Original Article By BeckerNews.com:
In the early 1990s, in the wake of the Berlin Wall crumbling and the Soviet Union dissolving, global leaders were left scrambling for an ideology that would fill the void left by then-discredited ‘communism.’
Enter manmade global warming. It was a doomsday prophecy based on a simple thesis: The industrial revolution had spurred a massive influx of temperature-increasing gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, and without an overhaul of Western society to make for a “greener” planet, the world would experience a complete meltdown.
Former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, who had undertaken the project of perestroika to reform the “evil empire,” was an early prophet.
“This is a problem that cannot be postponed. I think the environmental problem will be the number one item on the agenda of the 21st century,” he said in one interview about his environmentalist legacy. “If we just hope that we’ll make it somehow, that nature will cope with these problems somehow through its own resources, and we can just do what we’ve been doing, we could face an even graver situation.”
Former Vice President Al Gore, the Clinton administration’s point person on Russian affairs during the critical de-sovietization years, was on the same page as Gorbachev in advocating global action.
“The planet has a fever,” Gore said. “If your baby has a fever you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don’t say, ‘Well, I read a science fiction novel that told me it’s not a problem.’ If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action.”
Manmade global warming was subsequently transmuted into “climate change,” a vague term that radicals would later punch-up into “climate emergency.”
The “climate emergency” is now an article of faith among radical activists; it has also evolved into a multi-billion dollar scheme that has garnered the attraction of scientists and activists alike.
The climate grift includes everything from National Science Foundation grants for far-flung projects including carbon capture and even a quixotic proposal to block out the sun itself. The latter proposal, as opposed to being laughed off by the scientific community, is now being seriously considered by the White House; it is being researched at Harvard University and is backed by the “philanthropist” Bill Gates.
The marketing operation rolled out to sustain the climate grift has been sophisticated and intense. It was revealed in spectacular fashion by “Climategate,” a blockbuster story that was all-but-blacked-out by the corporate press, in a manner that would presage the Covid pandemic and debates about the novel coronavirus’s origins.
Climategate revealed the leaked emails and documents that detailed the psychological operations, data manipulation, and dirty tricks that the climate grifters were employing to terrify the world into taking extreme action.
Indicative of these emails is the revelation that many scientists were critical of the work of James Hansen, who had been a strident vocal global warming alarmist since the late 1980s.
“At very quick glance I am dubious,” one scientist said.
But dissent would continue to prove an increasingly fractious matter, as dissident scientists were personally attacked and pushed to the sidelines. Dr. John Christy, distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, was lambasted for his stance on the climate change issue.
“This gets to the issue that the ‘consensus’ reports now are just the consensus of those who agree with the consensus,” Christy said. “The government-selected authors have become gatekeepers rather than honest brokers of information.”
“John Christy is not a good scientist,” snapped climatologist Ben Santer, who worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “I’m not a religious man, but I’m sure willing to thank some higher authority that Dr. John Christy is not the ‘gatekeeper’ of what constitutes sound science.”
But who were the gatekeepers? Government-funded scientists like himself, of course. Santer after his retirement would pose as a truthteller who spoke “science to power,” apparently neglecting to notice that the most powerful people in the world had seized upon the work of climate alarmists such as himself.
But one former climate alarmist has bravely stepped forward to speak true “science to power”: Judith Curry, who recently told her story to investigative journalist John Stossel.
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” she confessed in the interview.
Curry explains that there are perverse incentives of “fame and fortune” that are distorting the science.
She was a darling of the media when she claimed that hurricanes were becoming more frequent and powerful.
“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” said Curry.
“This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”
She told Stossel about the lavish treatment that was immediately showered upon her by radical environmentalists.
“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”
When her colleagues began pointing out flaws in her research, showing her the evidence that hurricane data were skewed, she realized that her critics were right.
“Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability,” she explained.
Subsequent peer-reviewed research shows that all matter of data — from hurricanes to tornadoes to earthquakes to precipitation to global temperatures — are being skewed by data reporting issues.
The Italian scientists show that “the main reason of the increase in the second half of the twentieth century is the growing reporting capacity of individual states and that since this capacity has stabilized on a reliable level, the number of disasters has become stationary or has even gone down.”
Another groundbreaking study appears to corroborate this overreporting problem for global temperatures. In “Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed,” is is shown how approximately 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet the “acceptable” standards set by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
These aggregate data from compliant stations show significantly lower temperature readings compared to those from flawed temperature reading stations. This is due in large part to the temperature stations being located in urban ‘heat islands.’
But pointing out flaws in the data or its reporting can be hazardous to a scientist’s reputation and ability to work in the field, however. In Curry’s interview, she goes on about how the climate change industry “manufactures” consensus.
She says that the “climate-change industry” is set up to reward alarmism.
“The origins go back to the . . . UN environmental program,” says Curry.
Some United Nations officials were motivated by “anti-capitalism,” she said. “They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.”
Curry then explains this as the reason that the UN created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change,” she noted. “Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding . . . assuming there are dangerous impacts.”
The United Nations is now calling for trillions in new spending on projects. It is being echoed by the Biden administration, which early in his administration called on $2 trillion in new climate spending. When taxpayers bridled at the “Green New Deal” bill, he rolled $555 billion in climate spending into the Build Back Better program. Then he passed the $369 billion so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which was hailed as “the largest climate investment in the nation’s history.”
Radical environmentalists and climate scientists, greedy for more, complained that “the tens of billions in investment makes up a fraction of the scale required.”
But even climate envoy John Kerry is skeptical that the United States going to zero emissions by 2050 would ultimately do anything to stop climate change.
“We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved,” Kerry conceded about U.S. carbon emissions, adding, “Not when almost 90 percent of all of the planet’s global emissions come from outside of US borders.”
Net-zero carbon emissions would not stop the climate from changing, nor would it significantly slow the increase in global warming.
The World Economic Forum claims that “pre-industrial levels” of carbon dioxide were roughly 278 parts per million (ppm), which is approximately 50% of today’s level of 420 ppm.
But this is not only very low in earth-historical terms, but carbon dioxide increases fluctuate naturally and may follow natural global warming due in part to oceanic gas release. And as more carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, plant life tends to flourish and to become carbon sinks. That is indeed the case today, as there are more trees on the planet now than even 35 years ago.
One scientist, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Dr. John Clauser, was recently disinvited from speaking at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for expressing dissenting views on climate change. In particular, his association with the Co2 Coalition, a group that emphasizes the beneficial effects of carbon dioxide, put the pathbreaking scientist into hot water.
“In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis,” Dr. Clauser said. “There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s large population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science.”
That was enough to get Dr. John Clauser “cancelled.”
That is the inconvenient truth about how the climate-change industry manufactures “consensus”: Money, fame, and power for supporting the theory that manmade global warming is a threat to the earth, and ostracism, defunding, and unpersoning for dissenting from it.
