by Rand Paul
Trillions of taxpayer dollars transferred to government-favored “green” industries and the climate alarmists continue to beat the drum for more money.
The “green socialists” are never satisfied. As Moore explains, the “green socialists” believe “the only ‘solution’ is for the world to stop using fossil fuels, which is like saying that we should stop growing food.”10
Consider this quote from former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer who co-chaired the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008–2015:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
He described the world climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, as “actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.” At least he is being honest about his objective.11
Edenhofer’s goals are certainly not the exception. In 2015, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made the following statement:
This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history. This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.12
Figueres’s lofty language reveals a breathtaking ignorance of the “historic transformations” brought about by Stalin and Mao.
In their own words, climate alarmists are using the “crisis” of climate change to scare people into relinquishing the freedom and prosperity of capitalism in exchange for a global socialist welfare state.
Basically they want to let poor, undeveloped countries emit unlimited carbon dioxide. After all, as even Edenhofer acknowledged, “in order to get rich one has to burn coal, oil or gas.” And they want to put heavy carbon restrictions on developed countries like the United States. While that will slow our economy and limit our freedom, Edenhofer thinks we deserve it because we “have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community.”13
None of which is to say that we shouldn’t make every effort to curb pollution. In fact, the United States actually is successfully reducing pollution. The dirtiest decade in America’s history was likely at the height of the Industrial Revolution. Most emission levels are down, dramatically so for mercury and sulfur dioxide. Even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admits that over the past two decades, American emissions have fallen 7.5 percent. According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, the United States actually reduced CO2 more than any other nation in 2017.14
The problem is that China and India have not slowed their emissions. As Steve Moore writes at the Washington Times, “For every ton of reduced pollution the United States emits, China and India produce almost 10 more tons. This means it doesn’t really matter how much America reduces its greenhouse gases because China and India cancel out any and all progress we make.”
Climate change advocates agree that the problem is a worldwide one, thus their advocacy for the Paris Accord that President Trump did not join, to great condemnation from the left. Yet, as Moore points out, “Not a single EU [European Union] nation is within 80 percent of its respective target for emission reduction, according to Climate Action Network Europe (CANE). In its official EU report, CANE said, ‘All EU countries are failing to increase their climate action in line with the Paris Agreement goal.’” It’s telling that we do not hear much about the shortcomings of our European friends, who are often portrayed in the media as being more progressive on climate change.15
Chapter 36
Socialism and Climate Change Alarmism Go Together
Even the most ardent climate change alarmists acknowledge that this debate is about more than pollution or temperature changes. To many climate activists, it’s really about replacing capitalism with socialism.
Self-identified socialist and Grist columnist Eric Holthaus makes no bones about the true goal of climate change politics. He tweeted, “If you are wondering what you can do about climate change: The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.”1
In other words, nothing to debate here. The scientific consensus is that the planet can only be saved by eliminating capitalism.
Socialist Matthew Huber, in his essay “Five Principles of a Socialist Climate Politics,” writes that “the climate struggle is less about knowledge and more about a material struggle for power.”2
He argues that “[c]limate change is a class problem.” To Huber, “this seems obvious enough. Rich people are responsible for causing climate change and the poorest bear the costs of droughts, rising seas, and floods.”
For socialists like Huber, “your carbon footprint is not really the problem.” He contends that the problem is not just pollution, but that capitalism allows “profit from the production of the commodities you consume.” His answer: “nationalizing the fossil fuel industry.” (So much for their claim that they really don’t want Venezuelan-style socialism . . .)
The Green New Deal is presented by today’s socialists as absolutely necessary for the world’s survival. To them, the science is settled and there is no room for debate. Anyone with the temerity to question is labeled a heretic, a “climate change denier.”
The notion that an issue is settled and that dissent will not be tolerated is the epitome of “groupthink.” Irving Janis, who invented the term “groupthink,” warned that “the more amiability and esprit de corps there is among the members of a policy-making ingroup, the greater the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink. . . .”
To label the enthusiasm of climate change activists as “esprit de corps” is likely an understatement.
In a disturbing example, NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd announced, “We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.”3 These “climate deniers” include science Nobel laureates as well as a recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. But Meet the Press doesn’t want to confuse us with the scientific findings of those Luddites—after all, it’s a bigger ratings boost to feature AOC announcing that the world will end in twelve years! When our major media outlets close their minds and refuse to offer both sides of complex subjects, we should all be concerned.
In response to the Meet the Press pronouncement, Michael Guillen, Ph.D., who holds degrees from both UCLA and Cornell in physics, mathematics, and astronomy and was an award-winning physics instructor at Harvard for eight years, wrote that “if you are absolutely, 100 percent convinced” that “humans are having a decisive, apocalyptic impact on the climate,” then “you have a right to say your mind is settled, or your politics are settled. But never say the science of this or any equally complex subject is ‘settled.’”
He continued with a history lesson for Meet the Press’s producers. “[A]s everyone now knows, Einstein—like Copernicus, Galileo, and scores of other vindicated ‘deniers’ over the centuries—ultimately disproved the vaunted scientific consensus. . . . But, above all, heed Einstein’s wise words about how science really works. ‘No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right,’ he observed, ‘a single experiment can prove me wrong.’”4
For instance, cofounder and fifteen-year leader of Greenpeace Patrick Moore, Ph.D., and zoologist Susan Crockford, Ph.D., write that “the 2007 prediction that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears would disappear when summer sea ice declined dramatica
lly has obviously failed. It is ironic that activists have long insisted that polar bears are endangered by loss of ice created by human-caused climate change. In fact, both polar bear and walrus populations have increased dramatically in recent decades due largely to restrictions on hunting.”5
Researchers also are finding evidence that the loss of glaciers may not be as dramatic as predicted. According to a March 2019 article in National Geographic, “NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) project has revealed Greenland’s Jakobshavn Glacier, the island’s biggest, is actually growing, at least at its edge.” The article quotes NASA oceanographer Josh Willis: “The thinking was once glaciers start retreating, nothing’s stopping them. We’ve found out that’s not true.”6
This is a noteworthy acknowledgment in the era of “settled science.” No word yet from AOC on whether this has altered her claim that “[t]he world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”7
Dr. Moore, however, reminds us that “predictions that ‘we only have 10 years left’ began in 1989 and have continued unabated ever since . . .” and yet as each apocalyptic deadline approaches and passes it becomes necessary to establish new timelines for world-ending events. “To the contrary,” Moore and Crockford write, “NASA has recently demonstrated conclusively from satellite records that our CO2 emissions are greening the Earth. This has resulted in higher yields in agriculture and forestry, and more efficient use of water by vegetation generally. In fact, there is nothing occurring in weather or climate today that is anywhere near out of the ordinary with the past 10,000 years of this Holocene Interglacial Period.”
The same alarmist proclamations followed by unapologetic corrections attaches to predictions on global temperatures.
Recently the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a study predicting worldwide extinction of thousands of species if the average global temperature rises 2 degrees Celsius by 2040. The New York Times, never shy about spreading alarm, predicted “a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040—a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.”8
Meanwhile, Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis at the Washington Post reported that climate scientists recently had to admit that their predictions on rising global temperatures “contained inadvertent errors that made their conclusions seem more certain than they actually are.”
British mathematician Nicholas Lewis discovered that the climate scientists were “biasing up significantly, nearly 30 percent, the central estimate.”9
As Mooney and Dennis point out: “Lewis has argued in past studies and commentaries that climate scientists are predicting too much warming because of their reliance on computer simulations, and that current data from the planet itself suggests global warming will be less severe than feared.”10
Seems like even the vaunted “scientific consensus” occasionally accepts its comeuppance. Why is it a big deal if a prediction is off a degree or two? The secret is to follow the money. William Nordhaus of Yale estimates that the cost of keeping global temperature rise to 2.5 degrees Celsius over the next eighty years would be $134 trillion. So, if climate predictors are off by one degree, and we accept their predictions, we are talking about trillions and trillions of dollars in cost.11
Even the official UN mouthpiece for climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, acknowledges that predicting global temperatures a hundred years from now is not an exact science. In a 2001 report, the IPCC concluded, “The long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”12
The climate alarmists have managed to turn a general consensus that something is happening, and humans are causing at least part of it, into a false 100 percent consensus that catastrophic things are happening, and humans can stop it.
When climate alarmists wail and gnash their teeth over rising ocean levels, I like to remind them that the oceans rose some four hundred feet in the last twenty thousand years, well before man began burning fossil fuels. I remind them that once upon a time people walked across the Bering Strait, now covered by four hundred feet of ocean.13 Perhaps nature itself has something to do with climate change?
If you really want to challenge the climate change alarmists, ask them to name the three main causes of geologic climate change or if they’ve heard of the Milankovic cycles.
In the 1920s, the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer Milutin Milankovic proposed three reasons to explain the extreme climate change cycles in the earth’s history.
The earth’s tilt varies over long periods of time and when the earth is more tilted the climate is colder.
The earth’s tilt wobbles (axial precession), so the direction of the tilt varies and when the direction of the tilt is more completely away from the sun in winter, the climate is colder.
The earth’s orbit is eccentric and varies over long periods of time. Currently, the earth is closer to the sun in winter. Over long cycles of time the earth ends up being farthest away from the sun during winter.
To this day, no science has disproved Milankovic’s insights. My question to the alarmists is, how much of climate change is related to nature and how much to man? The alarmists gaze back confused at the question. I egg them on—“no, really, what percentage? Is climate change 90 percent nature or 90 percent man or perhaps we don’t know?”
The global warming crowd admits no such ambiguity. John P. Reisman writes at OSS Foundation, “It is safe to say that virtually 100% of this warming event is human induced, caused, or instigated by human industrial processes and output of industrial Green House Gases.”14
Yet Reisman admits elsewhere on the foundation website that global warming is both a natural cycle and affected by human influence. “What does the science say? Both are true. In the natural cycle, the world can warm, and cool, without any human interference.”
So, Reisman and his fellow travelers admit that the climate has a natural cycle but they are certain that the current warming trend is 100 percent from man for two main reasons:
According to Reisman: “In the natural cycle, the Milankovitch cycles lead the change and most everything else follows. The difference is that in the natural cycle CO2 lags behind the warming because it is mainly due to the Milankovitch cycles. Now CO2 is leading the warming. Current warming is clearly not natural cycle.”
(This may be true, unless the overall trend in temperature over the next thousand years turns out to be colder temperatures—then rises in CO2 will have been seen to lag behind warming.)
Their second reason for believing that climate change is 100 percent human caused is that historically ice ages last about 80,000–90,000 years and intervening warm periods last about 10,000–20,000 years. Currently, we are thought to be past the peak of the Milankovic warming cycle and headed back toward another ice age. Climate change advocates believe that the last forty years of warming indicate a reversal of the cooling trend that should be occurring.
But it also may be true that the recent forty-year history of temperatures rising are simply a temporary reversal of the cooling trend. Historical data show that climate change is easily seen to trend up and down when viewed on a timeline of thousands of years but when viewed on a timeline of single years, temperatures often reverse direction for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, a rational discussion of how much of climate change stems from natural causes and how much from man is increasingly disallowed.
I worry that such closed-mindedness threatens the level of skepticism and curiosity that true scientific inquiry requires. It seems that the intellectually honest answer—“we don’t know exactly how much of the cause is nature and how much is man-made”—is becoming impossible given the religiosity of the debate.
It is important to note that very few skeptics of climate change dogma, myself included, deny that man-made emissions play a role in climate change. Skeptics simply want to continue to examine the question before spending trillions
of dollars on predictions that continue to evolve with each new study.
So, the next time a young socialist comes up to scold you for driving an SUV or riding on a plane or eating a hamburger, ask them if they’ve heard of the Milankovic cycles.
Considering the desire of so many in the climate change industry to silence debate, as well as their antipathy toward capitalism, one has to wonder if there is another motive behind their efforts . . . Perhaps global redistribution of wealth or a worldwide socialist welfare state?
Chapter 37
Socialist Green New Deal Allows for No Dissent
The Soviets were not very subtle with their propaganda. When the state owns all media outlets, dissent becomes a crime. Isaak Babel, the Russian writer whom the Soviets executed in 1940, once made this remark concerning the pervasiveness of Soviet surveillance and control of speech: “Today a man only talks freely to his wife—at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.” My wife, Kelley, and I sometimes feel the same way, never knowing when our iPhones are eavesdropping.1
Robert Conquest, in Reflections on a Ravaged Century, describes the Soviet propaganda regime: “The censorship body, GLAVIT, is believed to have employed seventy thousand full time staff, concerned not merely to eliminate incorrect facts and promote correct falsehood but also to ensure that the correct ideological spin was put on every published item.”2
Today we don’t have central government control of thought and speech, but between the spin of the cable news networks and the political correctness of the social media networks we are approaching a state where people are becoming afraid to voice their true opinions except under cover of blankets.