In my writings for LewRockwell.com I first focused on climate change in “Finding Truth in Phoenix,” in 2003 after attending the 21st Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness held in Phoenix, Arizona that year.
Willie Soon, PhD, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, gave the first talk, on climate change. He refuted claims that the 1990s was the warmest decade of the millennium and that the 20th century was warmer than any other century.
Robert Balling, PhD, Director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University showed that the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere, measured by balloon and satellite thermometers had not changed in the previous 25 years, even though CO2 levels were rising. And Sherwood Idso, PhD,
President of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change found that a 300 ppm (parts per million) boost in concentration of CO2 increases the productivity of plants by 30 to 50 percent. Orange trees produce twice as many oranges, each with 20 percent greater vitamin C when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles, from 300 to 600 ppm. (Atmospheric carbon dioxide was 370 ppm in 2003 and is 421 ppm now.)
Earth History
Planet Earth was formed from a galactic cloud of gas, dust, and rocky particles 4,567 million years ago. It coalesced into a volcanic greenhouse planet free of any ice on it 80% of the time. Volcanos spewed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in concentrations more than 100 times greater than now.
Bacteria, single-cell organisms 1-2 micrometers in size, arose 3,600 million years ago. Then eukaryotes, cells with a nucleus, evolved 2,300 million years ago, followed by multicellular animals less than 1 millimeter in size. Land plants first appeared on Earth 470 million years ago, followed by a thousand species of dinosaurs living 250 to 66 million years ago (when atmospheric CO2 levels reached 2,000 ppm).
There have been six major ice ages in the Earth’s history. Two of them, 2,500 and 700 million years ago produced a “snowball” Earth, with glacial ice sheets reaching the equator.
During one warm period 50 million years ago the weather in the Arctic was like that in Florida today. The Artic Ocean remained free of ice year-round and was populated by alligators and turtles.
The current (Late Cenozoic) Ice Age began 34 million years ago. Its most recent glaciation phase began 127,000 years ago and ended 14,700 years ago. We live in an interglacial warm phase of this Ice Age.
In this interglacial period, there was a natural Medieval Warming from 900-1300 AD, and a Little Ice Age (1300-1850). New York harbor froze in 1780, and people could walk from Manhattan across the ice to Staten Island a mile away. A Modern Warming followed, which also occurred on Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and Triton, Neptune’s largest moon.
This figure shows the average global temperature over the Earth’s last 500 million years, determined by such things as temperature-sensitive isotopes in rocks, fossils, ice cores, and by cap carbonates (layers of calcium-rich rock that form only in warm water), as reported by Scott Wing and Brian Huber of the Smithsonian Institution.
Climate Scientism
Governments now fund climate “science” research and participate in the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Formed in 1988, the IPCC is “responsible for advancing knowledge on human-induced climate change.” It focuses on the purported climate impact of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—that humans use.
The Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of Climate Change violates this IPCC proviso. Proposed in 1996, it posits that cosmic rays in the galaxy shower Earth and make low-level clouds that block heat coming from the Sun. The Sun encloses the solar system in a magnetic field, producing a solar wind that shields us from cosmic rays exploding stars shoot our way. Sunspots–dark spots on the Sun’s surface 23,000 miles wide that can be seen with a telescope—are pools of intense magnetism. They vary in number on a multicyclic basis. There was a virtual absence of sunspots in the 17th century during the Little Age Ice Age.
Humans cannot control the number of magnetic sunspots on the sun or the density of the cosmic rays supernovae emit. The IPCC dismisses this theory and the role of the Sun in climate change, stating (in 2019): “Evidence shows that solar activity can explain very little of the observed warming since the Industrial Revolution…[and] The claim that cosmic rays are a ‘crucial player’ for the climate is not representative of published research on the topic.”
Still, there is climate research that the IPCC does not control. CERN (Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire – The European Organization for Nuclear Research) is studying this theory in an ongoing, multiyear CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) project.
I explore the issue of government grants for climate research in “The Government Grant System: Inhibitor of Truth and Innovation?,” published in The Journal of Information Ethics, available here. Five paradigms in the biomedical and climate sciences have achieved the status of dogma and become unassailable. One is: “Human activity is causing global warming through increased CO2 emissions.” I write this:
“In 21st century America, consensus and computer models masquerade as science. They supplant experimental data. As Corcoran (2006) puts it, ‘Science has been stripped of its basis in experiment, knowledge, reason and the scientific method and made subject to the consensus created by politics and bureaucrats.’ Reduced to a belief system, a majority of scientists and groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can declare, without having to provide scientific evidence, that they believe humans cause global warming. This alone makes the hypothesis become an established fact and received knowledge (Barnes, 1990). Peer review compounds the problem. It competes with objective evidence as proof of truth.
“Computer models purporting to make sense of complex data, particularly with regard to climate change, have replaced the scientific goal of supplanting complicated hypotheses with simpler ones (Pollack, 2005). Researchers offer computer models as evidence for global warming. When unsound assumptions and faulty data render one model unreliable, other improved ones are constructed to justify the state’s desire to promulgate this ‘truth,’ which it can use to exert greater control over the economy and technological progress.”
Climate researchers have constructed more than 100 computer models of CO2-caused climate change. None predict that global warming will stop, as is happening now despite the continued rise of atmospheric CO2 levels. Perhaps, instead, this rise in carbon dioxide is a prelude to the next 100,000-year period of renewed glaciation in this current Ice Age. (Each of the six great ice ages started when atmospheric carbon dioxide was higher than now.)
Climate scientism traffics in propaganda instead of testable hypotheses. It resolves matters by consensus, like with virtually all experts agreeing that the sun rotates around the earth—before Copernicus and Galileo. Climate scientism supports political ends. It is phony science, which government bosses and power-hungry elitists declare is the justification for their exerting greater control over our lives. “Scientism” demonizes dissent and declares that the “science is settled.” A scientific priesthood runs it, suppressing new ideas and pretending to be the sole arbiters of climate truth.
A New Road to Serfdom
Before fossil fuels, biomass, mainly wood, was humanity’s main source of energy for residential and industrial heat. Horses and mules provided transportation and oxen, work. Whale oil kept lamps lit and served as a lubricant. Life was hard.
In 1800, there were 1 billion humans living on Earth. Life expectancy was about 25 years. Per capita annual income was $100. Now, 200 years later, there are 8 billion people living on the planet. Average longevity is 69 years, and per capita annual income, $9,000. This striking change in human fortune comes from using fossil fuels.
Blast furnaces use coke, produced from coal, to smelt metals for constructing air-conditioned buildings and homes and for making automobiles, trains, and airplanes; with various grades of oil used to run them. Petrochemical industries use the hydrocarbons in oil to make thousands of products that improve the health, security, and well-being of people, things that did not exist 200 years ago before oil was discovered. Some of these are plastics in smart phones and computers; in containers that keep food fresh; in synthetic rubber for shoes, tires, and gloves; in burglar alarm systems; in asphalt for roads; in pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, etc.
Solar panels and windmills (both built with fossil fuels) provide 3% of the world’s energy. Battery storage systems (also built with fossil fuels) are necessary to maintain output from these intermittent sources of electricity—at night and when the wind doesn’t blow.
Without coal, oil, and natural gas life would return to a serfdom rivaling that which existed in Europe until in the early 1800s and in Russia until 1861. And should the Global Economic Forum be able to implement its Great Reset, we also “will own nothing.”
Even now the majority of people on Earth live in poverty, where 3 billion people use less electricity than that required to run a refrigerator. And another 3 billion people live in abject poverty without any electricity. Banning fossil fuels and succumbing to a “zero-carbon future” is the new road to serfdom.
Notes
My Articles Related to Climate Change on LewRockwell.com:
LewRockwell.com links all of my articles in chronological order in the Authors section of the site.
These four deal with climate change:
“Finding Truth in Phoenix” (2003) – Discussed in this article.
“Advantages of Nuclear Power” (2004) – I point out that nuclear power is much safer and far more efficacious in generating electricity than windmills, solar power, or burning coal. For solar power to produce the same amount of electricity as a standard 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor requires 33-127 square miles of solar panels, which must be washed and cleaned regularly to maintain a reasonable (70 percent) optical efficiency. And it would take 50,000 average-sized windmills over a 300 square mile area, given the variable winds in my state (Washington), to generate 1,000 megawatts of electricity. And windmills kill a lot of birds—eagles, condors, owls, hawks, and falcons. And bats, flying mammals who eat insects.
“Toro! Toro! Michael Crichton” (2005) – Michael Crichton (1942-2008) was a physician. He graduated from Harvard Medical School 4 years after I did, and he wrote six novels under pseudonyms to help pay his way through school. His novel State of Fear is about ecoterrorism and global warming. Dr. John Kenner, a professor of Geoenvironmental Engineering on leave from MIT, is the Willie Soon of the piece. In this page-turning thriller he warns: “Once you abandon strict adherence to what science tells us… you [can] subvert science to political ends.” In an appendix titled “Why Politicized Science is Dangerous,” he avers: There is no human-caused global warming.
“Solar and Celestial Causes of Global Warming” (2007) – I was inspired to write this article after reading the first, then new book on the Solar/Cosmic Ray Theory of climate change, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change by Henrik Svensmark and Nigel Calder. These authors show that the Earth’s temperature over the past 500 million years correlates well with the intensity of cosmic rays hitting the planet when it passes in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way. At one-point the atmospheric CO2 level was 18 times higher than it is today. They posit that the sun’s role in climate change is due not so much to changes in its irradiance, but to its magnetic effect on cosmic rays.
Three Good Books on Climate Change:
Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science by Ian Plimer, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne (2009), 493 pg., with 2,311references and an Index. This well-regarded professor “exposes the fraud perpetrated by a small group of pseudo-scientists and ideologues in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and promoted by environmental extremists; all for political purposes.” One of the 79% of 5-star Amazon reviewers calls it “The most authoritative book on Climate Change,” writing: “The author, Ian Plimer, is a highly qualified Geologist and Earth Scientist, and knows what he is writing about. It is the best book I have ever read on Climate Change & I have read many. His earlier book, ‘A Short History of Planet Earth’ won the Eureka Prize.”
Green Murder: A Life Sentence of Net Zero with No Parole by Ian Plimer (2021), 550 pg., with 1,667 references (no index). Another powerful, moving book by this author. He writes: “Consensus and settled science are terms to enforce green activist and political certainty.” And “Green activist policies against cheap reliable coal-fired electricity keep hundreds of millions of African people in poverty which results in environmental destruction and the deaths of millions of women and children from indoor cooking fires. The Greens are killing poor electricity-starved people in Africa.” One Amazon reviewer calls it “A Magnificent Book,” another, a “Fantastic Book.” I also highly recommend it.
“Clean” Energy Exploitations: Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support “Clean” Energy by Ronald Stein and Todd Royal (2021), 315 pg., 970 references. The authors of this book make a strong case for the value of fossil fuels in our lives. They clearly show how the Greens ignore the global environmental degradation and human atrocities committed using solar panels, wind turbines, electric-vehicle (EV) batteries, and battery storage systems for intermittent electricity-producing solar and wind grids. They point out that obtaining the lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite (carbon), and copper needed to produce just one 1,000-pound battery for an EV requires mining some 90,000 pounds of ore.
Doctors for Disaster Preparedness:
The doctors in Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (ddponline,org) include both MDs and PhDs, especially PhDs with doctorates in earth science and nuclear physics. But you need not have either degree to be welcome at its meetings.
The 40th Annual Meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness will be held in Las Vegas this year, August 14-16. The Program Agenda has 17 hour-long talks, 8 of them on climate-related subjects. Three of these are: Jay Lehr, PhD, Senior Policy Analyst for the International Climate Science Coalition and Senior Scientist at CFACT, on “The Fraud of Electric Cars Charged by Wind and Solar;” Paul Driessen, JD, Policy Advisor to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, on “The Great Green Renewable Energy Hoax;” and Ken Haapala, President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), will address “Extreme Poverty and the Necessity for Affordable Energy.”
For the first time, one can “attend” this DDP meeting via Zoom.
