Climate Change Alarmism is a Despicably Anti-human Ideology

Dr. Jay Lehr and Tom Harris December 18 @ America  Out Loud 

Fortunately, nothing was accomplished at this annual meeting⏤it was a complete waste of time! No new strict carbon dioxide (CO₂) emission rules, no way to head off the forthcoming exit of the United States from the Paris Agreement. But lots of marching and shouting to warrant the millions of gallons of jet fuel wasted in transporting the revelers to Madrid, Spain.

For the 25^th time in as many years, over the past two weeks, more than 20,000 bureaucrats from 192 nations convened at a touristy location and enjoyed the high life at fancy hotels. Were they there to discuss hunger, the lack of reliable electricity for billions of the world’s poor, security or any number of our most serious problems? Not a chance.

This massive get together, called the 25^th Conference of the Parties (COP25) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), was focused on redistributing the world’s wealth under the delusion that man-caused climate change through the use of fossil fuels required that developed countries cripple their economies by limiting their use of inexpensive energy and by turning over much of their wealth to developing countries who emit little CO₂ for lack of industry, automobiles or power plants.

Amidst this morass of misguided political hacks, however, The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank based in Arlington Heights, Illinois, held a counter conference on December 3 with presentations from some of the world’s leading experts on the real facts about the climate delusion. Among the many important topics presented was the data that proves that the four ten-thousandths of the atmosphere which consists of CO₂ cannot possibly control the thermostat of planet Earth.

Dr. William Happer, emeritus Professor at Princeton University and, until recently, one of President Trump’s top science advisors, led off the illustrious group of speakers with the most amazingly direct condemnation of the absurdity in believing that mankind has any measurable impact on our planet’s climate. Happer said “there is a non-existent global warming emergency put forth by a phony, bizarre climate cult.” He continued:

“I’m actually very grateful to Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii who, just a few weeks ago, made this statement at a prayer breakfast, ‘Believe in climate change is as though it’s a religion, it’s not a science.’” Happer explained that such a statement is absolutely unconstitutional according to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Happer detailed that the insanity of the widespread climate delusion was actually detailed in The Madness of Crowds, the 1841 book by Charles Mackay who showed that crowd irrationality has been going on for centuries and lasts until another delusion diverts the crowd to another unsupported, exaggerated fear. Happer said that we need to find an “off ramp” to take the global warming cult to a less dangerous insanity than that which the climate change delusion now represents.

Tom Harris, the junior author of this article, Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition, gave a talk in which he proved with specific data that reliance on diffuse wind and solar energy was nonsensical. He showed the largest solar farms across much of North America are “NONE,” or Negative On Net Energy, in that they deliver less energy over their lifetimes than is used to construct, maintain and eventually decommission them.

Harris showed a solar facility that used 100 times the acreage needed for a conventional fossil fuel power plant and produced one tenth of the conventional plant’s power. Towards the end of his 20-minute talk, Harris focused on the millions of birds and bats killed by wind turbines. He presented a slide which said:

The Spanish Ornithological Society (2012): reviewed carcass counts from 136 monitoring studies across the country.

Conclusion: Spain’s 18,000 wind turbines are killing between 6 and 18 million birds and bats every year. 

California-based meteorologist Anthony Watts gave an enlightening explanation of the fallacies presented in data to support the belief that man impacts our planet’s climate. Watts has obtained data on every weather station in the United States and described many that can no longer offer valid information because cities and parking lots have closed in around them. He showed how good and bad data is homogenized together similar to taking muddy water and mixing it with clean water to increase the water supply.

Watts showed how a wide variety of climate data referring to air and ocean temperatures collected by the government and government-supported scientists are continually altered to fit the narrative of man-caused climate change. He explained that no other science tolerates this sort of adjustment of data to fit a desired narrative.

Stanley Goldenberg of the National Hurricane Center in Florida made fun of the idea that hurricanes were increasing as a result of a small increases in CO₂ in our atmosphere. He laughed as he explained that we can neither cause hurricanes to increase or alter them in any way before or after they form. Goldenberg has flown through the eye of 100 hurricanes and understands their energy as few do. He talked about our efforts to model the paths and strength of current hurricanes with very little accuracy because of their complexity. Hurricane modelers have had egg on their faces over and over again as their predictions are put to the test in a matter of days or even hours. 

Goldenberg explained how general climate models make predictions decades ahead of time and we simply forget how wrong they always are. He showed the track of past hurricanes that were stronger than more modern ones with emphasis on our improved instrumentation for making measurements. He also explained that past hurricanes are sometimes upgraded a decade later with a better understanding of the analysis with modern instrumentation.

Dr. Happer returned later in the program to discuss his efforts within the Trump Administration to implement a true scientific analysis and debate concerning the man-caused climate change topic. He found that the “deep state,” embedded non-elected officials, had too strong an influence to allow such a debate to take place. Happer said there was no doubt President Donald Trump was on our side or he would not have withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, which he considered the most important accomplishment of his time in the administration.

Douglas Pollock, a civil industrial engineer from the University of Chile, delivered an outstanding talk at the Heartland conference in which he showed that the situation in Chile is a cautionary tale about what can happen in North America if we follow their disastrous devotion to green energy. “Please don’t follow, Chile!” said Pollock.

Pollock said that the impact on ‘global temperature’ of Chile’s expensive climate change plans would be 0.0000115 deg C per decade of forestalled global warming. He showed a slide which said “Chile has become the world’s most important emerging country for its outstanding climate behavior,” and so won the UN’s Champion of the Earth award in December 2017. Chile is “the cuddliest cuddly toy to the UN,” said Pollock. “What an honor!” he concluded sarcastically.

Having to pause due to his emotional feelings about the disaster befalling his home country, Pollock concluded, 

“Today the forces of evil have returned violently, and what is happening in Chile is not a social explosion, but an anti-social explosion, an ongoing Communist revolution which took as a pretext, the sustain electricity and transport far hikes derived from the overturn from traditional electricity generation to Medieval energy sources [i.e., wind and solar] and a holy war against fossil fuels.” 

Pollock’s moving talk may be seen here. 

In his presentation, James Taylor, director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center at Heartland, contrasted 10 of the most prominent climate scares one hears in the mainstream media with the actual observational evidence. Here are five of them:

• The pace of global warming forecast by the UN does not even remotely match the actual warming, which is far less, as observed by satellites. 
• To the extent that national security and global peace are affected by crop production, global warming is making the world more secure and less likely to be prone to the ravages of war and national aggression.
• The Great Lakes are not being detrimentally affected by climate change. Taylor said that the data shows that there is currently the most water ever recorded in the Great Lakes. 
• The UN IPCC itself says that hurricanes are not known to be increasing in intensity, frequency or duration.
• the most accurate land-based temperature record in the United States (the Climate Reference Network stations) shows no warming since at least 2005.

Taylor alerted viewers to an important new Heartland project, “Climate at a Glance,” one-page summaries of the information detailed in the thousand-page Climate Change Reconsidered documents. These will be found on the website in the next couple of months. Taylor concluded, “I think we’re going to have a tremendous impact on the climate science debate and, more importantly, on getting closer to scientific truth.”

Wolfgang Müller, General Secretary at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), delivered a somewhat shocking address on Germany’s response to COP25’s insanity. He explained that Germany is shutting down all nuclear power as a result of the Fukushima nuclear incident which ended up creating no nuclear radiation problems whatsoever. Germany has built, and continues to order, more solar and wind installations and mandated that the power from these unreliable, expensive sources be used at all times ahead of what is otherwise available on their grid. Müller showed how inadequate this renewable energy was to meet Germany’s day to day needs.

Along with other EU nations, Germany has pledged to be ‘net zero’ in CO₂ emissions by 2050 and support having 25% of the EU budget spent on battling man-caused climate change. Germany has also established a ‘Climate Cabinet’ in its government to be sure climate issues take first precedent over other government issues. Müller pointed out that other EU members such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Hungary are resisting the climate scare. Poland, for example, is determined to continue obtaining 80% of its electricity from coal.

Sadly, no matter how many wind turbines are built, Germans continue to demonstrate for more. Müller was thoroughly frustrated by the wrong direction his once great intellectual nation was taking.

The most surprising and arguably the most impactful talk of the conference was that by Naomi Seibt, a nineteen-year old German girl who described how she moved from climate alarmism to climate realism. Rather than interpreting Ms. Seibt excellent talk, we quote her directly:

“Once you start exploring…political topics that are more on the right or the libertarian department, things spiral out of control and you go down the path of understanding that many topics such as feminism, gender, socialism, post modernism and climate change hysteria, they are all related in some way,” said Seibt. “[They] pave the way for a very bad kind of totalitarianism.”  

“Science, you see, is entirely based on intellectual humility and it is important we keep questioning the narrative that is out there instead of promoting it. These days climate change science is not really a science at all. [Climate alarmist scientists] draw their conclusions before even testing their hypotheses. They base their assumptions on completely incoherent models which is just an insult to science itself.”  

“I believe, unfortunately, that the goal is to shame humanity. Climate change alarmism, at its very core, is a despicably anti-human ideology and we are taught to look down upon our achievements with guilt, with shame and with disgust and not even to take into account the many major benefits that we have gained from using fossil fuels as our main energy source. Because, look around. We are living in such an amazing era of fast progress and innovation. We are not allowed to be proud of that at all?”   

“Instead, debates are being shut down and real scientists lose their jobs for performing the most genuine and innocent form of science there is, which is real science, real skepticism.”  

“That is not just an insult to science. It is an insult to the complexity of nature and most importantly, it is an insult the freedom of speech. And that’s why we are here today. To speak up and to bring the spirit of science back to life again.”

Guus Berkhout, founder of the Global Climate Intelligence Group, also spoke at the Heartland conference detailing the World Climate Declaration, endorsed by over 800 knowledgeable and experienced scientists and professionals and sent to the UN Secretary-General, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, as well as the President, President-elect and Executive Vice President of the European Commission. The cover letter to the declaration stated, “Current climate policies not only dangerously undermine the European economic system, but they also put lives at risk in countries where access to reliable affordable energy is made very difficult.”

Berkhout outlined the six major statements of the declaration as follows:

• Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming.
• Warming is far slower than predicted.
• Climate policy relies on inadequate models.
• CO₂ is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth.
• Global warming has not increased natural disasters.
• Policy must respect scientific and economic realities.

It is not disparaging to anyone at the Heartland event to say that Lord Christopher Monckton was the superstar of the conference. His British accent, combined with his extraordinary humor and brilliant mathematical mind steals the day wherever he presents.

Monckton opened with a clear declaration that the planet is not at risk and then easily proved it. More importantly, he demonstrated that the evil the warming cult was creating by causing inexpensive electricity to be withheld from developing countries promoted continuing poverty. This in turn, leads to soaring population in poor nations while it is declining in the developed world. Monckton likened what the climate cult is doing to the worst actions of Stalin and Hitler.

Perhaps his most shocking denouement was that of a meeting between Obama and Communist Chinese leaders prior to the Paris Agreement where Obama promised to exempt China from hard targets under the agreement if they would support it. In contrast, the targets imposed on the United States would be devastating as it would eliminate our use of fossil fuels, thereby allowing China to become the world’s most powerful nation.

Words cannot do Monckton’s talk justice so we strongly recommend you watch it here.

There is no question that future historians will consider this and other Heartland climate change conferences rare shining lights in an otherwise dark period in human history when the climate delusion wasted trillions of dollars, not to mention the energies of many of the world’s otherwise brightest minds. We heartily recommend watching the whole event by clicking here.

About the Author: Dr. Jay Lehr & Tom Harris

 Dr. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government, as well as many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he went on to receive the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers. Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition. He has 40 years experience as a mechanical engineer/project manager, science and technology communications professional, technical trainer and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic in Canada’s Parliament. He is currently a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute.