The History of the Climate Change Movement

"You have to know the past to understand the present", Carl Sagan in Cosmos, 1980.

The following post was stimulated by my friend Trevor Wongsam. I met Trevor through a free speech MeetUp group called Cancelling Cancel Culture (CCC) in Manchester. He isn’t a scientist, but he is a rationalist and clear thinker. I quickly came to realise that it was worth taking his opinions seriously.

One of the topics he is most forthright on is climate change and Net Zero, a topic we are closely aligned on. The following article is based on a talk he gave to the CCC Meetup group and subsequently to Politics in Pubs in Manchester in August 2023.

Aside: I can already see that the pendulum has moved significantly since this talk and have pointed out where we are making progress.

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Introduction

Every pound or dollar spent on global warming and green energy, of which there are trillions, is money that you might as well put on a large bonfire and set a match to. It is probably the biggest and most successful hoax in history. I’ll try and explain why, and why it’s important.

Dr. Benny Peiser, the then director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, spoke about The Costs of Net Zero and its likely failure at one of our Politics in Pubs meetings. He explained that many people, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, accept the Net Zero argument. Some say do it faster, some say we should do it slower in order to mitigate the effects on ordinary people. However, an increasingly number of people are starting to understand that the economic costs of Net Zero are not sustainable. Even the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility has raised a red alert as I wrote about in Britain’s Looming Fiscal Storm.

However, more people, ordinary citizens, need to understand that not only are the costs unsustainable, but the whole climate change movement is a fraud. Many companies are making billions out of this while we suffer the consequences. Big Renewables is long overdue for a reckoning.

Of course many have a genuine belief that we are facing a climate emergency. If like most of us you are not a climate scientist, ask yourself how can you tell if something that lies within the remit of experts is true or false? There is a way, using just logical deduction, to come to a tentative position on any issue. I appreciate it requires some effort, but surely that effort is warranted when you consider what is at stake?

This is rather like a detective, rationally assembling the clues which includes what the witnesses and protagonists say and do. But you don’t have to be Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes to get an immediate impression, which is what I did when I first looked into this matter.

A history of failed predictions

The first thing that we can begin with is to look at the record of predictions by climate scientists. What do we see?

We see at least 50 years of climate science predictions with not one single prediction coming true. Think about that for a minute.

In 1968 Paul Ehrlich wrote “The Population Bomb”, one of the most influential books of the 20^th century. He predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the face of an exponential population increase.

Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make.

He further remarked that:

The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.

This was followed by the 70’s where the major concern was the coming of a new Ice Age. Tony Heller, over at Real Climate Science, provides a great summary of the sort of headlines prevalent at the time. Here is a quote from an article in the New York Times in 1970 - US And Soviet Union Worried About A New Ice Age:

The United States and the Soviet Union are mounting large-scale investigations to determine why the Arctic climate is becoming more frigid, why parts of the Arctic sea ice have recently become ominously thicker and whether the extent of that ice cover contributes to the onset of ice ages.

Here’s another quote from 1979 from The Age newspaper discussing a meeting of the World Meteorological Office:

… For some experts at the Geneva meeting believe that the eccentricities of recent years have been evidence of a climatic change towards much greater variability. Drought, floods, the failure of monsoons and the run of hard winters are all evidence, they say, that the world has come to the end of a spell of even-tempered weather which began in about 1910 and lasted until about 1960. This period has even been called “a little tropical age” by one of the more quotable of climatologists, Professor Reid Bryson.

What follows the tropics could be harder to live with — weather more typical of the 19th century or even of the “little Ice Age” which lasted between 1430 and 1850.

This coming ice age was due to the burning of coal such that the particulates would collect in the atmosphere and block out the sun unless something was done.

Then in the 1980s everything changed and many in the scientific community began saying that instead of a coming ice age we were facing a global catastrophe from warming!

Since then, we have had such predictions as.

• 2007 - The Arctic Ocean will be ice free by 2014 (Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth). Arctic sea ice is at about the same level as it was in 2007 today.

• 1988 - The Maldive islands will disappear under water by 2018. Today the islands are thriving and have built several new airports to service their booming tourist industry.

• 1989 - Rising sea levels will obliterate whole nations by 2000 if nothing is done (UN officials reported).

• 2005 - There would be 50 million climate refugees by the year 2020.

You do not have to be a climate scientist to realise that something is wrong.

These are just a fraction of the many failed predictions of climate science. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the “We only have 10 years to save the world” trotted out! For another list try Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions by Myron Ebell and Steven J.Milloy.

Just two examples of what might be surprising good news, which you probably haven’t heard about:

1. Polar bears are thriving.

2. The Great Barrier Reef is doing well as can be seen from the article Coral in a Warming World.

The demonisation of CO₂

To summarise the position of the climate alarmist movement we see that the two dirtiest words in the English language are “Carbon Dioxide” or CO₂, i.e. one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen.

Interestingly, it is possible to get rid of (through a process called scrubbing) the particulates from burning coal which were allegedly responsible for the projected ice age. However, it is not possible to get rid of carbon dioxide gas and water vapour. This is not stopping governments trying and projects are emerging using unproven carbon capture technology at an immense cost to the consumer. Even the BCC is running articles like this warning:

The government is committing billions of pounds to an "unproven" green technology for reducing planet-warming gases without considering the impact on consumers' bills, MPs have warned.

Since they cannot make water vapour sound dangerous (as I will talk more about later) this explains why carbon dioxide has been demonised.

If we pump much more of this so called pollutant into the atmosphere, or so the argument goes, we will alter the climate catastrophically. We will reach a “tipping point” when the globe will warm exponentially out of control and we won’t be able to do anything about it.

According to the IPCC:

• Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil burning must be reduced to zero by 2100.

• Fossil fuels constitute 85 percent of our current energy use globally.

• We have to save ourselves from ourselves!

• Carbon dioxide is the climate control knob, more carbon dioxide more warming!

A quick look at history

δ¹⁸O-based temperature reconstruction from the Créte (Greenland Ice Sheet Project, early Greenland cores, ~1974–1981) showing millennial-scale (~1,500 yr) Holocene temperature oscillations. Based on work by Bond et al. (2001); Debret et al. (2007)

We are currently living in the Holocene period, as far as geological time goes. The last 10,000 years encompasses the whole history of human civilisation. Homo sapiens first appeared around 300,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until the second half of the Holocene period that civilisation really got under way. This is known as the Bronze Age, or the second Holocene climatic optimum. In this context optimum means warm.

In this warm period, life was good and we saw the rise of the first great civilisations – the Hittites, Assyrians, Phoenicians and the ancient Egyptians. This warm spell started around 3500BC and came to an abrupt end around 1200BC. Why? There have been many arguments about why this occurred but the record shows that around 1200BC the Late Bronze Age collapse was due to much colder weather and gave way to what is known as the Greek Dark Ages.

All the great civilisations that time collapsed within a period of 50 years indicating a widespread and rapid global phenomenon.

There things stayed, until the Roman warm period began and there was again a great flourishing of civilisations. This lasted up until the Dark Ages. This was yet another cool period which accompanied the collapse of the Roman Empire. Following the Dark Ages came the Medieval Warm period which lasted from the 9^th century until about the 13^th century. This was another great period of human flourishing when many of the great cathedrals were built and the Vikings colonised Greenland (which was then green in the sense of being covered by vegetation) and Iceland.

This ended in what is known as the Little Ice Age. This was the era of famine and plagues and witch burning as people looked for somebody to blame for year on year crop failures. The record shows that the colder it got the more witches they burned!

The Vikings abandoned their Greenland colonies. The Little Ice Age lasted for 500 years up until around 1840. During this period the river Thames would regularly freeze over completely so that it was possible to have fairs and amusements on the ice. This last occurred in 1814. There are famous paintings of these events in art galleries.

And now? Since the mid 1900s the weather is getting warmer again. This just happens to coincide with the first industrial revolution. Why is this a surprise? And why given the history of the entire Holocene period, the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere has been more or less stable compared to previous eras. And this was despite wild swings in temperatures over extended periods.

Neither the Hittites nor the Romans used fossil fuels to power their chariots nor did the Vikings use jet fuel to power their long boats.

To summarise this quick history of our own Holocene period we can say that the rise and fall of temperatures seems to have accompanied the rise and fall of civilisations. Correlation does not mean causation but the evidence seems compelling.

Taking all this into consideration, without being a scientist, one can infer that perhaps the climate alarm scientists may have got something wrong. But wait, let’s go further back.

The real history of life on earth

Source: GEOCARB III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO₂ over Phanerozoic Time, Robert A. Berner & Zavareth Kothavala (2001); in American Journal of Science, Vol. 301, pp. 182–204

If we look even further back, at say the origin of multi-cellular life on earth we should start 540 million years ago in what is known as the Cambrian explosion. It is called an explosion because this period marked an explosion of life on earth in many different forms, all emerging at the same time. At that time, the carbon dioxide level on the planet was in the region of 7,000 parts per million. This was approximately 15 times higher than at present, being around 420ppm.

Indeed over the last 530 million years the average carbon dioxide level on the planet has been about 6 times higher than now.

Here is what is strange. All life on earth is carbon based. And that carbon originates from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. All the fossil fuels that we are burning today originate from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before it was consumed by plankton in the sea and plants on the land.

Coal, oil and natural gas are the remains of those plankton and vegetation that were then compressed by pressures deep in the earth’s crust. In other words, fossil fuels are 100% organic and were produced by solar energy. That is why in science, before the climate scare, carbon dioxide was deemed to be the “gas of life.”

So from a big picture perspective we are currently living in a historically very low carbon dioxide level.

If there were no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the earth would be a dead planet. And yet the “powers that be”, such as the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), declared it to be a pollutant! The question then is how can something that is essential for life be a pollutant? Around the world such positions are being withdrawn - sense seems to be prevailing.

I need to point out that the US Department of Energy Climate Working Group has just called this endangerment ruling into doubt in their report A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. This report is well worth reading in full as it provides a sobering assessment of the state of climate science.

Emissions from fossil fuels have been deemed to be “carbon emissions”. This terminology is incorrect as CO₂ is not carbon. That would be like calling H₂O hydrogen! It is in fact an odourless, tasteless, invisible gas that is an indispensable food for all living things.

When we say historically low, we should realise how low. At the beginning of the industrial revolution the atmosphere contained around 380 ppm. Now it’s about 420ppm and that is a good thing given that plants die of starvation if the level drops below 150ppm. This is what almost occurred in the last glaciation 20,000 years ago. If it had dropped even a couple of hundred ppm more then the consequences would have been no plants, no animals or insects, and this means no life on earth!

The optimum level for plant growth is 4 to 5 times the current level in the atmosphere. Could nature be trying to tell us something here? The greenhouse growers of the world seem to know something that the scientists have missed and that is why they pump carbon dioxide into their greenhouses to help the plants to grow.

Likewise, the additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels has boosted agricultural production many fold in some cases and has caused the earth to green, as can be seen from NASA satellite records.

This is all well and good you might say. But what about the actual science?

Climate science

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. So what does this mean? And what is the greenhouse effect?

To be concise, high energy sunlight comes through the atmosphere and hits the surface of the earth. The surface warms up and emits infra red, low energy radiation back into space. Greenhouse gases act to trap some of this radiation (by re-absorption) and slows down the re-emission into space thereby keeping the earth at a warm ambient temperature.

It is false to say, as some like John Kerry have, that greenhouse gases act like a blanket which would prevent altogether the re-emission of infra red radiation into space. No such thing has ever happened on the planet earth as an equilibrium has to be reached.

In more detail, in control system terms the earth’s climate represents a negative feedback system. This means that the impact of many changing conditions, of which greenhouse gases are only one, always act to bring our system under control. A positive feedback system would quickly move us toward an extreme position.

The greenhouse effect is therefore a vital component of our climate system, acting to prevent the planet turning into an icy waste.

So what are the most prominent greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere?

They are water vapour and carbon dioxide. Water vapour is by far the most abundant and effective of these gases and averages around 20,000 ppm or between 1 and 4% of the atmosphere (depending on location on earth). It absorbs much broader wave lengths of infra red radiation than does carbon dioxide, which is around 420ppm in the atmosphere or about 0.04%. There are other trace gases like methane, ozone and nitrous oxide in very small quantities which also play a very minor role.

Not only is carbon dioxide a less efficient greenhouse gas than water vapour but it has been known for a long time that it has a saturation point well below that of water vapour do to the way it only absorbs radiation in a narrow band. Its absorption ability is logarithmic. For example, if we were to get one degree of warming from say 400ppm, to get another degree we would need 800ppm. Therefore, each successive degree of warming requires carbon dioxide concentration to double. This is why in the Cambrian period the level was around 7,000ppm and there was no runaway warming at a time when so much life exploded into being.

As an aside, it is fair to point out that human life as it is today would find this level too high. 5,000ppm is the level at which it starts to become really dangerous. This means that were carbon dioxide to reach this level we would have much more to be concerned about than a possible rise in temperature. That is assuming that we did not evolve over the long timescale it would take.

However, we also have to remember that population rise is due to halt towards the end of this century, and then start declining. We also have plenty of time to transition to low carbon dioxide reliable energy sources, such as nuclear. We might even have to start worrying about falling carbon dioxide levels at some point!

In summary, the focus on carbon dioxide as being the driver of the climate is false and misleading as there are many other factors that contribute towards the little understood science of climate.

What other factors affect the climate?

A few years ago there was no such thing as a climate scientist. The climate is so complex and overlapping within disciplines that the areas of expertise required to master it are numerous, including geology, solar physics, geochemistry, tectonics, atmospheric physics, oceanography, glaciology, meteorology, archaeology, geology and so on.

It is important to understand that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was not set up to investigate climate change in general and does not undertake it’s own research but rather pulls together contributions from many scientists and groups around the world in order to provide advice for policy makers. From a press release in 2010:

Its role as defined in the “Principles Governing IPCC Work” is “to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

It’s clear from this remit that the IPCC downplays the potential for natural climate change. It also underplays the importance of the broad spread disciplines we mentioned above. Instead, it favours prediction of the climate by computer modelling, which I shall look at in more detail.

Computer modelling

Computer modelling is not science, it is a tool used by scientists. Science is empirical, if you cannot test it, repeat it or measure it, or to put it another way, apply the scientific method, then it is not science.

There are two kinds of modelling, the first is deterministic modelling. This is engineering rather than science as such. The components involved are not unknowns, there is no guess work involved. If all the variables are known then it can be calculated with almost 100% certainty what will occur. This is how man went to the Moon. We know the distance, the required thrust, Newton’s Laws of motion and all the other stuff to enable men to travel across space. What is unknown would be say, if a meteor collides with the capsule. This cannot be factored in advance and is therefore not included in the model.

The second kind of model is speculative modelling where the variables are unknown, or not fully known and understood. This type of modelling is therefore full of assumptions. This kind of modelling is what we see in climate science today. If this happens then that, if this variable is correct then that. The effect of the oceans are not well understood. Cloud formation and its impact is not well understood. The sheer detail necessary to be able to model the earth’s climate is not present and so they fill in the gaps as is convenient.

You may remember discussions of the butterfly effect? In this analogy demonstrating the sensitivity of our chaotic climate system, a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet can cause an extreme weather event on the other. This is simply not a system amenable to accurate modelling or predictions. Worse still, climate model assumptions include all sorts of other non-scientific factors, including socio-economic forecasts.

However, it’s using these latter models that global policy is formulated. I have written previously that climate models are known to “run hot”. I.e., when we have looked back in time to what models predicted say 10 years ago for today, we find that temperatures now do not match those forecasts. Used carefully, with a full and transparent understanding of their limitations, such models can provide valuable insights into how the climate works. However, they will never be able to provide an accurate prediction of the future.

Why don’t more people know this history?

The political class supported by a compliant media do not want to you to know about this history. Anyone questioning the narrative has been labelled a climate denier a thoroughly unpleasant linkage to denial of what happened in the Nazi concentration camps. Simply being sceptical means you are in effect a Nazi.

You’ll also note over the years a change in language from Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) to Climate Change and most recently Climate Emergency. This change in language was done in great part for two reasons. The first is that the global temperature has stubbornly refused to rise as much as was predicted. And secondly, all surveys of the general population show that though people are concerned, it isn’t enough to convince them that the costs are worthwhile.

At least that had been the case. Today, GB News, now more popular than the BBC, is helping people to understand what is going on. Also, when you look at any pro-renewables post on X or Facebook, the comments are heavily weighted towards the negative. In current jargon, pro-renewable posts are getting ratio’d like never before.

Summary

• Climate science predictions have a terrible track record

• Carbon dioxide is vital for life on earth and levels been much higher and somewhat lower over geological timescales.

• The rise and fall of civilisations has coincided with warmer and cooler periods in the earth’s past.

• We have plenty of time to adapt to rising and falling levels in order to stay within a comfortable range of carbon dioxide levels from the point of view of human health.

• There are many factors which affect climate and focussing solely on carbon dioxide is not scientifically justifiable.

• Climate models do not provide accurate predictions since they are based on many assumptions, many of which are still poorly understood.

• More and more people are coming to understand that the costs of climate policy are unsustainable.

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Thank You

Many thanks to Trevor Wongsam for providing the inspiration and significant content for this article.