CLIMATE the MOVIE: The Cold Truth | Jim Fetzer

➡ Jim Fetzer discusses the controversy around climate change, with some arguing that it’s a scam driven by money and power, while others, including respected scientists, deny the existence of a climate crisis. They argue that the Earth’s temperature has always fluctuated, and that it’s currently in a relatively cold period. They also suggest that humans, as a species, thrive in warmer conditions. The text also mentions that these scientists encourage critical thinking and checking data for oneself.

➡ Over the past millions of years, Earth’s temperature has gone through cycles of extreme cold and slightly less cold periods. In the last 10,000 years, we’ve been in a less cold period, which allowed human civilizations to flourish. However, recent temperature records may be skewed due to the urban heat island effect, where cities are warmer than rural areas. This means that the global warming we’re seeing might be less severe than we think.

➡ This article talks about how CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been much higher in the past compared to now, even with human contributions. It explains that plants, which need CO2 to survive, thrived during periods of high CO2. The article also questions whether CO2 is the main driver of climate change, as temperature changes have occurred before CO2 levels changed in the past. Lastly, it suggests that clouds, not CO2, might have a bigger impact on the Earth’s climate.

➡ Scientists have discovered that cosmic rays from exploding stars, or supernovae, can affect Earth’s climate by forming clouds. As our solar system moves through the galaxy, it encounters more or less of these cloud-forming cosmic rays, which can cause temperature changes on Earth. Additionally, solar activity can also influence our climate, as a more active sun produces a stronger solar wind that limits the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth, leading to fewer clouds and warmer temperatures. Despite popular belief, data shows that extreme weather events, wildfires, and heatwaves are not increasing, and the Earth’s climate is actually becoming milder, not hotter.

➡ Climate change has become a major focus for government-funded research, with many scientists feeling pressured to find evidence of global warming to secure funding. This has led to an increase in climate-related jobs and industries, such as renewable energy and climate compliance. However, this dependence on the existence of a climate crisis has raised concerns about the objectivity of the research and the potential for exaggeration. Some scientists who question the dominant narrative of human-caused climate change have faced professional marginalization and funding cuts.

➡ This text talks about how the fear of climate change is being used to increase government control and limit personal freedoms. It suggests that people who question the mainstream view on climate change are often silenced or punished, which hurts scientific inquiry. The text also argues that this climate fear is being used to justify more regulations on our daily lives, like what we can buy or how we travel. Lastly, it warns that this could lead to a society where the government has too much power.

➡ This article talks about how some people believe that speaking against climate change can risk their jobs and careers. It also discusses how climate activists criticize capitalism for producing too much, leading to overconsumption. The article suggests that these activists want a simpler lifestyle with less consumption. It also highlights the struggles of poor people in Africa who lack basic necessities like electricity, clean water, and efficient farming, and how they need fossil fuels for development, which is opposed by Western environmentalists. Lastly, it mentions that many people are becoming skeptical about climate change policies, seeing them as restrictive and harmful to their lifestyles.

➡ A lot of regular folks are really mad about the panic over climate change. They think it’s a made-up scare, pushed by people who just want more money and power. These people feel like it’s an attack on their freedom and wealth.

You people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. 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. You it. This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry. It’s a wonderful business opportunity. Okay, you want climate? We’ll give you climate. There’s a huge amount of money involved.

This is a huge, big money scam. There are not just now billions, but there are trillions of dollars at stake. It’s a story of self interest and big government funding. 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 are doing with their whole career. They don’t want this to end.

If CO2 isn’t having the huge negative impacts that we claimed it was having originally, how are we going to stay in business? A lot of people’s livelihoods depend on. They’re not going to give that up. This is a story of the corruption of science. There’s no such thing as a climate emergency happening on this planet now. There’s no evidence of one. The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax.

I’ve never liked hoax. I think scam is a better word, but I’m willing to live with hoax. It’s a story about the bullying and intimidation of anyone who dares to challenge the climate alarm. To speak up against or about climate change in any sort of skeptical way was essentially career suicide. Activists are even calling for any skepticism to be criminalized. It’s the story of an assault on individual freedom.

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 worldwide government to cope with it. We see all these kind of authoritarian measures being adopted in the name of saving the planet. You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world. 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 evermore. The weather will get worse, the planet will boil. We greedy humans must accept limits on 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. Teaching at New York University is one of these climate deniers. Professor Stephen Coonan is one of America’s leading physicists. He was a science advisor to President Obama and both vice president and provost of Caltech, one of the most prestigious scientific institutes in the world.

I teach climate science to my students at NYU and I always tell them, check the data or the papers yourself. And they all come out of that course with their eyes wide open. Professor Kuhnin’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. Because I’ve been called a denier and my response is, tell me what I’m denying, because I’m quoting from you directly from the official UN scientific reports.

Dick Lindsen also dismisses the claims of climate alarmists. He’s one of the world’s leading meteorologists who is professor of meteorology at both Harvard University and MIT and has served on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, 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 it, it’s biased.

But you couldn’t get any real scientists to agree some of the nonsense that’s being promoted. Will Happer is also a denier and is another of America’s leading physicists. He has been science advisor to three presidents and professor of physics at both Columbia and Princeton University. There’s this mischievous idea that’s promoted that scientific truth is determined by consensus. In real science, there are always arguments, no science is ever settled.

It just is absurd when people say the science of climate is settled. There’s no such thing as settled science, especially climate. Dr. John Klauser is one of the most respected scientists in the world. In 2022, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics. The science that’s being done is appallingly bad, in my opinion. There are a large number of scientists who are in violent disagreement. They refer to themselves as skeptics.

Since I am no longer worried about losing funding or a job, whatever, I call myself a climate change denier. These very eminent and respected scientists and others like them are not flat earthers. They do not deny science. So what’s the evidence that has caused them to dismiss the climate alarm as nonsense? 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, even millions of years.

The desert of Judea by the dead Sea. Professor Nir Shavi from the Rakr 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. And here’s the climate. We are at the lake bed of what used to be Lake Lisan. It’s a lake that existed until the end of the last ICE age.

Back then, the lake level was maybe 100 meters above where we’re located. When we want to reconstruct climates of the past, we have to look for evidence for clues. And when the lake existed, it had deposits. And by looking at these layers here, we can actually reconstruct how the climate has changed. 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 way geologists can reconstruct past climate. In other places. We can go to stalagmite caves and see the annual rings that you have in the stalagmite, or we can drill coals from the bottom of the ocean and then 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. So when we look back in time, what do we find? 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. If you go back, let’s say 200 million years, it was maybe 13 degrees warmer than it is now.

So on the geological perspective, this is not at all unprecedented. 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. We’re relatively cold, maybe not quite the coldest it’s been in 500 million years, but pretty close to it.

We are in a remarkably cool period. If we look over the last 550,000,000 years. In fact, only one other time period in that last 550,000,000 years was the temperature as cool as it is now. The mammals who now inhabit the earth began to evolve around 60 million years ago, when the world was much warmer than today. We just look at the last 65 million years. So this is after the dinosaurs go extinct, mammals really start to take 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. The earth’s mammals, humans included, appear to thrive when it’s warm, warmer than it is now. 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 20 C 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.

Over the last 50 million years, temperatures steadily declined, plunging the earth into what geologists call the late Xenozoic ICE age. We are still in that ICE age. The reason there’s all that ICE on 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 50 million year cooling period and they’re saying it’s too hot.

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 10,000 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 civilizations in a blissful period, which, according to many studies, was considerably warmer than today. This is known as the Holocene climate optimum. It was called an optimum because people thought that warmer was better. 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.

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 one degrees Celsius. 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.

And there’s certainly nothing very alarming that’s happening today. At the very end of the record, most of the warming that we’re observing today is the recovery from the little ICE age. Whatever calls that? Well, you know, we’re talking over the entire industrial period of about one degree centigrade. To put this one 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 three 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 five degrees Celsius. The average temperature on this day in this year might be five degrees different from the average temperature a year ago or two years. When I hear people pontificating about one and a half degrees, leading to the end of civilization, I think, what have they been smoking? Are you crazy? 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? Professor Ross McKitric is an expert in statistical analysis at Guelph University. He noticed something OD about modern thermometer records. Thermometers, even in the same region, give out very different readings depending on where they’re located. I was interested in the question of how do you explain the spatial pattern of warming? So some places warm a lot, some places don’t warm much.

And it turns out it’s highly correlated with the spatial pattern of economic activity. Where there are more people and there is more human activity, there’s more heat. This is known as the urban heat island effect. Urban heat island effect is essentially London, right? You pick London with buildings, with a lot of activities, tends to be a few degrees. I mean, we’re talking now Celsius, right? Even four or five degrees Celsius warmer than outskirts.

This is a phenomenon of urbanization these days. The obvious effect is actually concrete retaining heat. This can be illustrated with the satellite heat map of Paris. The centre of Paris can be as much as five degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside. Paris, London, Beijing, Shanghai, you name it, New Delhi, all of them absolutely demonstrated that effects. 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. These towns and all the locations where thermometers are located, on average, they’ve all grown in population, let’s say since 1880. You’ve got buildings growing up around 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 thermometer data for monitoring global warming.

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. We combine all the best rural stations. Anything that we can correct for, we correct for, and we show. If you just don’t use this data set and use only rural, you get a very different kind of picture.

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. What we see is that basically you have a warming from the 19, 1850s or so to 1930s and started to warm and then cool in a substantial way to the 70s, about 76 or so.

Instead of a long term systematic warming trend, it has a variability, multidecado, like every 50, 60 years or so, kind of a variation. 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. Sea is not supposed to be, quote unquote, contaminated by urban heat island effect, am I right? Yes. So when we compare the two record within the range of uncertainty, this behavior actually fits. 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 pattern closely resembles rural temperatures. Satellites, too, seem to be 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 Spaceflight center. 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. Dr. Spencer’s development of weather satellites was revolutionary. He and his colleague professor John Christie, have been awarded NASA’s Medal for exceptional scientific achievement.

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. There was one critical question about temperature that satellites were singularly well equipped to answer. Has there been a spurious warming that has crept into the global temperature record over land? That’s just a result of an increase in population. And that’s something that we’ve been analyzing and working a lot on lately.

And we’re finding that, especially in urban areas, it’s large since 1880. Most of the warming it looks like is due to the urban heat island effect. 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, ground based temperature records were going wild. They were going up like 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 globe’s temperature, which is not alarming at all.

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 120 years, artificially inflated by urbanization. You look at the weather balloon record, the satellite record, the rural record, the ocean record doesn’t warm nearly as much as land. All of these indications show that the big warming pulse in the record is the northern hemisphere land record.

And that’s also where most of this data contamination is happening. But of the mild warming that has taken place in the last three to 400 years, can any of it be attributed to human emissions of CO2? Professor Henrik Flensmark is visiting the Hebrew University of 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. What we have here is a ginkgo tree, and it’s actually a living fossil in the sense that this type of tree first appeared about 270,000,000 years ago. On the underside of the leave, there are what we call stomata, the cells where they can uptake CO2. So they are actually measuring how much CO2 is in the air, and then they adjust the number of this stomata to how much CO2 there is.

And by looking at fossils and measuring how many there are at a different time, it says something about what was the level of CO2 back in time. 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, 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.

At present, we have about 400 parts per million. 50 million years ago, it might have been 2000 parts per million. So much, much higher concentration of CO2. I think current estimates of global CO2 is 423 or so parts per million today. If we look through the phanorozoic, the last 550,000,000 years, we would see CO2 on the order of 7000 parts per million. CO2 is planned food and the result of much higher levels of atmospheric CO2.

In the past was a much, much greener world. Periods of elevated CO2 tend to be time periods of a huge biodiversity on the planet. In fact, we’re in a CO2 famine. If we look over the last 550,000,000 years of 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. They say CO2 is higher than it’s been for 100,000 years.

But what they don’t tell you in that period they’re talking about is that CO2 sank so low that all life on earth nearly died 20,000 years ago. CO2 is at the lowest level it has 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. 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, 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’re still far from the historical norms, which would be several thousand parts per million. There’s not enough fossil fuel to get there, but at least we’re making a start.

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. 4 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? If it were true that higher levels of CO2 caused higher temperatures, we should be able to see that in Earth’s climate history.

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. So it’s true over the last few million years of the ICE age that we’re in now, that CO2 and temperature are correlated. But if CO2 is the driver, it has to change first and the temperature has to change second.

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 to a few centuries later, we start to see a rise in CO2. 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. ICE ages start when carbon dioxide is at its maximum, and ICE ages end when carbon dioxide is at its minimum, which is the exact opposite of what would occur if carbon dioxide was controlling the temperature.

The question of whether CO2 drives the climate is easily resolved. You can look back in time over hundreds of millions of years. CO2 levels have changed radically many times. Did this cause temperature change? No, absolutely not. CO2 has never driven temperature changes in the past. Never. 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 was only 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. One of the embarrassments that IPCC doesn’t like to talk about was that the 1930s, when human influences were much smaller, were particularly warm.

That’s the puzzle, that the first early pipe where we have such a sharp warming. From the 19 hundreds to 1930s and 1940s, CO2 could never cause that temperature rise. But the 1930s and early 40s was so hot, it’s puzzling. More puzzling still is what happened next. By the end of World War II, CO2 was really going up, and yet the temperature was going down from 40 to 70.

While the CO2 continued to rise, this thing started to cool. What happened? Journalists were writing about the coming ICE age. It was on the COVID of Time magazine. 1970s. The new ICE age was the big story. 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.

Well, what we 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’s 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 modeling efforts. 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 the surface thermometers are correct, they still don’t produce as much warming as most of the climate models say there should have been, let’s say, in the last 50 years. The models, individually and even collectively, when you average over all of them in so called ensembles, they don’t get it right. You can already see that the main supports of the climate alarm movement, which are 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 Nino la Nina cycles. They’re just nonsense. 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. Yes, I assert that there is no connection whatsoever between CO2 and climate change.

That’s all across a crap. In my opinion. There is no truth to the idea that the Earth is warmer 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. Earth’s climate has changed many times over the course of its long history and will continue to change without any help from us. Climate always changes.

Who denies climate change? It’s always changing. But if CO2 doesn’t drive climate change, what does? In Earth’s atmosphere, there are powerful forces at work, and perhaps the most powerful of all are clouds. 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 of the sunlight back out into space. Big, bright, white clouds. If you look at the Earth, you see lots and lots of them, and they vary dramatically from one day to the next.

That is hundreds of times more powerful than the trivial effects of CO2. But what controls the number and density of clouds on Earth? Professor Henriks Fensmark from the Danish National Space Institute is in Jerusalem with the astrophysicist Neheviv. 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. When we have big stars, they don’t live very long, relatively, only maybe a few million years, up to 40 million years.

But they end their life in a huge explosion, which we call the supernova. An exploding supernova sends out vast quantities of debris, tiny charged subatomic particles known as cosmic rays, traveling almost at the speed of light. And as they hit Earth, they develop into seeds, which attract water vapor and form clouds. Professor Cheviv 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. The really mind boggling thing is that using geology, you can reconstruct the climates on Earth over the past billion years. And you can reconstruct our galactic journey and both tell the same story.

But what about temperature change on shorter 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. The solar wind warms us indirectly by acting as a barrier, limiting the number of cloud forming cosmic rays reaching earth.

So, from the sun, we have the solar wind. It carries the sun’s magnetic field out to a large distance, and it works like a shield against cosmic rays. When the sun is more active, you have a stronger solar wind, you have less cosmic rays reaching the inner solar system and reaching 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.

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. Because IPCC is determined to go on a narrative that only CO2 can drive the climate system. They turn off the sun, essentially, right, because the sun is just a background thing for them, that it doesn’t do anything.

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 as of 2023, IPCC says, is that the sun have absolutely zero chance to explain the changes of the climate system on broad scale.

Let’s say global warming or northern hemisphere. We say no. We can easily demorate the sun, can explain all of it. There’s zero for the co, 200% for the sun. How’s that? Why are these and other studies never reported in the mainstream media? And if climate change is natural, what are we to make of the alleged terrifying increase in extreme weather events, of the heat waves and hurricanes, of forest fires, droughts, and the rest? 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 IPCC reports themselves, that it’s pretty hard to find trends in extreme events, much less attribute them to human influences. You’ve now had decades of putting the idea in people’s heads that anytime the weather is bad, it’s climate change and greenhouse gases. So I think people at this point can’t help themselves. If you have a heat wave, immediately everybody’s thinking, oh, what have we done to the weather? If somebody says in the news, this is the warmest day since 1980 or something, well, you can look up the temperature records and see for yourself whether it was in fact warmer in the 1930s.

As it often is, US temperature records are the best in the world. And here is the official US government record of heat waves in the US over the past century. It shows very clearly that the 1930s were far more prone to heat waves than we are today. Not only were there more heat waves than the 1930s, the heat waves then were much hotter than those of today. Likewise, official figures show that the number of hot days in the US has markedly declined.

United States was much hotter in the 1930s. North Dakota reached 121 degrees. South Dakota was 120 degrees. Wisconsin was 114 degrees. These sort of temperatures are just completely out of range of anything people experience. Now. 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 three to 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. That’s certainly being observed all over the world. If you look at temperature records, 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.

When the average goes up, it’s really more due to the coldest temperatures getting warmer. So the temperatures getting milder rather than getting hotter. What about the increasing number of wildfires we’re often told about? If you look at the actual number of forest fires from satellite observations, the actual number is going down. Here is an estimate of global wildfires 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, far worse in the 1930s, from 1930s and 1920s. When you have data, thing was huge, five to ten times bigger than the current level. 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. When you look at the data for hurricanes, technically tropical cyclones, you see that there is no long term trend.

How about the rest of the world? Here is a chart of global hurricane activity. Over the past 40 years. Hurricanes have been around forever. We’ve got good proxy records of hurricanes and there’s been no change in their frequency. Even the IPCC admits that. 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, has recently reached record levels. There’s no such thing as a climate emergency happening on this planet now. There’s no evidence of one. Yeah, the extreme weather event story is just absurd. There’s no basis to it at all. It’s just based on propaganda.

The actual data shows the opposite. I’ve shown you the official data, the official science. Tell me what I’m denying. The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax. I’ve never liked hoax. I think scam is a better word, but I’m willing to live with hoax. But why are we told again and again that manmade climate chaos is an undisputed scientific fact beyond question, beyond doubt? To answer this, we must examine the so called consensus on climate change.

Thank you very much. Until the 1980s, global warming was little more than an eccentric scare story put about by radical environmentalists. But then the cause was picked up by an ambitious young senator, Al Gore, who would soon become 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 to that level, academic researchers in various disciplines began to apply for this climate funding.

If you want to qualify for money that’s labeled climate, well, you take whatever you’re doing and you add a little bit of climate speak to it and away you go. You’re dealing with the sexual habits of cockroaches. You’ll add, and the impact of climate. So 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 so right away, you qualify for funding. 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. And it also served to create a community. I mean, you’ve become a climate scientist now, even though you know nothing about the physics of climate. Thousands of papers were published on climate change and prostitution.

Climate change in beer, climate change in the black death, climate change in disability, climate change in video games and everything else imaginable. There’s an almost comical list of studies out there. Just do a Google search on climate change and everything comes up. Few of these papers ever questioned whether climate change was actually true. After you’ve done the research and you write the paper up, sometimes you find there’s no effect 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.

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. Scientific research in the United States tends to be dominantly funded by government grants. And so whatever government grants are offered sort of determine much of the science being done. It was during the cold war that many government research bodies were set up.

But the end of the cold war and pressure on government spending has left many of them struggling to justify their continued funding. United States Congress only funds problems, okay? Research into problems. Whether it’s money that goes to NASA or NOAA or National Science foundation or Department of Energy or any other Alphabet soup organization, it’s always been a problem to support your research or your existence. Raisondetra and so climate was a godsend.

If Congress is willing to pay you to find evidence of global warming, by golly, as a scientist, we’re going to go find evidence of it, because that’s what we’re 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. Who was the famous gangster, asked, why do you rob banks? And he said, well, because that’s where the money is.

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. So 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 that 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 brings a ton of money into the earth’s sciences, even if I don’t buy all the hyperbole. What’s the problem? By the late 1990s, what had started as an environmental scare story was gaining momentum. 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. Take the banking sector, for instance.

Say to a banker, we want you to file reports with the regulatory commission on how climate change is going to affect your bank. Well, the banker doesn’t know anything about this subject. So then they have to commission studies from academics. And of course the academics are happy to come and tell them, well, it’s going to be terrible for your bank. It’s going to cause all kinds of problems.

And you need to give us money to research this. 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. It’s a wonderful business opportunity. Okay, you want climate? We’ll give you climate. The renewables industry alone now turns over a trillion dollars a year. And that’s expected to double in the next few years.

What used to be a cottage industry has now blossomed to become a major part of the world economy. The growth of this climate industry has seen an explosion of highly paid green jobs. Chief sustainability officers, carbon offset advisors, ESG consultants, climate compliance lawyers and countless others. Students started to come into our departments as earth science departments with a focus on climate. That never happened before. But they started to look at their career prospects and they were smart and they were looking at who’s hiring.

And the fact of the matter was that everything in the hiring pool had climate somewhere attached to the name. I started a few years ago seeing programs like a master’s degree in climate finance. And I just went, what on earth is climate? I don’t understand what a master’s degree in finance is. Well, now you need a university that’s going to teach this program. You need professors of climate finance.

Every single school or university or business will have a climate officer or climate officers and a climate program. And you look at any of these institutions or businesses, you will find they all are signed up to it. And anyone who hasn’t signed up will come under pressure. 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.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many hundreds of thousands of jobs worldwide now depend on the climate crisis. You start building this enormous population whose job is to manage the crisis, and also explicitly to make sure that people are alarmed about the crisis, because this whole industry depends on the existence of the crisis. But therein lies the one great threat to this multitrillion dollar industry.

All the jobs, all of the funding are totally dependent on there being a climate crisis. If CO2 isn’t having the huge negative impacts that we claimed it was having originally, how are 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? 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 are doing with their whole career. They don’t want this to end. If NASA said global warming is not a problem, where did their funding disappears? Right? So they can’t say that. I mean, you’ve got the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate change. If they said the climate isn’t changing, they’d have no reason to exist.

The IPCC has a self preservation instinct to show that climate change is an existential threat. Otherwise, there’s no reason for them to be collecting the money and doing the work in the first place. There are not just now billions, but there are trillions of dollars at stake. 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. If suddenly the notion becomes apparent that this is not such a problem, you’re going to see that as an existential threat. Scientists who studied the natural causes of climate change began to be viewed with suspicion as two Harvard astrophysicists discovered. How much does the sun change and how does it change and why does it change? And then we didn’t even want to get into the temperature record climate thing immediately they will come after us.

Because when we started to estimate that the sun changed by quite significantly in terms of climatic sense, immediately the attack is there, because it’s not following the narrative, because they need the CO2 to be the only one, the only dominant player. When you tried to say, well, we’re 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.

Now, 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 by that time, anything that contradicted the narrative of global warming as a serious problem was not going to get funded. Editors of academic journals came under pressure not to accept papers which were deemed to be skeptical of the climate crisis.

We will not publish anything that questions this. I mean, it’s not something surreptitious. Scientists who dared to point out in public that there was no climate chaos began to be sidelined and shunned. If a scientifically qualified person stands up and says, we don’t see an upward trend in the data on Pacific typhoons, well, suddenly they lose standing to address the topic of Pacific typhoons, not because what they said is wrong, but because it’s off message.

They can marginalize 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 marginalized everyone who doesn’t support the narrative, they can turn around and say, well, everybody who counts supports the narrative, so we must be right. Environmental journalists ignored skeptics and instead offered headlines to anyone prepared to make the most outrageous claims and predictions about a climate apocalypse.

It’s gotten to where it has 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 you for your opinion, even though you were crazy wrong about your predictions. 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. From the start, the climate scare was political. It came from the environmental movement, the sworn enemy of free market industrial capitalism. Finally, we’ve got them. We can claim that it is the free markets who are destroying the planet, and we need big government to save us. 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. 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 out, 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.

All of these things require the government to get involved, right? 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. Support for the climate alarm is now virtually synonymous with disdain for free market capitalism and a yearning for bigger government. It’s liberals versus conservatives in the United States. And generally speaking, liberals are worried that we’re destroying the planet.

And they’re also, of course, for big government. And then conservatives are at the other end of the spectrum, where a lot of them don’t believe that we’re destroying the planet and they don’t want government involved in their personal lives. 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. The entire county of Los Alamos was kept going by government money. We had the highest incomes in the state. So naturally people who lived in Los Alamos supported big government because that was where their livelihood came from, that was where their good schools came from. Everything good, unless almost came from the government. So of course, they were all believers in big governments.

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 skeptic is taboo. Somebody that goes against it really does get met with a lot of anger and vitriol and you’re called a denier, science denier and a heretic. Your colleagues won’t engage with you anymore.

You don’t get invited to conferences. Your students may desert you. This is all really terrible. Professors Henrik Slensmark and Neer Cheviv describe what happened when they published their results on the climatic effects of solar activity. It was like all Hill had broken loose because of this work. I had no idea that things would escalate as they did. And it completely changed my life. Once we said that, people didn’t like hearing it and we became a Persona non gata.

I mean, I have so many instances of people doing really nasty things. When I applied for a job, a group of scientists right to the university say they shouldn’t hire me. And that’s a typical story. Unfortunately, if you don’t agree with a standard polemic, you become an outcast. You’ll shunt as if you have leprosy. For Professor Sally Baliunas, the personal attacks became too much. I retired early, and my family said I should have retired even sooner, years sooner.

So they noticed the toll. It took a toll on them and me. Dr. Matthew Wileicki 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. To speak up about climate change in any sort of skeptical way was essentially career suicide. Absolutely. There was no possible way that I would publish in quite a few 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, is because anybody who is skeptical of that consensus essentially gets kicked out of the community. Speaking out in scientific ways that go contrary to the consensus, I would say, is a career killer for people at the early stage of their careers. If I were 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. If a young person is questioning this, they can’t put that 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. 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 get your career ruined, you’re going to be trashed by the community, you’ll be despised by your coworkers. 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. It’s a tool that people use to bludgeon their opponents and the skeptics and to attack their character.

According to its critics, far from being scientific, the militant, intolerant climate consensus represents a devastating assault on free scientific inquiry. 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. If you shut the door on ideas, 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.

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, it’s clear it’s now a cult, completely divorced from science. But 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.

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. Global warming is like the perfect problem that government can get involved in to grow the influence of government. It’s a wonderful way to increase government power.

And if there’s an existential threat out there that’s worldwide, well, you need a powerful worldwide government to cope with it. If you’re a climate activist, you’re actually facilitating a huge validation of the government running our lives. Many environmentalists, most environmentalists, all environmentalists who consider themselves to be radical, progressive alternatives, are in fact simply reinforcing the mantras and the mainstream arguments of the entire establishment. 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.

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 sort of aspect that can be controlled with a climate lens. Suppose 20 years ago, somebody had hatched the idea that I would really like to ban cheap energy. I’d really like to control everybody’s appliance purchases.

I’d really like to tell everybody where they can go. And basically, I’d like to have dictatorial control over everything. Well, it’s not going to fly. Everybody would think you’re a nut and would ignore you. But fast forward 20 years. That’s what’s happening. The publicly funded establishment in the west is so large and powerful, it is able to impose and enforce the official consensus on climate through its control of schools, universities, government, and much of the media.

State broadcasters like the BBC exclude climate skeptics. Broadcasting regulatory bodies forbid private stations from disseminating skeptical views, threatening them with having their broadcasting licenses revoked. 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, where basically all normal forms of behavior, normal forms of social communication and normal forms of democracy are essentially ruled out.

Activists are even calling for any skepticism to be criminalized in certain jobs and professions. It is now dangerous to express dissent on climate. It’s no surprise that people who are more skeptical will think twice before voicing their concerns, because they might risk their careers, they might risk their business, they might risk being sacked. If you’re a professional of any kind, in science or law or medicine, if you belong to a professional association or you are in a university, you can be fired for saying what you believe.

The consequence is a censorious, authoritarian regime that has to control every move, every word, everything you want to do, because everything you do is a potential risk to the survival of mankind. Climate protesters condemn capitalism, but at their anti capitalist rallies, it’s hard to spot anyone who looks like a worker, like a docker or crane driver 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. The modern capitalist system has led to prosperity. More and more people have more and more things. The modern anticapitalism of the present time is a critique of capitalism that it gives us too much. They think that the problem with capitalism now, it’s actually that it’s giving out too many rewards en masse to ordinary workers and what they want instead, and this is often very explicit, actually is a much more austere, simple kind of lifestyle in which the mass consumption, the consumption choices of the great bulk of the population, are controlled or even prohibited.

You have to consume less, you have to holiday less, you have to drive less, you have to eat less, and so on. 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, ordinary working people. For once, we’ve arrived at a point in history, in the western world at least, where mass manufacturer 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 of. It’s like, what are they doing? Oh, my God. And all those cruise ships, like, ruining Venice, ruining all our beautiful. We own them, don’t we? They’re not. What are they going there for? What you have here is a classic example of class hypocrisy and self interest masquerading as public spirited concern.

You could take these kind of green socialists much more seriously if they lived off grid. They cut their own consumption down to the minimum they never flew. Instead, you get constant talk about how human consumption is destroying the planet. But the people making all this talk show absolutely no signs of reducing their own. What environmentalists call degrowth 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. 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.

Kisi, 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 Nyakananda 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.

Dochenko and Rega Korawana dinda vaccine nabong kwaba timbu atik and 100 and it’s not just cheap, reliable electricity that Africa needs. Agricultural productivity here is incredibly low, increasing it takes fossil fuels to make fertilizer and drive tractors and other farm machinery. Jasper Mashogu is a farmer. Each and every African wants to develop and increasing. Improving agriculture is one of the easiest ways to do that. Agriculture is tightly tied to fossil fuels, fossil fuels that the western nations are saying we should not have access to.

Around a third of the food produced in Africa rots before it ever reaches the mouths of consumers. To prevent this terrible waste, Africa needs plastic packaging, refrigerated lorries and good roads. All are reposed by western environmentalists. All come with industrial development. All rely on affordable fossil fuel energy. Diarrhea 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. I think it’s pretty obvious that the west has got 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. And that means we continue being starving, we continue being poor. Most people don’t know what climate change is, they don’t care.

They 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. When they use the word sustainable development, they’re talking about no development. Exactly. I mean, if the point is that to develop sustainably means not to use too much energy, not to use too much carbon net zero. The idea that you mustn’t use too many resources, the fact you mustn’t produce enough consumer goods because consumption is bad.

So ultimately, the idea of development is out the window. The greens think the Africans should never use their resources the way the Europeans are. The Americans or the Canadians or the Australians have used theirs. They are also in favor 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.

The 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, which is one of the reasons why this whole climate agenda is falling apart, because the rest of the world is not cutting emissions, is not moving to renewables.

In the west, too, for many people, climate alarmism is wearing thin. Ordinary people are not stupid. They have 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. To fix the climate crisis, we’re told we must give up our cars, we must pay more for fuel, heating, clothes, food, fly less, limit where we go.

This attack on mass travel, mass tourism, mass consumption holds little appeal to the masses. People have started to realize it’s going to cost them a lot of money to simply live the lives that they weren’t leading, that they want to lead. 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, right? How dare they try and take away what we consider to be not luxuries, but necessities.

The whole policy of sustainability is about restraint. It’s about restriction. It’s about doing less. And that, obviously, for most people, is anathema to their everyday needs. The fact that there is actually an ideological movement of people who think that cheap mass production of whether it’s 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? When climate protesters climbed onto an underground train in London’s east end, they were not cheered on by working commuters. They were held abuse pelted angrily, dragged off the train and received rough treatment on the platform. If you were to go into a pub frequented mainly by what the Americans call blue collar workers, you will find that being skeptical about climate change policy is not going to get you thrown out.

Quite the contrary. Somebody 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 a hostility towards them, their lifestyle, their beliefs, and a desire to change it by force if necessary. 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. What they underestimated was the fury that this would meet with ordinary people who just say, you can’t do this. So you suddenly get this new movement. Many working people are not merely skeptical, but positively angry about the climate alarm and all that flows from it. There is a suspicion, or perhaps realization, 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.

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