Climate the Movie
‘People are dying and entire ecosystems are collapsing and we are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth – how dare you!
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This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry.
STEVEN KOONIN
It’s a wonderful business opportunity – ok you want climate? we’ll give you climate
TONY HELLER
There’s a huge amount of money involved, this is a huge big money scam
JOHN CLAUSER
There are not just billions of dollars there are trillions of dollars at stake
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It’s a story of self-interest and big government funding.
ROY SPENCER
People like me, our careers depend on funding of climate research (pause) this is what I have been doing just about my whole career, this is what the other climate researchers are doing with their whole career, they don’t want this to end.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
If CO2 is not having the huge negative impacts that we claimed it was originally then how are we going to stay in business?
TONY HELLER
A lot of people’s livelihoods depend on it – they’re not going to give that up.
COMM
This is the story of the corruption of science.
PATRICK MOORE
There is no such thing as a climate emergency happening on this planet now – there’s no evidence of one.
WILLIAM HAPPER
The climate alarm is a nonsense you know…it’s a hoax, I’ve never liked hoax I think scam is a better word, but I’m willing to live with hoax.
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It’s a story about the bullying and intimidation of anyone who dares to challenge the climate alarm.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
To speak up against or about climate alarm in any sort of sceptical way was essentially career suicide.
BENNY PEISER
Activists are even calling for any scepticism to be criminalised.
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It’s the story of an assault on individual freedom.
WILLIAM HAPPER
It’s a wonderful way to increase government power, if there’s an existential threat out there worldwide well you need a powerful worldwide government you know to cope with it.
BENNY PEISER
We see all these authoritarian measures being adopted in the name of saving the planet.
WILLIAM HAPPER
You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world.
CLIMATE: THE MOVIE (The Cold Truth)
COMM
We called it industrial progress. Since the industrial revolution, the development of free market
capitalist mass production has made ever more goods, ever more affordable to ever larger numbers of people.
Mass production marched hand in hand with mass consumption. In the modern age, ordinary people enjoy a level of prosperity never before achieved in human history.
But all the while, we are told, we were destroying the planet. Computers have calculated what is in store for us, as we produce and consume ever more. The weather will get worse. The planet will boil.
We greedy humans must accept limits of our lifestyle. Consume less. Travel less. Those who deny the climate crisis are not just wrong, they’re dangerous, spreading the poison of doubt among a gullible population.
These deniers should be shunned and shamed and censored. For these climate deniers are flat-earthers. They are anti-science.
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Teaching at New York University is one of these climate deniers. Prof Steven Koonin is one of America’s leading physicists. He was a science adviser to President Obama, and both vice-president and provost of Caltech, one of the most prestigious scientific institutes in the world.
STEVEN KOONIN
I teach climate science to my students at NYU, and I always tell them to check the data or the papers yourself, and they all come out of that course with their eyes wide open.
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Prof Koonin’s best-selling book Unsettled, argues that mainstream scientific studies, accepted by official agencies, do not support the notion that there is any kind of climate crisis at all.
STEVEN KOONIN
Of course I’ve been called a denier and my response is tell me what I’m denying, because I’m quoting to you from directly from the official UN’s scientific reports.
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Dick Lindzen also dismisses the claims of climate alarmists. He’s one of the world’s leading meteorologists, was professor of meteorology at both Harvard University and MIT, and has served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
DICK LINDZEN
Even the intergovernmental panel on climate change if you go to their section on working one group one which is the science, they don’t support any of these claims and I assure you having served on them its biased. But you couldn’t get any real scientists to agree to some of the nonsense that’s being promoted.
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Will Happer, another denier, is another of America’s leading physicists. He has been a science advisor to three presidents, and professor of physics at both Columbia and Princeton University.
WILLIAM HAPPER
There’s this mischievous idea that scientific truth is determined by consensus, in real science there are always arguments, no science is ever settled, so its absurd when people say the science of climate is settled, there’s no such thing as settled science, especially climate.
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Dr John Clauser is one of the most respected scientists in the world. In 2022 he won the Nobel prize for physics.
JOHN CLAUSER
The Science is appalling bad in my opinion – there are a large number of scientists who are in violent disagreement, they refer to themselves as sceptics, since I am no longer worried about losing funding or a job or whatever, I call myself a climate change denier.
THE SCIENCE
Part 1: HISTORY OF THE EARTH
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We are told that current temperatures are unprecedented and dangerously high.
It’s possible to check if this is true, because we have evidence of earth’s climate history, dating back hundreds, thousands and even millions of years.
The desert of Judea, by the Dead Sea. Professor Nir Shaviv from the Racah Institute of Physics has come here, looking for clues. Thousands of years ago, this place was underwater, and
etched into the rocks are lines which, if you know how to read them, tell the story of earth’s climate history.
NIR SHAVIV
And here is the climate.
NIR SHAVIV
We’re at the lakebed of what used to be Lake Lissan. It’s a lake that existed until the end of the last ice age. Back then the lake level was maybe 100 metres above where we are located.
When we want to reconstruct the climate of the past, we have to look for evidence – for clues. And the lake existed it had deposits and by looking at these layers here, we can actually reconstruct how the climate has changed.
COMM
Warmer water means more life, the accumulation of more shells and bones from sea creatures, and other changes that are reflected in the ancient layers of the lake bed. The lines act as a kind of thermometer. And this is just one of the many ways geologists can reconstruct past climate.
NIR SHAVIV
In other places we can go to stalagmite caves and see the annual rings that we have in the stalagmites, or we can drill cores from the bottom of the ocean and look at layers there, or
many other places. But here I think this is one of the nicest places because you can actually see, you can actually see, how the climate has changed.
COMM
So, when we look back in time, what do we find?
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For 200 million years dinosaurs roamed the earth… An Earth marked by fertile dense forests, teeming with life. And at no time, during those 200 million years were temperatures as cold as they are today.
STEVEN KOONIN
If you go back maybe 200 million years it was maybe 13 degrees warmer than it is now. So, on a geological perspective, this is not at all unprecedented.
COMM
For the last 500 million years, temperatures have varied greatly, but for almost all that time, the earth was much, much warmer than today. Compared to the last half billion years, the earth right now is exceptionally cold.
In fact, there are very few times when it’s been this cold.
STEVEN KOONIN
We’re relatively cold. Maybe not quite the coldest it’s been in 500 million years, but pretty close to it.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
We are in a remarkably cool period if we look over the last 550 million years. In fact, only one other time period in that last 550 million years was the temperature as cool as it is now.
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The mammals who now inhabit the earth began to evolve around 60 million years ago, when the world was much warmer than today.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
If we just look at the last 65 million years – so this is after the dinosaurs go extinct, mammals really start taking over, and our evolutionary ancestors start to live on the land. Any time period within the last 65 million years was warmer than it is essentially today.
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The earth’s mammals, humans included, appear to thrive when it’s warm – warmer than it is now.
PATRICK MOORE
There’s no doubt that warm is better than cold in geological history. We are a tropical species A human being in the shade naked dies at 20C. From hypothermia.
We evolved on the equator in Africa, and the only reason we were able to get out of there eventually was fire, shelter, and clothing.
COMM
Over the last fifty million years, temperatures steadily declined, plunging the earth into what geologists call the late Cenozoic ice age. We are still in that ice age.
PATRICK MOORE
The reason there’s all that ice around the poles is because we’re in an ice age. Everybody knows that who knows anything about the history of the earth. This is an ice age. We’re at the tail end of a fifty million year cooling period, and they’re saying it’s too hot.
COMM
If we zoom in on the past few million years, we see temperatures sinking, and as they do fluctuating between extremely cold periods and slightly milder periods.
The extremely cold periods are called glacial maxima, when the planet is mostly covered in ice.
And the slightly less cold are called glacial minima, when there’s just ice at the poles.
For the past ten thousand years, fortunately, we’ve been in a slightly less cold glacial minimum, known as the Holocene.
With milder weather humans began to emerge from their caves and, several thousand years ago, we see the rise of the first great civilisations, in a blissful period which, according to many studies, was considerably warmer than today. This is known as Holocene climate optimum.
STEVEN KOONIN
It was called an optimum because people thought that warmer was better.
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Since then, temperatures have declined and begun to fluctuate. In Roman times there was a blissfully warm period. Followed by a brutal cold period in the dark Ages. Then came the balmy Medieval Warm period, according to many studies as warm or warmer than today.
Followed by an especially cold period known as the Little Ice Age, possibly the coldest in the last 10,000 years.
And here it is, the Roman warm period, the cold dark age, the medieval warm period, and then the very cold little ice age, from which – for the past 300 years or so – we’ve been recovering.
COMM
The longest instrumental record of temperature in the world, comes from central England.
And this is what it shows. Since the worst of the Little Ice Age, from 1650, the temperature has risen, gently, by little more than 1 degree celsius.
WILL HAPPER
The central England record of temperature is a world treasure. It’s the longest continuous record that we have. And it’s certainly not a very alarming record. It began in the depths of
the little ice age, and so you can see the slight warming that followed the little ice age there is certainly nothing very alarming happening today at the very end of the record. Most of the warming that we’re observing today is from recovery from the little ice age, whatever caused that.
DICK LINDZEN
Well, you know, we’re talking about over the entire industrial period, of about 1 degree centigrade.
COMM
To put this in 1 degree in perspective, let’s look at New York Central Park.
Records show that there has been no overall change in temperature here since 1940.
But, from one year to the next, the average temperature can vary by 3 degrees celsius without many New Yorkers even noticing.
In fact between the warmest year in the 1960s and the coolest in 2000, there’s a difference of 5 degrees celsius.
STEVEN KOONIN
The average temperature on this day could be five degrees different to the average temperature on this day a year ago, or 2 years ago.
WILL HAPPER
You know, when I hear people pontificating about 1 and a half degrees leading to the end of civilisation I just think they’ve been smoking. You know, are you crazy?
COMM
According to thermometer readings since 1880, there’s been a very mild increase in temperature. Only by stretching the Y-axis on this graph, is the increase noticeable.
This is the rising line, used by official agencies as proof of global warming. But is it accurate?
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Professor Ross McKitrick, is an expert in statistical analysis at Guelph University. He noticed something odd about modern thermometer records. Thermometers, even in the same region, give out very different readings, depending on where they’re located.
ROSS MCKITRICK
I was interested in the question of how you explain the spatial pattern of warming. Some places warm a lot and some places don’t warm much. And it turns out that it’s highly correlated with the spatial pattern of economic activity.
COMM
Where there are more people and there is more human activity, there’s more heat. This is known as the Urban Heat Island effect.
WILLIE SOON
Urban Heat Island effect is essentially London – pick London – with buildings, with lots of activity, buildings, tends to be a few degrees – we’re talking about celsius right – four or five degrees warmer than outskirts. This is the phenomenon of urbanisation.
The biggest obvious thing is concrete retaining heat.
COMM
This can be illustrated with a satellite heat map of Paris. The centre of Paris can be as much as 5 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside.
WILLIE SOON
Paris, London Beijing, Shanghai – you name it – New Delhi, all of them, absolutely demonstrated that effect.
COMM
So how has this affected the official temperature record? In the early part of the 20th century, it was normal to erect weather thermometers just outside towns … Close enough to check every day, but away from the heat of urban life.
But over the 20th century those towns have expanded. Suburbs have spread. There are more roads, more cars. Thermometers which were once OUTSIDE towns, are now surrounded by shopping malls, offices, factories and houses.
ROY SPENCER
These towns and all the locations where these thermometers are located, on average they’ve all grown in population, since 1880.
You’ve got buildings growing up around the thermometers you’ve got parking lots – so you’ve got all of these non-climate influences which are affecting the temperatures, which raises questions about the quality of the thermometer data for monitoring global warming.
COMM
To correct for this corruption of the data, an obvious solution is to use only records from rural weather stations, which have been less affected by urban development. This has now been done by a team led by Dr Willie Soon.
WILLIE SOON
We combine all the best rural stations anything we can collect from we collect. And we show, if you don’t use this set and use only rural you get a very different kind of picture.
COMM
According to rural temperature records temperatures rose from the 1880s but peaked in the 1940s. Then there was a marked cooling until the 1970s. After that temperatures recover, but are still, today, barely higher than they were in the 1940s.
WILLIE SOON
What we see is that basically we have a warming from 1900’s or so to the 1930s and 40s, and then it cooled in a substantial way to the 70s, 76 or so, instead of a long-term systematic warming trend, it has a variability. Every 50 – 60 years or so. Kind of a variation.
COMM
It’s not just rural thermometers that show little warming. Merchant ships and other naval vessels have been measuring the temperature of the sea since the 19th century.
In red we see the land temperature record since the 1860s, which has been inflated by urban thermometers.
But in blue is the ocean temperature record. From around 1900, the two begin to diverge.
Ocean records show far less warming in the 20th century and the pattern more closely resembles the rural temperature record.
WILLIE SOON
Sea is not meant to be contaminated by the urban heat island effect, am I right? Yes? So, when we compare the two records, within the range of uncertainty this behaviour actually fits.
COMM
Scientists have also studied temperature change by looking at tree rings, which again shows very little warming. There’s a gentle rise till the mid 20th century, a cooling to the 1970s, followed by a mild recovery. Once again it shows temperatures today are barely different to those of the 1930s and 40s, and the pattern closely resembles rural temperatures.
COMM
Satellites too seem to telling a different story. Our ability to measure global temperature accurately took a leap forward when satellites began to orbit the earth.
One of the scientists who pioneered the use of satellites to measure temperature is Dr Roy Spencer, who in the 1980s was senior scientist for climate at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
ROY SPENCER
We were discussing over lunch, isn’t there some way we can use satellites to monitor global temperatures, because as you know the temperature network of thermometers is pretty skimpy around the world. So it’s kind of hard to get a global temperature.
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Dr Spencer’s development of weather satellites was revolutionary. He and his colleague Prof John Christy have been awarded NASA’s medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
ROY SPENCER
Our satellite data begins in January of 1979 – that’s when we have complete global coverage – and we have it right up to the present.
COMM
There was one critical question about temperature that satellites were singularly well equipped to answer.
ROY SPENCER
Has there been a spurious warming that has crept into the global warming temperature records over land that’s just a result of an increase in population And that’s something that we’ve been analysing and working a lot on lately. We’re finding that especially in urban areas, er, its large, since 1980 most of the warming it looks like is due to the Urban Heat Island Effect.
WILL HAPPER
We’re lucky to have a few independent scientists like John Christie and Roy Spencer with their satellite measurements of temperature. Before they started releasing this, the ground
base temperature records were going wild. They were going up crazy with no bounds. But now they have to contend with the fact that there’s this independent and probably better way of measuring the whole globes temperature. Which is not alarming at all.
COMM
Evidence from multiple sources now agree that the official global temperature record, as used by world governments and reported in the world’s media, is showing far too much warming over the last hundred and twenty years, artificially inflated by urbanisation.
ROSS MCKITRICK
You look at the weather balloon records the satellite records, the rural records, the ocean records don’t warm nearly as much as land. All these indications show that the big warming
pulse in the records is the northern hemisphere land record, and that’s also where most of the data contamination is happening.
COMM
But of the mild warming that has taken place in the past 3-400 years, can any of it be attributed human emissions of CO2?
The Science
Part 2: CO2
COMM:
Professor Henrik Svensmark is visiting the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and taking a stroll in the evolution garden, dedicated to preserving the oldest surviving plant species on earth.
These plants aren’t just pleasing on the eye. They can also tell us about levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in earth’s geological past.
HENRIK SVENSMARK
What we have here is a ginkgo tree, and it is actually a living fossil, in the sense that this type of tree first appeared about 270 million years ago.
On the underside of the leaf there are what we call stomata, which are the cells that can uptake CO2. So, they’re actually measuring how much CO2 is in the air, and they adjust the number of the stomata to how much CO2 there is.
And by looking at fossils and by measuring how many there are at a different time it says something about what was the level of CO2 back in time.
COMM
So, when we look back in time, what do we find? Over almost all of the last 500 million years, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been far higher than it is now.
Even with modern industry’s contribution to CO2 levels, by geological standards, the level of atmospheric CO2 today is close to being as low as it has ever been.
HENRIK SVENSMARK
We know, for instance, that the CO2 levels were much higher than we have today. At present we have about 400 parts per million. 500 million years ago, it might have been 2,000 parts per million. So a much, much higher concentration of CO2.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
I think current estimates of global CO2 is 423 parts per million today. If we look through the Phanerozoic, the last 550 million years, we would see CO2 on the order of 7,000 ppm.
COMM
CO2 is plant-food, and the result of much higher levels of atmospheric CO2 in the past, was a much, much greener world.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
periods of elevated CO2 tend to be time periods of huge biodiversity on the planet. In fact, we are in a CO2 famine if we look over the last 550 million years.
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At the depths of the most recent glacial maximum, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere sank so low, all life on earth came close to extinction.
TOM NELSON
They say C02 is higher than its been for a hundred thousand years What they don’t tell you in that period we’re talking about is that C02 sank so low that all life on earth nearly died.
PATRICK MOORE
20 thousand years ago, CO2 is at the lowest level it as ever been in the history of the earth. 180 parts per million. If it had gone down another 30 parts per million, we’d all be Dead.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
There is a low point of CO2 where photosynthesis becomes so inefficient that plant life would die. Then everything else starts to perish after that.
WILL HAPPER
During the last glacial maximum, there’s good evidence that in many parts of the world there was plant starvation from not enough CO2. So, we should be very grateful that CO2 levels
are beginning to go back up, we are still far from the historical norm which would be several thousand parts to the million, there’s not enough fossil fuel to get there but at least we’re making a start.
COMM
But has the small recent increase in CO2 affected the temperature? We would now show you a picture of CO2, but we can’t, because it’s invisible. CO2 makes up a tiny fraction of the gases in the atmosphere, just 0.04 of a percent. It is just one of 25 different greenhouse gases, which taken as a whole, form only one part of earth’s complex climate system.
So what evidence is there that this trace gas is having any noticeable impact on the climate?
COMM
If it were true that higher levels of CO2 caused higher temperatures, we should be able to see it in Earth’s climate history.
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Here scientists are drilling into ancient ice cores. These cores tell us both about past temperatures and CO2 levels. Scientists have indeed found a link between temperature and CO2. The trouble is, it’s the wrong way round.
WILL HAPPER
It’s true, over the last few million years of the ice age that we’re in now, that CO2 and temperature are correlate but if CO2 is the driver, it has to change first, and the temperature has to change second.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
In fact, when you start to look at the data very specifically you see the exact reverse. temperature starts to rise first, and then on the order of a century, two centuries later, we start to see a rise in CO2.
ROSS MCKITRICK
It’s long been known that the temperature actually moves first. So, temperature goes up, CO2 goes up after that. Temperature goes down, CO2 goes down.
TONY HELLER
Ice ages start when CO2 is at its maximum, and ice ages end when CO2 is at its minimum. The exact opposite of what would occur if carbon dioxide was controlling the temperature.
TOM NELSON
The question is does CO2 drive the temperature is easily resolved, you can look back in time over hundreds of millions of years and sea levels have changed radically many times.
Did this cause temperature change? No. Absolutely not. CO2 has never driven temperature change in the past. Never.
COMM
Nor is it clear in recent times that CO2 is having any effect on temperature.
Here we see industrial output of CO2 since 1750. From the mid 19th century to the mid-20th century there only was a slight increase.
It’s not until the 1940s that industrial production of CO2 begins to take off. But this doesn’t match the temperature record. According to rural thermometers, most of the warming in the past 200 years, occurred before the 1940s and have barely changed since then.
STEVE KOONIN
One of the embarrassments that the IPCC doesn’t like to talk about, was that the 1930s, when human influences were much smaller, were particularly warm.
WILLIE SOON
That’s the puzzle, the first early part where we have such sharp warming, from 1900 to 1930s and 1940s – the CO2 could never cause that temperature rise.
COMM
That the 1930s and early 40s were so hot, was puzzling. More puzzling still was what happened next.
WILL HAPPER
By the end of World War 2, CO2 was really going up. And yet, the temperature was going down.
WILLIE SOON
From 40 to 70, while CO2 continued to rise, this thing started to cool. What happened?
PATRICK MOORE
Journalists were writing about the coming ice age. It was on the cover of Time Magazine.
TONY HELLER
The 1970s was the new ice age, that was the big story.
COMM
And how about since the 1970s? According to computer climate models, over the past half century, rising CO2 should have led to this increase in temperature. But according to multiple satellite and balloon measurements, what actually happened was this …
ROY SPENCER
What we’ve found from the satellite data is that the global atmosphere is not warming up as fast as the climate models say it should be. There are a couple dozen climate models now that have been worked on for decades, billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars have been invested in these climate models, and we find that generally speaking virtually all of the climate models produce too much warming over this period, since 1979 up to the present.
Now even if we say that surface thermometers are correct, they still don’t produce as much warming as most of the climate models say there should have been in the last fifty years.
STEVEN KOONIN
The models individually, and even collectively when you average all of them in so called ensembles, they don’t get it right.
WILL HAPPER
You can already see that the main support of the climate alarm movement, these enormous computer models, they’re clearly wrong. They don’t agree with what we observe. They’re all
running much too hot. They don’t get the geographical distribution of temperatures anywhere close. they don’t get El Niño, La Niña cycles. They’re just nonsense.
COMM
All climate models are based on the assumption that CO2 drives temperature change.
But actual observations and historical evidence clearly suggest that it doesn’t.
JOHN CLAUSER
Yes, I assert that there is no connection whatsoever between CO2 and climate change. That’s all a crock of crap in my opinion.
PATRICK MOORE
There is no truth to the idea that the earth is warming now than it has been in the past. It’s a lie. There is no truth that CO2 is higher than it should be. That is a lie.
COMM
Earth’s climate has changed many times over the course of its long history, and will continue to change, without any help from us.
WILL HAPPER
Climate always changes, you know? Who denies climate change – it’s always changing?
COMM
But if CO2 doesn’t drive climate change, what does?
Natural Climate Change
Part 1 – Clouds
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In Earth’s atmosphere there are powerful forces at work, and perhaps the most powerful of all are clouds.
JOHN CLAUSER
CO2 is quite unimportant in controlling the Earth’s climate. What is important is clouds.
Clouds don’t absorb any energy at all, they simply reflect all the sunlight back out into space. Big bright white clouds and they vary dramatically from one day to the next. That is hundreds of times more powerful than the trivial effects of CO2.
COMM
But what controls the number and density of clouds on earth? Professor Henrik Svensmark, from the Danish National Space Institute is in Jerusalem, with the astrophysicist Nir Shaviv.
Together they’ve been exploring cloud variation and its effect on climate. And, strangely they’ve found a link between clouds, and exploding supernovae, far off in our galaxy.
HENRIK SVENSMARK
When we have big stars, they don’t live very long, relatively only a few million years up to 40 million years but they end their life in a huge explosion which we call a supernova.
COMM
Exploding supernova send out vast quantities of debris … tiny charged subatomic particles known as cosmic rays … travelling almost at the speed of light.
And as they hit earth, they develop into seeds which attract water vapour, and form clouds.
COMM
Professor Shaviv noticed that the amount of cloud cover on Earth is related to our journey round the Milky Way. As our solar system orbits the galaxy, over millions of years, it passes through the galaxy’s spiral arms – dense clusters of stars.
As it does, we are exposed to more or less cloud-forming cosmic rays, and this corresponds to historic temperature changes on earth.
NIR SHAVIV
The really mind-boggling thing is that using geology, You can reconstruct the climate on earth over the past billion years. And you can reconstruct our galactic journey. Both tell the same story.
COMM
But what about temperature change on shorter time scales?
The sun – our source of heat and light … a seething mass of gigantic magnetic storms, which vary in strength and number over time, and which affect earth directly and indirectly. When it is very active the sun sends giant gusts of solar wind through the solar system.
This solar wind warms us indirectly, by acting as a barrier, limiting the number of cloud-forming cosmic rays reaching earth.
HENRIK SVENSMARK
Sun, we have the solar wind it carries this sort of magnetic field out to a large distance and it works like a shield against cosmic rays.
NIR SHAVIV
When the sun is more active you have a stronger solar wind, you have less cosmic rays ageing the inner solar system and ageing the atmosphere and the clouds which are then formed
are less white they reflect less of the sunlight, which means that it’s going to be warmer here on Earth.
COMM
Here is a proxy reconstruction of ocean temperatures over thousands of years.
And here is one of solar activity over the same period. What is causing the ocean temperature to change is clearly variations in solar activity.
WILLIE SOON
Because IPCC is determined to go on a narrative that only CO2 can drive the climate system, they turn off the sun essentially. The sun is just a background thing for them. It doesn’t do anything.
COMM
Astrophysicist Willie Soon decided to look again at the rural temperature record for the past 150 years. Then he looked at a record of changes in solar activity over the same period.
To Dr Soon, it was obvious that it was the sun, not CO2, that was driving temperature.
WILLIE SOON
As off 2023, IPPC says this, that the sun has absolutely zero chances to explain the changes of the climate system, on a broad scale, let’s say global warming in the northern hemisphere.
We say no! We can easily demonstrate it. All of it. There is zero for the CO2, 100% for the sun. How about that?
The Science
Part 4 EXTREME WEATHER
COMM
Why are these and other studies never reported in the mainstream media? And if climate change is natural, what are to make of the alleged terrifying increase in extreme weather events? Of the heatwaves and hurricanes, the forest-fires, droughts and all the rest.
STEVEN KOONIN
So, my first instinct as a scientist, and what I teach my students is, well let’s look at the data. And when you do that, you discover as you can read in the IPPC reports themselves that it’s pretty hard to find trends in extreme events much less attribute them to human influences.
ROSS MCKITRICK
You’ve now had decades of putting the idea in people’s heads that any time the weather is bad, it’s climate change and greenhouse gases. I think people at this point can’t help themselves.
If there’s a heatwave, immediately everyone is thinking ‘oh, what have we done to the weather?’
STEVEN KOONIN
If somebody says on the news, well this is the warmest day since 1980 or something well you can look up the temperature records, and see for yourself whether it was warmer in the 1930s, as it often is.
COMM
U.S. temperature records are the best in the world, and here is the official U.S. government record of heatwaves in the U.S. over the past century. It shows very clearly that the 1930s were far more prone to heatwaves than we are today.
Not only were there more heatwaves in the 1930s, the heatwaves then were much hotter than those of today. Likewise official figures show that the number of hot days in the US has markedly declined.
TONY HELLER
The United States was much hotter in the 1930s. North Dakota reached 121 degrees F. South Dakota was 120 degrees F. Wisconsin was 114 degrees F. These sort of temperatures are just completely out of range of anything people experience now.
COMM
A common mistake is to suppose that higher average temperature will mean more hot weather.
But this isn’t true. Here again is the Central England Temperature Record, the longest instrumental temperature record in the world. Summer temperatures, over the past 3-400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age, have barely changed at all.
It is winter temperatures that have been slightly rising. The earth’s climate has not been getting hotter, it’s been getting milder.
WILL HAPPER
And that’s certainly being observed all over the world, if you look at temperature records the high temperatures are almost unchanged. But cold temperatures at night, or during the
winter, are going up a little bit. Not very much, but you can measure it.
STEVEN KOONIN
When the average goes up it’s really more due to the coldest temperatures getting warmer.
So the temperature’s getting milder rather than getting hotter.
COMM
What about the increasing number of wildfires we’re often told about?
STEVEN KOONIN
If you look at the actual number of forest fires from satellite observations, the actual number is going down.
COMM
Here is an estimate of global wild-fires since 1900. It shows a clear decline. And here is a record of areas affected by wildfires in the US. It shows that wildfires were far worse in the 1930s.
WILLIE SOON
From the 1930s and 1920s, when you have data, the thing was huge. Five to ten times bigger than the current level.
COMM
How about hurricanes? The US has by far the best record of hurricane activity in the world. Over the past 120 years, there is no overall change. In fact, the trend is slightly down.
KOONIN
When you [look at the data] for hurricanes, technically tropical cyclones, you see there is no long-term trend.
COMM
How about the rest of the world? Here is a chart of global hurricane activity over the past 40 years.
WILL HAPPER
Hurricanes have been around forever, you know. We’ve got good proxy records of hurricanes and there’s been no change in their frequency, even the IPPC admits that.
COMM
How about melting ice-caps and drought? Here’s a satellite record of temperature in Antarctica since the late 1970s. It shows no increase whatsoever.
And here is a record of global drought since 1950. There is no observable increase at all.
Polar Bears are meant to be going extinct, but studies suggest their numbers are growing.
The Great Barrier reef too, but it recently reached record levels.
PATRICK MOORE
There is no such thing as a climate emergency happening on this planet now. There is no evidence of one.
TONY HELLER
Yeah, the extreme weather story is just absurd. There’s no basis to it at all. It’s just based on propaganda. The actual data shows the opposite.
KOONIN
I’ve shown you the official data, the official science, tell me what I’m denying.
WILL HAPPER
The Climate alarm is nonsense it’s a hoax, I’ve never liked hoax, I think scam is better word but I am willing to live with the hoax.
COMM
But why are we told, again and again, that man-made climate chaos is an undisputed scientific fact? Beyond question. Beyond doubt. To answer this, we must examine the so-called consensus on climate change.
THE CONSENSUS
PART 1 – FUNDING
COMM
Until the late 1980s global warming was little more than an eccentric scare story put about by radical environmentalists. But then the cause was picked by an ambitious young senator Al Gore, who would soon be vice-president.
A billion dollars a year of public money was made available for research into climate change. This quickly rose to 2 billion. (up-sync)
Academic researchers in various disciplines, began to apply for this climate funding.
STEVEN KOONIN
If you want to qualify for money that’s labelled climate, you take whatever it is you’re doing and add a little bit of climate speak to it, and away you go.
DICK LINDZEN
You’re dealing with the sexual habits of cockroaches, and you’ll add the impact of climate.
ROSS MCKITRICK
All I have to do is add a little wrinkle to my grant application to explain how ‘well I’m worried that climate change will mean the death of all the maple trees’, and right away you qualify for funding.
COMM
Academics of every kind lined up for climate funding. Climate became an exciting new area of interest for sociologists, biologists, Professors of English literature, lecturers in gender studies, and many more.
DICK LINDZEN
And it also served to create a community. You’ve become a climate scientist now. Even though you know nothing about the physics of climate.
COMM
Thousands of papers were published … on climate change and prostitution, climate change and beer, climate change and the black death, climate change and disability, climate change and video games, and everything else imaginable.
ROSS MCKITRICK
So there’s an almost comical list of studies out there. Just do a google search on ‘Climate Change AND..’ and everything comes up.
COMM
Few of these papers ever questioned whether climate change was actually true.
STEVE KOONIN
After you’ve done the research and you write the paper up, sometimes you find there’s no affect at all from climate. But you still have to say in your papers, oh yes climate change is
real and we just need to study this some more.
COMM
Since so few of these so-called ‘climate studies’ challenged the idea of climate change, it was declared that there was a scientific consensus. Climate change must be true.
Climate also became a new focus for government-funded research bodies.
JOHN CLAUSER
Scientific research in the United States tends to be dominantly funded by government grants. And so whatever government grants are offered sort of determines much of the science being done.
COMM
It was during the war and Cold War that many government research bodies were set up.
But the Cold War is over, and pressure on government spending has left many of them struggling to justify their continued funding.
ROY SPENCER
The United States Congress only funds problems. Research into problems. Whether it’s money that goes to NASA, NOAA, or the National Science Foundation, or Department of Energy, or any other alphabet soup organisation.
WILL HAPPER
It’s always been a problem to support your research, your existence, your raison d’etre, and so Climate was a godsend.
ROY SPENCER
if Congress is willing to pay you to find evidence of global warming, by golly, as a scientist, we’re going to find evidence of it. Because that’s what we are being paid to do. And guess what, if you don’t find evidence or say the evidence suggests it’s not a problem, your funding ends.
This totally corrupts the way we look at the science.
JOHN CLAUSER
Who was the famous gangster who was asked, ‘why do you rob banks?’ And he responded, ‘because that’s where the money is!’
COMM
The climate alarm brought funds. And the bigger the supposed threat, the more funds seemed to flow. The publicly funded science establishment now had a direct financial interest in playing up the alarm.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
There’s a huge incentive to over exaggerate or to speak in hyperbole. Even if the data doesn’t support exactly what you’re saying. Because that’s what brings the funds.
I was in that boat. I was someone who was defending climate change as a grad student quite a bit, because the truth is, I didn’t give it too much thought, but I thought well it’s getting a ton of attention, it’s bringing a ton of money into the Earth Sciences, even if I don’t buy all the hyperbole, what’s the problem?
COMM
By the late 1990s, what had started as an environmental scare story was gaining momentum.
THE CLIMATE BANDWAGON
COMM
Western governments and their senior civil servants were more than willing to address the climate problem. Green taxes were levied, green regulation expanded, and this, in turn, generated more climate-related jobs and activity.
ROSS MCKITRICK
Take the banking sector for instance. Say to a banker, we want you to file reports to the regulatory commission on how climate change is going to affect your bank. Well, a banker doesn’t know anything about the subject, so then they have to commission studies from academics, and of course the academics are happy to come and tell them ‘It’s going be terrible for your bank, it’s going to cause all kinds of problems, you need to give us money to research this.’
COMM
Green subsidies and regulation meant there was now money to be made in climate.
Renewables firms sprouted, Consultancy firms offered advice on what they called sustainability and climate compliance.
STEVEN KOONIN
It’s a wonderful business opportunity. You want climate? We’ll give you climate.
COMM
The renewables industry alone now turns over a trillion dollars a year and that’s expected to double in the next few years.
JOHN CLAUSER
What used to be a cottage industry has now blossomed to become a major part of the world economy.
COMM
The growth of this climate industry has seen an explosion of highly-paid green jobs … chief sustainability officers, carbon offset advisers, ESG consultants, climate compliance lawyers and countless others.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
Students started to come into our departments, our earth science departments, with a focus on climate. That never happened before.
But they started to look at their career prospects, and they’re smart, and they’re looking at who’s hiring, and the fact of the matter is everything in the hiring pool had climate somewhere attached to the name.
ROSS MCKITRICK
I started a few years ago seeing programmes like a master’s degree in climate finance. And I just went what on earth is climate finance? I can understand what a master’s degree in finance is.
Well now you need a university that’s going to teach this programme you need ‘professors’ of climate finance.
BENNY PEISER
Every single school or university or business will have a climate officer or climate officers and a climate programme. You look at any of these institutions or businesses and you’ll find they are all signed up to it. And anyone who hasn’t signed up will come under pressure.
COMM
At the last gathering of the publicly-funded UN’s IPCC, 70,000 delegates flew in from around the world. Government bureaucrats, Green NGOs, carbon sequestration consultants, environmental journalists, heads of renewables companies.
And yet the 70,000 people here are just the tip of a climate industry iceberg.
ROSS MCKITRICK
You start building this enormous population, whose job is to manage the crisis. And also, explicitly, to make sure people are alarmed about the crisis, because the whole industry depends on the existence of the crisis.
COMM
But therein lies the one great threat to this multi-trillion dollar industry.
All of the jobs, all of the funding are totally dependent on there being a climate crisis.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
If CO2 isn’t having the huge negative impacts that we claimed it was having originally, how’re we going to stay in business? How do we justify our existence if climate change isn’t this existential threat that we claimed it was over the last four decades or so?
ROY SPENCER
People like me, our careers depend on funding of climate research. This is what I’ve been doing just about my whole career, this is what the other climate researchers have been doing with their whole careers. They don’t want this to end.
TONY HELLER
If NASA said global warming is not a problem, then their funding disappears, right? So, they can’t say that. I mean, you’ve got the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. If they said the climate isn’t changing, they’d have no reason to exist.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
The IPPC has a self-preservation instinct to show that climate change is an existential threat, otherwise there is no reason for them to be collecting the money and doing the work in the first place.
JOHN CLAUSER
I mean there are not now just billions, but trillions of dollars at stake.
TONY HELLER
There’s a huge amount of money involved. This is a huge big money scam. A lot of people’s livelihoods depend on it. They’re not going to give that up.
STEVEN KOONIN
If suddenly the notion becomes apparent that this is not such a problem, you’re going to see that as an existential threat.
COMM
Scientists who studied the natural causes of climate change began to be viewed with suspicion, as two Harvard astrophysicists discovered.
WILLIE SOON
How much does the sun change? How does it change? Why does it change? We didn’t even want to get into the temperature record. But immediately they would come after us, because when we started to estimate that the sun changed quite significantly in terms of climate, immediately the attack is there, because it’s not following the narrative.
Because they need CO2 to be the only one, the only dominant player.
SALLIE BALIUNAS
When you tried to say, we were just looking for the background of natural variability, the response would be ‘we can’t have natural changes as an effect. It has to be human caused.’
Some of that was directly stated, but most of it was indirect. Your funding for this kind of project will be dropped. This kind of project doesn’t go anywhere.
RICHARD LINDZEN
By that time, anything that contradicted the narrative of global warming as a serious problem was not going to get funded.
COMM
Editors of academic journals came under pressure not to accept papers which were deemed to be sceptical of the climate crisis.
RICHARD LINDZEN
We will not publish anything that questions this. It’s not something surreptitious.
COMM
Scientists who dared to point out in public that there was no climate chaos, began to be side-lined and shunned.
ROSS MCKITRICK
If a scientifically qualified person stands up and says, ‘we don’t see an upward trend in the data on pacific typhoons’, suddenly they lose standing to address the topic of pacific typhoons. Not because what they said was wrong, but because it’s off message.
They can marginalise any kind of criticism of the narrative by saying ‘you’re not qualified to talk about this, because you don’t support the narrative.’ And then having marginalised everyone who doesn’t support the narrative, they can then turn around and say ‘well, everyone who counts supports the narrative so it must be right.’
COMM
Environmental journalists ignored sceptics and instead offered headlines to anyone prepared to make the most outrageous claims and predictions about a climate apocalypse.
ROY SPENCER
It’s gotten to where it’s got nothing to do with the science anymore. It doesn’t matter if your alarmist prediction doesn’t come true, you’re still going to retain your status as an expert and the media is still going to come and ask for your opinion even though you were crazy wrong about your predictions.
COMM
But the consensus on climate is not only enforced by those in the climate industry.
To explain the broader appeal of the climate alarm, we must look at the politics behind climate.
The Politics of Climate
COMM
From the start, the climate scare was political. It came the environmental movement … the sworn enemy of free-market industrial capitalism.
BENNY PEISER
Finally, we’ve got them. We can claim that it is the free markets that are destroying the planet… We need big government to save us.
COMM
The climate problem, it is said, stems from the irresponsible actions of greedy, feckless individuals, who have too many babies and drive too much and consume too many products.
And of the capitalist corporations who pander to their whims.
The solution is for government to have greater power to regulate private companies, but also to guide and reshape the lives and habits of individuals.
ROSS MCKITRICK
Policy agenda has sprawled into micromanaging everybody’s lives on the most minute detail. What kind of stove you can use, what kind of heater you can have, how much you can set the thermostat at, where you can drive, what kind of car; according to the planners we’re not going to have internal combustion engines an hour from now.
ROY SPENCER
All of these things require the government to get involved, because the government has to sort of force changes upon the public. If it was up to the public, we wouldn’t be buying electric vehicles because they’re impractical.
COMM
Support for the climate alarm has been virtually synonymous with disdain for free-market capitalism, and a craving for bigger government.
ROY SPENCER
It’s basically liberals versus conservatives in the United States. Generally speaking, liberals are concerned that we’re destroying the planet, and they’re also for big government.
Conservatives are at the other end of the spectrum, they don’t believe we’re destroying the planet, and they don’t want the government involved in their personal lives.
COMM
Paying lip service to the climate alarm has become almost universal among those who depend on government for their livelihoods.
This includes those in the publicly-funded education, arts and science establishments. Tony Heller recalls his time at Los Alamos labs.
TONY HELLER
The entire county of Los Alamos was kept going by government money. We had the highest incomes in the state. So naturally the who people lived in Los Alamos supported big government because that is where their livelihood came from.
That is where their good schools came from. Everything good in Los Alamos came from the government, so of course they were all big believers in big government.
COMM
Among the largely publicly-funded Western intelligentsia, support for more government spending and regulation, is almost a defining moral badge.
In these circles, to question the climate alarm is socially unacceptable. To be a climate sceptic is taboo.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
Somebody that goes against it really does get met with a lot of anger and vitriol… you’re called a denier a science denier, a heretic.
STEVEN KOONIN
Your colleagues won’t engage with you. You don’t get invited to conferences. Your students may desert you. This is all really terrible
COMM
Professors Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv describe what happened when they published their results on the climatic effects of solar activity.
HENRIK SVENSMARK
it was like all hell had broken loose because of this work. I had no idea things would escalate as it did. It completely changed my life.
NIR SHAVIV
Once we said that, people didn’t like hearing it. We became persona non grata.
HENRIK SVENSMARK
I mean I have so many instances of people doing really nasty things. When I applied for a job, a group of scientists wrote to the university and saying they shouldn’t hire me. And that is a typical story, unfortunately.
NIR SHAVIV
If you don’t agree with the standard polemic, you become an outcast. You’re shunned. As if you have leprosy.
COMM
For Professor Sallie Baliunas, the personal attacks became too much.
SALLIE BALIUNAS
I retired early. And my family said I should’ve retired even sooner, years sooner, they noticed the toll it took on them, and me.
COMM
Dr Matthew Wielicki was an assistant professor of Geology at the University of Alabama, when he decided to speak out about the climate scare … As a result of the backlash, he has decided to leave teaching.
MATHEW WIELICKI
To speak up about climate change in any type of sceptical way was essentially career suicide. There was no way that I would publish in any of the mainstream journals that I was required to publish in. I essentially isolated myself from many of the funding institutions.
This is one of the reasons you can build a consensus in a community, because anyone who is sceptical of the consensus essentially gets kicked out of the community.
STEVEN KOONIN
Speaking out in scientific ways that go contrary to the consensus I would say is a career killer for people at the early stages of their career.
WILL HAPPER
If I was 30 years old in a university trying to make a career, I would certainly keep my mouth shut. And, in fact, I went to some effort to keep my mouth shut when I was younger. I knew climate was nonsense then, but I was a little bit careful.
DICK LINDZEN
If a young person is questioning this, they can’t put it in a proposal. The proposal will be denied. And they can’t effectively publish because the gatekeeper will keep them out. And so, it would end their career.
TONY HELLER
You have to go along with the global warming story. If you don’t you’re going to get cut off, you’re going to lose funding, you’re going to have your career ruined, you’re going to be trashed by the community, you’re going to be despised by your co-workers.
COMM
The so-called consensus on climate has itself become a weapon, a form of bullying, intimidation and censorship, used against those who refuse to conform.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
[the consensus] It’s a tool people use to bludgeon their opponents, and the sceptics, and to attack their character.
COMM
According to its critics, far from being scientific, the militant, intolerant climate consensus represents a devastating assault on free scientific enquiry.
SCIENCE IS ABOUT FACTS NOT FEELINGS
STEVEN KOONIN
I see my job as a scientist as just laying out the facts, and letting people decide what they want to do. When you can’t talk about the facts, things become corrupt.
SALLIE BALIUNAS
If you shut the door on ideas in science… If you say, you’re not allowed to test it, you’re not allowed to have that idea, you’ve left the realm of science.
ROY SPENCER
I don’t think climate researchers will ever back down from their claim that increasing CO2 is the control knob on today’s climate system. I don’t think they will ever back down from that no matter what the evidence is.
RICHARD LINDZEN
It’s clear it’s now a cult, completely divorced from science.
COMM
The apparently unstoppable climate scare does not just represent an attack on science…it is starting to shape for us a new kind of society.
CLIMATE versus FREEDOM
COMM
Environmentalists like to pose as anti-establishment, but their demands are well- received and piously echoed by King Charles and the archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC, the UN, the EU, by heads of government, the World Bank and World Economic Forum. In fact by the entire, state-funded ruling establishment.
ROY SPENCER
Global warming is like the perfect problem that the government can get involved in. To grow the influence of government.
WILL HAPPER
It’s a wonderful way to increase government power. If there’s an existential threat out there, that’s worldwide, well you need a powerful world-wide government to cope with it.
CLAIRE FOX
If you are a climate activist you are actually facilitating a huge validation of the government running our lives.
AUSTIN WILLIAMS
Many Environmentalists most environmentalists, all environmentalists who consider themselves to be radical progressives alternatives are in fact simply reinforcing the mantras and the mainstream arguments of the entire establishment.
CLAIRE FOX
The demands on the government mean that the government suddenly gains the authority to interfere into every nook and cranny of our lives and how we live.
MATTHEW WIELICKI
everything has a climate narrative attached to it. How much you consume, where you spend your money, how much you travel, who you interact with, what types of food you eat, whether you eat meat. Everything has some kind of aspect to it that can be controlled with a climate lens.
ROSS MCKITRICK
Suppose 20 years ago, somebody hatched the idea that ‘I’d really like to ban cheap energy, I’d really like to control everyone’s appliance purchases, I’d really like to tell everyone where they can go, basically I’d really like dictatorial control over everything. Well, it’s not going to fly.
Everyone would think you’re a nut and ignore you. But fast forward 20 years and that’s what’s happening.
COMM
The publicly-funded establishment in the West, is so large and powerful, it is able to enforce and impose the official consensus on climate, through its control of schools, universities, government and much of the media.
State-broadcasters like the BBC exclude climate sceptics, broadcasting regulatory bodies forbid private stations from disseminating sceptical views, threatening them with having their broadcasting licences revoked.
BENNY PEISER
What normally happens in an emergency is that all normal forms of openness and democracy have to be suppressed.
Because how else to deal with an emergency, so we are facing a situation not unlike lockdown when basically all normal forms of behaviour, normal forms of social communication, normal forms of democracy are essentially ruled out.
BENNY PEISER
Activists are even calling for any scepticism to be criminalised.
COMM
In certain jobs and professions, it’s now dangerous to express dissent on climate.
BENNY PEISER
(add lead into this) am always surprised that people are more sceptical will think twice before voicing their concerns because they might risk their career, they might risk their business, they might risk being sacked.
PATRICK MOORE
If you’re a professional of any kind in science or law or medicine and if belong to a professional association or are in a university, you can be fired for saying what you believe.
BENNY PEISER
The consequence is a censorious authoritarian regime that has to control every move, every word, everything you want to do cos everything you do, is a potential risk to the survival of mankind.
Climate Versus the People
COMM
Climate protestors condemn capitalism.
But at their anti-capitalist rallies it is hard to spot anyone who looks like a worker – like a docker, or crane-diver, or steel-worker, or a beautician or a trucker.
The workers, it appears, are totally absent from these rallies, and for very good reason.
Today’s climate alarmists complain not that capitalism isn’t producing enough, but that it’s producing too much.
CLAIRE FOX
The modern capitalist system has led to prosperity, more and more people have more and more things. The modern anti capitalism of the present time is a Critique of capitalism is that it’s gives us too much…
STEPHEN DAVIES
They think the problem with capitalism now is actually that it gives out too many rewards, en masse, to ordinary workers. What they want instead, and this is often very explicit actually,
is a much more austere, simple lifestyle, in which the mass consumption, the consumption choices of the great bulk of the population are controlled or even prohibited.
BENNY PEISER
You have to consume less, you have to holiday less, you have to drive less and to eat less and so on…
COMM
It seems that what upsets many environmentalists is not the failure but rather the success of capitalism, in producing an abundance of affordable goods for the masses.
CLARE FOX
Ordinary working people for once we have arrived at a point in history ,in the western world at least, where mass manufacturing has allowed them cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap furniture therefore you get a clash when affluent environmentalists express their disdain for mass consumption.
People going on those big huge cruise ships, it’s like thousands ‘what are they doing? Oh my God! Ruining Venice, ruining all our beautiful places, we own them don’t we? What are they going there for?
STEPHEN DAVIES
What you have here is a classic example of class hypocrisy – and self-interest masquerading as public-spirited concern. You could take these sorts of green socialists much more seriously
if they lived off grid, they cut their own consumption down to the minimum, never flew, instead what you get is constant talk about how human consumption is despite their values. But the people making up this talk, show absolutely no signs of reducing their own.
COMM
What environmentalists call ‘de-growth’ is being achieved by the trashing of our conventional energy and transport systems, and the forced introduction of expensive and unreliable alternatives.
Already this is having the desired effect on industrial manufacturing, which is straining under the burden of punitive green taxes and regulation, and higher energy prices.
TOM NELSON
The people behind the climate alarm couldn’t give a damn about manufacturing. They have nothing to do with it, they don’t know people who work in manufacturing, whose jobs and lives depend on it. They’re not excited by industry or industrial progress. They explicitly want to shut it down.
CLIMATE VERSUS THE POOR
COMM
Kisii, Kenya, East Africa.
According to many leading environmentalists, the world’s poorest people should not aspire to the lifestyle of people in the First World. The planet will not cope.
Grace Nyakenanda is one of the many Africans who do not have electricity or gas, to cook with or heat their homes.
The resulting indoor smoke, from burning wood and dried dung, is the deadliest form of pollution in the world, for millions the cause of lung disease, blindness and early death.
KENYAN WOMAN
If I continue like this, I’ll go blind. And my children are still young. Who is going to feed them? I worry about it. But what can I do?
COMM
It’s not just cheap, reliable electricity that Africa needs. Agricultural productivity here is incredibly low. Increasing it takes fossil fuels, to make fertiliser and drive tractors and other farm machinery. Jusper Machogu is a farmer.
JUSPER MACHOGU
Each and every African wants to get along, and increasing improving agriculture is one of the easiest ways to do that. Agriculture is closely tied to fossil fuels, fossil fuels which the western nations say we should not have access to.
COMM
Around a third of the food produced in Africa rots before it ever reaches the mouths of consumers. To prevent this tragic waste, Africa needs plastic packaging, refrigerated lorries and good roads. All are opposed by Western environmentalists, all come with industrial development. All rely on affordable fossil fuel energy.
Diarrhoea from drinking dirty water still kills hundreds of thousands of African children.
But clean water requires large industrial water purification plants and a modern water supply network. And this will come only with cheap energy.
JUSPER MACHOGU
I think it’s pretty obvious that the West has what it has because of fossil fuels. When people say Africa doesn’t need fossil fuels, I wonder. I don’t think they want what’s best for us.
They don’t want us to develop. That means we continue being starving, we continue being poor.
Most people don’t know what climate change is. They don’t care. They just want food on their table. They want to beat poverty. They want to beat hunger. They need money to better their lives. They want to flourish. That’s just it.
AUSTIN WILLIAMS
When they use the words sustainable development, they’re talking about no development, exactly, the point is that to develop sustainably means not to use too much energy, not to use too much carbon, you know net zero the idea that you shouldn’t use too many resources the fact that you shouldn’t produce enough consumer goods because consumption is bad, so ultimately the idea of development is out the window.
BENNY PEISER
The Greens think the Africans should never use their resources the way the Europeans, or the Americans, or the Canadians, or the Australians have used theirs.
They are also in favour of punitive taxes border taxes on any African country that wants to export their goods to Europe if they do use their resources. So that sums up the ethical ruthlessness and depravity of the green agenda.
COMM
But climate alarmists have a problem. Many countries in Africa and across Asia, are simply ignoring the environmentalist demands of Western governments and international agencies.
Communist China is estimated to be building an average of two new coal power plants a week.
China now uses more coal than the rest of the world combined.
BENNY PEISER
Which is one of the reasons that this whole climate agenda is falling apart… because the rest of the world is not cutting emissions, is not moving towards renewables.
COMM
In the West too, for many people, climate alarmism is wearing thin.
TOM NELSON
Ordinary people are not stupid. They’ve seen one ridiculous claim after another fail. Over and over. What this does is leave people with a profound and justified cynicism about what the scientific establishment says. And about what the government says.
COMM
To fix the climate problem we’re told, we must give up our cars, pay more for fuel, heating, clothes, food, fly less, limit where we go.
It’s hardly surprising that this attack on mass travel, mass tourism, mass consumption, holds little appeal to the masses.
CLAIRE FOX
Ordinary people starting to realise it’s going to cost them a lot of money to simply live the lives they were leading and as soon as that started to happen, I could see people in the United Kingdom, who had previously been indifferent to environmentalism, suddenly think how dare they do that’ how dare they try and take away what we consider not to be luxuries but necessities.
AUSTIN WILLIAMS
The whole policy of sustainability is about restraint – it’s about restrictions about doing less and that obviously for most people is an anathema to their everyday needs.
CLAIRE FOX
The fact that there is actually an ideological movement of people who think that cheap mass production, whether its houses or anything else is a problem. I mean for God’s sake, no wonder people become disdainful of the kind of middle-class outlook of environmentalism, but that is literally what people say. How can we stop people buying cheap things in shops.
COMM
When climate protesters climbed onto an underground train in London’s East End, they were not cheered on by working commuters. They were hurled abuse, pelted, angrily dragged off the train and received rough treatment on the platform.
STEPHEN DAVIES
If you were to go into a pub frequently mainly by what the Americans call blue collar workers, you will find that being sceptical about climate change policy is not going to get you thrown out.
Quite the contrary, someone will probably buy you a drink. They can tell that behind all the talk about climate emergency, climate crisis, what there actually is, is an animus and hostility towards them, their lifestyle, their beliefs and a desire to change it by force if necessary.
COMM
Punitive and restrictive policies carried out both in the name of Climate change and Covid, have sparked protests, in Britain, Canada and other Western countries. Anti-establishment politicians and movements are gaining support.
CLAIRE FOX
What they underestimated was the fury with ordinary people who say you can’t do this! and you suddenly get this new movement.
COMM
Many working people are not merely sceptical but positively angry about the climate alarm, and all that flows from it. There is a suspicion, or perhaps realisation, that climate change is an invented scare, driven by self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment, hungry for ever more money and power.
An assault on the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us.