Ironically, Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) were acknowledged by the UN in 1977 upon the signing in Geneva of the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. Since then climate manipulation has been amply documented by scientists. It is acknowledged by the mainstream media including CBS and CBC.
Despite a vast body of scientific knowledge, the issue of climatic manipulation has been excluded from the Warsaw agenda on climate change. In excluding it from the debate, the UN is in violation of its own mandate as defined by the 1977 Convention.
Livingston asserts that hurricane control was a national priority of the government more than 40 years ago and that the technology was fully operational to control the weather at the time.
AMERICA'S ELECTROMAGNETIC AND DIRECTED ENERGY WEAPONS (DEWs) PROGRAM
Video * Aug 1, 2010
A DEW is a system using a beam of concentrated electromagnetic energy (including but not limited to lasers and high power microwave systems), or atomic or subatomic particles primarily as a direct means to kill, injure, disable, or temporarily incapacitate people or destroy, damage or temporarily incapacitate property or materiel.
Acoustic weapons use sound across the entire frequency spectrum to kill, injure, disable, or temporarily incapacitate people. Acoustic weapons, although outside the Joint definition of DEW, have effects and hazards more similar to DEW than to conventional weapons.
GLOBAL FLASH FLOOD DESTRUCTION: THE OBVIOUS MAN-MADE SOURCE
Weather War 101 Video * January 24, 2017
For the last ten years, I have been proving the nature and man-made origin of severe weather, and flash flood disasters that have cost countless hundreds of millions in damages and lives lost. I’m not a “truther” or a “conspiracy theorist” by any stretch of the imagination. I’m a former corporate engineer (for almost 30 years), and I deal only in facts. For 30 years, it has been my job to figure how things physically and mechanically work, and that is exactly what I have done here. Everything I present can be proven scientifically, is backed up by scientific research, is backed up by the specifications of the equipment (Cooling Towers and their smaller equivalent WSAC [Wet Surface Air Coolers]), and can be observed in action – every single day. There’s nothing “theoretical” about any of this. It’s is as matter-of-fact as the existence of the Combustion Engine is, and its existence is just as easy to prove.
It’s not a difficult concept to understand. Water Vapor in the air is what rain comes from, so enormous cooling towers that put enormous amounts of Water Vapor into the air, would logically affect where and how much rain would fall. In fact, based on a 1971 study at Zion Nuclear Power Plant which investigated the impact of proposed cooling towers (which showed that they did – in fact – affect the amount of rain and snow that would fall down wind), Cooling Towers were rejected at that facility. In spite of this reality, the next few decades saw an explosion of Cooling Tower installations at Power Plants all over the world, to the point that now – one would be hard-pressed to find a power plant without them. Since each tower can evaporate thousands or even tens of thousands of gallons of Water Vapor per minute, and since there are 62,500 power Plants worldwide, it cannot be disputed that they are adding trillions of gallons of Water Vapor to the air… and that in such large numbers, they would necessarily have an affect rainfall.
The obvious question is “why” would (Power Plant / ‘Fossil Fuel’) Industry deliberately do this? Why would a system like this (or to be more precise, the dual-purposing of existing systems) exist? As I explain in detail and prove in my book, one-hundred and fifty years of industrialization created considerably more problems and atmospheric imbalances than just the popular Global Warming and Climate Change focus, CO2. In fact, there is a much bigger problem that has been hidden from public consciousness for several decades… that being the problem of industrialization’s impact, on the natural rain cycle.
In order for a rain drop to form, water vapor must attach to a particle in the air. In the natural cycle, that particle could be a grain of dust, carbon ash, salt, etc. Those particles are called “CCN” (Cloud Condensation Nuclei). When enough of these droplets combine into a drop heavy enough to fall from a cloud, it becomes rain. However, industrial pollution puts particles in the air that are much smaller than natural CCN (which creates droplets much smaller than normal), and this prevents rain drops that are large enough to fall to the ground from forming. This was definitively proven in 2000, although scientists were very much aware of the reality decades before. The droughts of the 70s and 80s illustrated the rapid development and impact of industrial pollution particles on rain.
With pollution creating water droplets that were too small to combine into raindrops (leading to tremendous droughts in at the end of the 20th Century), much more water vapor was required to force saturation point, and to force any rain at all to fall. Although the public was deliberately kept unaware of these realities by corporations spending huge amounts of money on misdirection and disinformation, industry was clearly aware of the problem – and trying to bury it. We know this, because of how industry quietly developed the ability to produce massive amounts of additional Water Vapor, on their own.
The overpopulation issue is used often by those who want an excuse to cull the masses. Overpopulation describes a situation where the number of people exhausts the resources in a closed environment such that it can no longer support that population. In a closed environment – that means one which relies on keeping people in poverty, using fossil fuels, and by dumping every possible toxic poison and chemical possible where people must live, wash, breathe, and reproduce.' _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Leaked United Nations report reveals the world's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years
Politicians have raised concerns about the final draft
Fears that the findings will encourage deniers of man-made climate change
By Tamara Cohen, Political Correspondent
Published: 20:40, 19 September 2013 | Updated: 07:47, 20 September 2013
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Scientists working on the most authoritative study on climate change were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed.
A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft.
Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain.
The report is the result of six years’ work by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is seen as the world authority on the extent of climate change and what is causing it – on which governments including Britain’s base their green policies.
Concerns: Scientists have been urged to cover up the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years amid fears it would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change
Concerns: Scientists have been urged to cover up the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years amid fears it would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change
But leaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years.
Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has changed its tune after issuing stern warnings about climate change for years
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has changed its tune after issuing stern warnings about climate change for years
Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change.
Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat - and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve.
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The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.
The last IPCC ‘assessment report’ was published in 2007 and has been the subject of huge controversy after it had to correct the embarrassing claim that the Himalayas would melt by 2035.
It was then engulfed in the ‘Climategate’ scandal surrounding leaked emails allegedly showing scientists involved in it trying to manipulate their data to make it look more convincing – although several inquiries found no wrongdoing.
The latest report, which runs to 2,000 pages, will be shown to representatives from all 195 governments next week at a meeting in Stockholm, who can discuss alterations they want to make.
But since it was issued to governments in June, they have raised hundreds of objections about the 20-page summary for policymakers, which sums up the findings of the scientists.
What it says will inform renewable energy policies and how much consumers and businesses will pay for them.
The report is expected to say the rate of warming between 1998 and 2012 was about half of the average rate since 1951 – and put this down to natural variations such as the El Nino and La Nina ocean cycles and the cooling effects of volcanoes.
A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States have raised concerns about the final draft. Above, the United Nations headquarters building in New York
A leaked copy of the United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States have raised concerns about the final draft. Above, the United Nations headquarters building in New York
A German climate scientist - Stefan Rahmstorf, who reviewed the chapter on sea levels - yesterday admitted it was possible the report’s authors were feeling under pressure to address the slowdown in warming due to the ‘public debate’ around the issue.
The draft report, which is not new research but a synthesis of all the work being done by scientists around the world, is likely to be highly disputed at the three-day meeting.
It will make the case that humans are causing global warming with carbon emissions even more strongly upgrading it from ‘very likely’ in 2007 to ‘extremely likely’ it is manmade.
But scientists are under pressure to explain why the warming has not exceeded 1998 levels although the decade 2000-2010 was the hottest on record.
Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Washington, said yesterday: ‘I think to not address it would be a problem because then you basically have the denialists saying: ‘Look the IPCC is silent on this issue.’
Very interesting con man?
Died yesterday.....
From behind paywall.
Professor James Lovelock, scientist behind the Gaia theory of Earth as a self-regulating ecosystem – obituary
His invention of the electron capture detector enabled other scientists to identify the threat posed by CFCs to the ozone layer
Professor James Lovelock, who has died on his 103rd birthday, developed the Gaia theory, which suggests that Earth and all the living things on it are inextricably bound together, interacting in complex ways to ensure that the environment can sustain life.
Lovelock’s theory was regarded with hostility by many scientists who saw it as more of a New Age religion than empirically-based science. Yet Lovelock was a respected scientist whose other achievements, notably his invention of the electron capture detector, a device capable of measuring tiny amounts — parts per trillion — of dangerous toxins, might well have earned him a Nobel Prize.
Indeed without the detector, Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland would not have won the 1995 prize for chemistry for their work warning that Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were a danger to the ozone layer. Many thought it unfair that Lovelock did not share in the award.
Lovelock’s Gaia odyssey began in 1961 when, on the strength of his detector, he was recruited from the National Institute for Medical Research laboratories in north London to work for Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Nasa wanted to develop light, portable instruments to find out if there was life on the planets with a view to sending a space probe to Mars.
For several years Lovelock had been using his detector to investigate the chemistry of the Earth’s atmosphere and he had come to realise that, on Earth, living things were constantly absorbing and releasing gases and that the atmosphere was full of highly reactive chemical mixtures. So much so, that he concluded that Earth’s atmosphere was in a state of chronic chemical disequilibrium, caused by life itself.
The same conditions, he suggested, would apply on any planet capable of sustaining life. By contrast, where life did not exist, the atmosphere would reach a state of chemical equilibrium. By analysing the atmosphere of Mars, therefore, scientists would know whether the planet could sustain life.
It was not necessary to send a probe to Mars, he suggested, because infra-red telescopes on Earth had already analysed the atmosphere and found that Martian “air” was stable, inert and dominated by a single gas, carbon dioxide. Therefore, Lovelock concluded, whether or not there had ever been life on Mars, there is no life on Mars now.
Lovelock’s message was not one Nasa scientists wanted to hear and he eventually found himself surplus to requirements. But his insight led Earth scientists and biologists to question the traditional Darwinian theory that living things evolved simply by adapting to their environment. Lovelock’s theory suggested that life itself fundamentally influences its own environment — so much so that it seemed to have maintained stable conditions over hundreds of millions of years, even though the chemistry of the atmosphere was itself unstable.
Earth’s life support system, Lovelock observed, could even apparently respond to outside events. The temperature of the atmosphere, for instance, had barely changed during a period of two or three billion years when the Sun had grown 25 per cent hotter. If that extra heat had been transferred to the planet’s surface, life would have come to an end. That it did not, Lovelock reasoned, could not have been a matter of mere chance.
One afternoon in 1965, the thought came to him “in a flash” that such constancy required the existence of an active control system. Life on Earth, he felt, was controlling its environment for its own good. A friend of Lovelock’s, the novelist William Golding, coined the name Gaia to describe this hypothesis, after the Greek Earth goddess.
The book in which he proposed his theory
The book in which he proposed his theory
First on his own in 1972, and then later in 1973 with American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock formally proposed the idea of Gaia as a control system. In 1979 his book, Gaia presented the hypothesis to the wider public.
The Gaia hypothesis was seized on by churchmen and by many environmentalists, who saw it as a way of bringing together science and religion. But — partly for the same reason — journals such as Nature and Science refused Gaian papers. Richard Dawkins accused Lovelock of “teleology” — supporting the idea that the natural processes work with some sort of deliberate purpose. Lovelock later admitted he had sometimes been provocative in the language he used: “I like telling biologists ‘the earth is alive’.” In fact, he merely meant that Earth operated as a self-regulating system.
Later, he invented a simple, computerised model world — Daisyworld – to explain the Gaia process. In Daisyworld, a vast meadow, white daisies and black daisies spontaneously operate their own thermostat. If it gets hotter, the black daisies suffer, but white daisies, which reflect more heat, prosper. The result is a world dominated by white daisies that reflect so much heat back into space they cool the planet down again. By contrast, if the world cools, black daisies do well and absorb more heat. The world warms. Thus a planet can become self-regulating without natural selection or some sort of deity.
Gradually, Lovelock’s ideas began to find support, particularly among climatologists, as the theory seemed to be borne out by physical evidence of the interaction between biology, geology and atmospherics. For example, it is now known that when the climate gets warmer, bacteria in soils work faster and speed up the weathering of rocks. That weathering absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as the gas reacts with silicate rocks to produce carbonates. So faster weathering reduces the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and lowers temperatures again.
But Lovelock warned that man-made changes to the atmosphere caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the destruction of rain forests might be occurring too fast for Gaia processes to maintain a constant equilibrium. Indeed, the Daisyworld model suggested that the planetary equilibrium could change suddenly if the self-regulating system is tipped too far.
The fossil record, Lovelock argued, suggested that sudden climatic “flips” had happened periodically throughout earth’s history. Man-made global warming might cause Gaia to “flip” into a new steady state within a matter of 100 years, threatening Man’s survival as a species.
He warned that runaway global warming was threatening the future of human civilisation
He warned that runaway global warming was threatening the future of human civilisation
In later books such as The Revenge of Gaia (2006) and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009), Lovelock struck a more apocalyptic note, warning that humanity’s lack of respect for Gaia was threatening to lead to runaway global warming, bringing climatic conditions which human civilisation will find it difficult to survive. Writing in the The Independent in 2006, Lovelock argued that, as a result of global warming, by the end of the 21st century “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”
Later on he retreated from this position somewhat, telling an interviewer in 2012 that he had made a mistake about the timing of climate change. He still believed it was happening, but that its worst effects will be felt farther in the future.
James Lovelock walking on the Dorset coast in 2020
James Lovelock walking on the Dorset coast in 2020 CREDIT: RUSSELL SACH
James Ephraim Lovelock was born into a Quaker family in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire on July 26 1919. His mother was a fervent suffragette who believed in smoking as a gesture demonstrating the equality of women. She encouraged her son to smoke, a habit he later blamed for recurrent health problems. The family moved to Brixton and he went to the Strand School, but he struggled with dyslexia and felt socially isolated for much of his childhood.
He left school early and took a job as a lab assistant while studying for his A-levels in the evenings. When war came, he was studying for a chemistry degree at Birkbeck College. He became a conscientious objector, finished his degree at Manchester University in 1941, then started working for the National Institute for Medical Research where he remained until 1961.
By 1943 he was no longer a pacifist, but in the event, he was turned down for the armed services because his work was too valuable. In 1948 he received a doctorate in medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and in 1959 another doctorate in biophysics from London University. Between 1946 and 1951 he worked at the Common Cold Research Unit at Harvard Hospital in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
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Lovelock’s research led him to file more than 50 patents, most notably for the electron capture detector, invented in 1957, the device which virtually launched the environmental movement. With it, Lovelock conducted some of the earliest studies of CFCs and suggested how sulphur from marine algae circulated worldwide and played a part in cloud formation.
Its use also led to the discovery by other scientists of the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues in the natural environment, work which inspired Rachel Carson to write The Silent Spring, the bible of the early “Green” movement. More recently, the detector has enabled meteorologists to follow the movement of air masses across continents and is also used in ocean research.
Although Lovelock became a hero to many in the environmental movement, the admiration was not reciprocated. He regarded the movement as a “potent force preventing environmental reforms”, because many of its claims about, for example, the dangers of nuclear power, were based on dubious scientific evidence.
Lovelock resigned from the National Institute in London in 1961 to take up the job with Nasa and became Professor of Chemistry at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. After returning to Britain from America in 1964, he operated as an independent scientist, working in a converted barn near Launceston, Cornwall.
He was a visiting professor, first at the University of Houston and then at the University of Reading. From 1986 to 1990 he was president of the Marine Biological Association.
In his later work, Lovelock developed his Daisyworld programme to investigate why it is earth has a profusion of life forms. After showing on his computer how daisies could regulate temperature, he then introduced rabbits to graze on them, foxes to eat the rabbits and so on.
He found that, although the various populations of creatures risked lurching from boom to bust, because of the way they interacted with one another, they did not do so; the populations remained stable. In another experiment, he populated Daisyworld with 50 different kinds of daisies each reflecting the Sun’s heat to a different degree, then increased the heat of the sun.
The stress produced a brief spurt in diversity as other daisies proliferated. This led him to suggest that when the earth warmed a couple of degrees after the ice ages, the rich diversity now found in the tropics was the result.
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A slender figure, with glasses, wavy grey hair and a quizzical expression, Lovelock had flirted with Communism in his youth, but in later life became a fan of Mrs Thatcher, after she appeared to embrace his theory in her first major speech on environmental issues.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and in 1975 received the Tswett Medal for Chromatography. In 1988 he was a recipient of the Norbert Gerbier Prize of the World Meteorological Organisation, and in 1990 was awarded the first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Other awards included the Nonino Prize and the Volvo Environment Prize in 1996, and Japan’s Blue planet prize in 1997. He was appointed CBE in 1990 and made a Companion of Honour in 2003.
The 1970s and 1980s were difficult years for Lovelock. He had had a heart bypass operation, but during his stay in hospital there had been a strike and the hospital did not have any clean equipment. They used an old catheter sterilised with ethylene oxide which destroyed his urethra; he had to have 30 to 40 operations to repair it. At the same time, his first wife Helen, née Hyslop, whom he had married in 1942, became bed-ridden with Multiple Sclerosis and eventually died in 1989.
In 1991 he married, secondly, Sandy Orchard. She survives him with two sons and two daughters of his first marriage.
Professor James Lovelock, born July 26 1919, died July 26 2022 _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Good old David Bellamy. "I have been banned from television. They sacked Julian Pettifer and Robin Page and they are just conservationists.
David Bellamy tells of moment he was "frozen out" of BBC
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9817181/David-Bellamy-t ells-of-moment-he-was-frozen-out-of-BBC.html
David Bellamy has described how the BBC “froze him out” when he dismissed global warming as “poppycock”.
David Bellamy has claimed his fellow conservationist David Attenborough used to be sceptical about global warming before “he had a change of heart”
David Bellamy insists global warming is "poppycock" Photo: REX FEATURES
By Victoria Ward - 22 Jan 2013
The 80-year old environmentalist and former broadcaster, admitted that his scepticism signalled the end of his career as he had known it.
“From that moment, I really wasn’t welcome at the BBC,” he said.
“They froze me out, because I don’t believe in global warming. My career dried up. I was thrown out of my own conservation groups and I got spat at in London.”
Mr Bellamy said things first began to change in 1996 when he spoke out against wind farms during one of his regular appearances on Blue Peter.
“That was the beginning really,” he told the Daily Mail. “From that moment, I was not welcome at the BBC.”
Global warming at a standstill, new Met Office figures show 08 Jan 2013
However, it was not until 2004 when he caused controversy by questioning whether the world was warming that his profile really began to slide.
“I worked with the Wildlife Trusts for 52 years,” he said “And when they dropped me, they didn’t even tell me. They didn’t have the guts.
“I read about it in the newspapers. Can you believe it?
“Now they don’t want to be anywhere near me. But what are they doing? The WWF might have saved a few pandas, but what about the forests?
“What have Greenpeace done?”
Mr Bellamy’s wife Rosemary admitted that they had both been devastated by the developments.
“It did upset us terribly,” she said. “But we pretended not to be upset, didn’t we David? The best thing to do was not to talk about it. So we didn’t.
It’s been very difficult, because he does feel strongly about things.”
Mr Bellamy insisted that he had no regrets about being so outspoken and had not changed his opinions about global warming.
“I still say it’s poppycock,” he said. "For the last 16 years, temperatures have been going down and the carbon dioxide has been going up and the crops have got greener and grow quicker.
"We’ve done plenty to smash up the planet, but there’s been no global warming caused by man.
“If you believe it, fine. But I don’t and there’s thousands like me."
He added: "Who cares if they’ve put me on the back burner? I can still talk to my flowers, which are all fine and growing amazingly and say, “Thank you very much, David!”
The Met Office this month downgraded its forecast for global warming to suggest that by 2017 temperatures will have remained about the same for two decades.
Attenborough 'sceptical about global warming' 13 Jan 2013
Sir David Attenborough dispels any doubts 11 Nov 2011
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