I will start with my conclusion – the UN-led effort to shame the west into constricting their economies to control emissions has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with destroying capitalism.
My interest in the environmental movement began with the Kyoto Protocols in 1992, when my skeptic’s antenna picked up some red flags.
Here was a global initiative by the UN, worrying about global warming and blaming CO2 for trapping heat in what was being called a “greenhouse” effect. At the time I had no idea what global warming had been or how much CO2 was allegedly trapping heat. However, what my antenna picked up was that the solution being proposed was focused on the western industrial countries, while exempting India, China and every less developed country.
I thought, how is this supposed to work? I knew the western industrial countries were already controlling their emissions for particulates and noxious gases which cause respiratory illnesses. Now, they were being asked to curb emissions of CO2, a natural plant food, but the biggest polluters were not even being asked to curb the emissions that cause illnesses? That sounded to me like having a growing global “Smoking Section” and expecting the air in the “Greenhouse” to improve.
When I began to look at the details, the first thing I found was that the “average global temperature” had increased by 0.8 +/- 0.2 degrees Celsius since 1880. This was less than one degree Celsius in 112 years at the time! As an engineer I thought, who can even measure this in any way that makes sense without a margin of error that makes the measurement itself moot?
Think about what they were doing. Using some mathematical sleight of hand, um…., algorithm, to first arrive at an “average global temperature” for the whole world for a whole year.
We know that temperatures change 24/7/365 at every location around the globe and from pole to pole, and yet, someone had found a way to calculate one “average global temperature” for the whole world for a whole year? Imagine the margin of error in such a whimsical number. Then they compared that with other years and the “warming” was 0.8 +/- 0.2 degrees Celsius over 112 years. Then, someone thought this was so serious that they came up with the Kyoto Protocols, which targeted only the western industrial countries but exempted the biggest polluters, India, China, and the less developed countries.
The only major scientist I found who thought the notion of an “average global temperature” for the whole world for a whole year was absurd was Nobel Physics Laureate, Ivar Giaever. Dr. Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society because of their stance on global warming. In his resignation letter (*1) he wrote, in part, “The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.’”
I was thinking all this in 1992. Can you see why I began to smell a dead rat? But let us leave the absurd notion of an “average global temperature” aside for now.
I knew from high school that the amounts of Oxygen and Nitrogen in the atmosphere did not leave much room for CO2, but someone was claiming that there was enough of this clear gas to “trap heat”? OK. How much CO2 are we talking about? I found that the amount of CO2 before the Industrial Age began was 0.028% of the atmosphere. By 1992 this had risen by about 30% to 0.036%. They were asking us to believe that this trace amount of a clear gas was acting like a “greenhouse”, which is absurd. The only gas that can act like a greenhouse is water vapor in opaque rain clouds.
I was simultaneously wondering what was going on in the world that was so horrible that this amount of global warming needed an international effort to curb? From a wonderful article written by researchers at Cambridge University titled “Climate change: it’s all happened before” (*2) I found that the only thing new about climate change now versus over the millennia, was that the officials at the UN were blaming someone and trying to hold them accountable, for reasons that were not clear to me at the time.
Throughout recorded history people had just adapted to climate changes and moved on with their lives. Angkor Wat in Cambodia and Fatehpur Sikri in India stand in stark evidence of that, monumental cities that were abandoned when their sources of water disappeared. However, since 1880, everything about the human condition had improved immensely, from food production to energy usage to health and life spans to recreational opportunities. So, what was the “catastrophe” that the UN officials were trying to avoid?
Anyone who follows the climate change issue knows that the facts we can observe for ourselves do not come close to justifying what the climate alarmists have claimed for almost 30 years now. Their projections have been wrong throughout, but they shamelessly come out with new ones at regular intervals, and the compliant legacy media reports the projections as if they have merit. After being wrong for some 30 years how can any hypothesis have merit? In real science a hypothesis that has no predictive value is null, which means the hypothesis is useless. The reason this is continuing is the growing influence of anti-capitalist political ideology, and the left-wing propaganda being spewed out by the legacy media, without any skepticism or interest in the facts.
Anyone familiar with serious modeling knows that models that are being developed are subjected to back tests, to see if they can simulate what we already know from measuring the same independent and dependent variables in the past. I seriously doubt any of the major climate models have been subjected to back tests, which would make them accountable to reality, which would defeat the purpose of keeping the hoax alive.
Why have so many scientists sold their souls to participate in such an endeavor to fool the world? In my opinion it was and is to make it possible to compete for scarce research grants. No one is interested in funding a hypothesis that shows that everything is fine. Create a hypothesis that can cause an alarm, and the money will come in from well-intentioned foundations to solve the problem identified. One would think after 30 years the sources would realize they are being scammed, but that is where the media build-ups, and cover-ups come into play. Nazi propaganda head, Joseph Goebbels, once said if you repeat a lie often enough it begins to sound like the truth.
Since the Kyoto Protocols in 1992 the “average global temperature” has risen by another miniscule 0.2 degrees Celsius, which makes the total increase since 1880 a whole one degree Celsius over 141 years now. The level of CO2 has also risen to 0.041% of the atmosphere, which makes the increase since the 0.028% in 1880 a whopping 46%. The human condition continues to improve, we have increasing vegetation from the increased CO2, and the weather events being attributed to global warming have all happened before, before any humans could be blamed.
When you read overheated news articles that claim “Global temperatures over the last five years have been the highest on record”, please note that these HIGHEST temperatures on record are ONE DEGREE CELSIUS HIGHER THAN IN 1880.
Which brings me to why I think all this has been going on now since 1992. The year before that, the old Soviet Union had split apart and with it went the ultimate dream of socialism, which was to dominate the world and destroy capitalism. When socialism crashed and burned, a group of socialists morphed into environmentalists to try again through the back door of environmentalism. Those who do not understand this will never understand what has been going on since. They picked CO2 as their villain because controlling it would allow them to control emissions, which then would allow them to control entire economies.
They had to exempt India, China and every less developed country because the goal was not to destroy them – the main proponents of capitalism were the western industrial countries, chiefly the USA. Thus, the USA became the primary target, and the other more left-leaning European countries can cheat on achieving what they agree to in the other agreements since the Kyoto Protocols, the most recent one being the Paris Accords.
President Trump’s business common sense had realized the Paris Accords made no sense if followed as prescribed. So, Trump pulled out and allowed the free market in the US to continue to reduce emissions far more than the actual signatories of the Paris Accords, without incurring its crippling costs. Now, the political ideologue, President Biden, who knows nothing about economics or business, having never worked in the private sector, and has no respect for capitalism as we can see from his first 60 days, has put the US back on the griddle. If he cannot be stopped the US will waste trillions, stifle the US economy, shred its energy independence, send gasoline prices through the roof, make transporting crude oil from its sources to the refineries more costly and risky, all without achieving anything. In a rare moment of candor, Biden’s Climate Czar, John Kerry, has already admitted (*3) that even if the US reduces its emissions to ZERO, there will be no effect on the climate, because of all the countries exempted from having their economies stifled by the Paris Accords.
Finally, we have two senior UN climate officials, one being Christiana Figueres, architect of the Paris Accords, the other being Ottmar Edenhofer, who admitted in articles published in Investors.com that their objective in the Paris Accords was not the condition of the environment, but to destroy capitalism.
At a news conference in Brussels (*4) in February 2015, Figueres said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,”
In March of 2016, Ottmar Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.said (*5), “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole. We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,”
In August 2019, Saikat Chakrabarti, the author of the Green New Deal, said (*6), “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. We really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy-thing.”
There we have it, from those who are organizing the hoax. It has nothing to do with the environment, and everything to do with destroying capitalism. That is the only objective that fits all the facts.
I plan to start worrying about Climate Change as an EXISTENTIAL THREAT when I hear that Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have started seeking higher ground from their expensive seafront estates. But, if we can’t find a way to stop the Biden administration from destroying our economy to “transform” it, using the hoax that Climate Change is an EXISTENTIAL THREAT, we will never get off the slippery slope we’re on that takes us towards an economy more like Venezuela.
We may end up giving the Democrats what they were seeking in 1861 – their own country to follow their own senseless future. Back then they wanted to preserve slavery, now they want to destroy capitalism. The red states should not compromise on such a choice. It may be better to have a smaller United States of America, made up of red states that would continue to follow our exceptional Constitution and principles of Economic Freedom, and a People’s Republic of American States of blue states that follow socialism, which will be more like Canada, and have the USA take care of their foreign affairs and national security.
Sources:
2. https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/climate-change-its-all-happened-before
3. https://nypost.com/2021/01/27/kerry-zero-emissions-wont-make-difference-in-climate-change/
4. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism/
Mario Goveia, an immigrant unleashed 