Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
Environmentalists are destroying environmentalism. As a subset of that destruction, creators of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) falsified science to claim that humans are causing global warming (AGW). That false science wasted trillions of dollars and disrupted millions of lives. That is enough money to provide clean drinking water and basic sewage for every country in the world.
Environmentalists changed a necessary and better way of living in the world into a destructive, controlling, political weapon. AGW proponents took climatology, a generalist discipline working to understand the atmosphere, and turned it into a political vehicle to establish control over all human behavior. COP 24 in Poland is the most recent attempt to control people using this false climate science. Two false assumptions, underpinned the conference. These are that the science is settled, and the human production of CO2 is unnatural. The latter is part of the larger anti-human notion of environmentalism. The question is, why are humans not allowed to produce CO2 unlike all other species?
The truth is we needed environmentalism, but not as a political weapon. Power-grabbing environmentalists took the moral high ground to claim that only they cared about the Earth. The guilt trip they used was the charge that everyone else was a dissolute polluter, destroying the Earth. It became a religion with all the superiority that allows, and the blind faith it demands. Those who question, regardless of the question, are automatically heretics. The real tragedy is it defies logic, contradicts the evidence, and precludes discovery and implementation of practical actions. As with so much of what is going on in today’s world, the simple charge of wrong-doing is sufficient to destroy individuals, communities, businesses, and industry. Frighteningly, these destructions occur even if people adopt the solutions recommended to pay for their transgressions.
Central to the claim of environmentalists and climate alarmists is the belief that the quickest and simplest solution is to reduce the number of people dramatically. They succeeded in convincing even sensible people that the biggest problem is overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich began the false doctrine in his 1968 book The Population Bomb. He reinforced it in a 1970 Earth Day statement that mass starvation was impending and inevitable. We know it is a false doctrine because in a surprisingly short time almost all his predictions proved incorrect. In a classic circular argument typical of the environmentalists and the IPCC, they created the strawman of overpopulation and human-caused global warming. Then, with speculation, they identified the problems it created and offered all the solutions that would create the world they wanted.
The assumption that humans are a blight and to blame for every change that occurs is central to their position. The Club of Rome (COR), which supported and promoted Ehrlich and others, set the foundation to this false ideology when they wrote in The First Global Revolution,
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”
They believe in Darwin’s views and yet their position, as stated, contradicts and confounds him. If they accept, as Darwin claims, that humans are animals like all the other species, then who we are and everything we do is normal and natural. However, that is not what they think. A classic example occurred early in the climate change debate. In the 1990 Greenpeace Report on global warming edited by Dr. Jeremy Leggett, it says, “Carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere naturally and unnaturally. The statement is meaningless unless you are saying that the unnatural portion is from humans. Then it becomes more meaningless unless you assume that humans are unnatural.
It is illogical to say, or even imply, that humans are natural but what we do is unnatural. Nonetheless, this is the absolute contradiction created by the use of environmentalism and climate for a political agenda. Why isn’t everything humans do part of evolution? Why aren’t development, industry, economy, or anything else we do, part of the natural order?
The answer effectively began in 1859 when Darwin published the first edition of On the Origin of Species. It went through several editions as he received feedback. Herbert Spencer made many comments, but one of them Darwin thought summarized his thesis so well that he included it in the 1869 Fifth Edition. The more extensive quote from Spencer says,
The law is the survival of the fittest…. The law is not the survival of the ‘better’ or the ‘stronger,’ if we give to those words anything like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.
The part that Darwin liked, and so it persists, is the phrase “the survival of the fittest.”
Darwin’s inclusion of this phrase is also likely due to the influence of Alfred Russel Wallace. Before Darwin published in 1859, Wallace sent him an essay reporting on his work in Asia. It reached the same conclusions as Darwin. The difference was Darwin, as Wallace later pointed out, made no mention of humans in his First edition. Wallace said that any theory which omitted humans and did not explain how they were so markedly different than all the other species, failed.
The difference is so significant that science has avoided the implications of the answer ever since. Ironically, Darwin, unknowingly, created the situation that science and society avoided when his theory became the weapon used to eliminate religion and God. Removing God removed the explanation for the difference and made it a challenge to science. Wallace tried, like many since, to offer a compromise. He didn’t use the phrase, ‘intelligent being’ but implied that such an entity might provide an answer.
The ‘difference’ problem remains unanswered. Environmentalists don’t address it but in avoiding it create the paradox, that we are animals like all the rest, but behaving inappropriately. Of course, they decide what is appropriate. Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder and president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) provides an excellent example of this thinking because it is extreme. No behavior is appropriate.
“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
Newkirk doesn’t realize that the Earth only exists because of human superiority. No other species is aware that the Earth exists. Eliminate Homo Sapiens as Newkirk proposes, then no other “Earth-dwelling species” would know if “every problem on earth” was solved.
Newkirk’s ‘phase out’ suggestion implies a gradual elimination of people. I agree, as long as we begin with Newkirk and all environmentalists and the IPCC. Once we get rid of them, then, as free-thinking humans, we can reassess the situation and determine that the problem no longer exists, and we can get on with evolving. Part of that will include explaining how humans are so radically different and superior to all other species, with every right to exist.
This concept comes from an old environmentalist canard that tool use is un-natural. That other animals survive using their claws and paws and mouths and teeth, while humans use tools and technology for everything, which is seen as un-natural. I once saw on a forum debate on the issue of eating meat, where a woman commented, “Unless you can run the animal down while naked and kill it with your bare hands, you are not meant to eat it!” This totally ignores, or shows a lack of understanding of, what humans are.
Humans are a bipedal ape. We are evolved to do three things very well: run distance, throw projectiles, and make and use tools and other things we find helpful. We do these things better than pretty much any other animal (no other ape can do an overhand throw like a human). Other animals use tools we know now too, and some, such as chimpanzees (our closest relative), even make tools. But none can make tools like humans. Humans are evolved to use and make tools and other things (clothing, shelters, etc…) and so doing so is completely natural. The human brain evolved to allow highly complex, very precision movements: the human tongue and throat to allow for highly-complex verbal communication, i.e. speech (requires complex, sophisticated movements of the tonque). The human eye and hand coordination to allow for the ability to accurately throw projectiles, and the human brain’s development to allow for complex tool making and use. Also the ability to think abstractly and thus use symbols.
Other animals also routinely manipulate nature in various ways, for example beaver dams and bee hives. Beavers in particular do not cut down trees and build dams with any concern about how it will affect the local environment. To the contrary, they are known to completely screw up the water systems of the local ecosystem.
Other animals besides humans and chimps also make and use tools, to include not just mammals, but birds, fish, molluscs and insects:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals
Note that the highest insect intelligences observed are all among the Hymenoptera, ie ants, wasps and bees.
Small ants have far and away the highest ratio of brain to body mass, ie ~1:7, v. ~1:50 in humans. This ratio is obviously a crude measure of mental function, but suggestive. Overall size matters, too.
The spectral GHG paradigm has been the most destructive falsehood in post Newtonian science .
It literally denies Newton’s Law of Gravity .
It is trivial to understand :
. Particles moving “up” in a gravitational field slow down , ie: cool ;
. Those moving down speed up , ie: heat .
Newton’s Law of Gravity which explains how much faster satellites go in lower orbit also explains how much faster molecules go at the bottoms of atmospheres and thus quantitatively explain the temperature profiles of all planets whatever their atmosphere including the ~ 33c warmer the bottom of our atmosphere is than our radiative balance with the Sun .
The GHG paradigm , excluding the Law of Gravity in violation even of conservation of energy , being false , has thus never presented a testable equation quantifying their asserted spectral “trapping” nor an experimental demonstration of it .
See Hansen et al , 1981 , https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha04600x.html , for the equationless bait ‘n switch which implicitly uses the gravitation lapse rate for why more CO2 will emit from higher where it’s colder then ascribes the entire gradient below to some spectral GHG effect with 0 , because it’s false , derivation .
And the field has been disconnected from the quantitative analytical testable method of physics ever since .
You had me at “falsehood”.
“The law is the survival of the fittest….” Darwin, Spencer, PETA, and all the others got it backwards. It’s not survival of the fittest, but the death of those least fit that promotes changes. Of course the fittest are likely to survive, although that is not a given. The weakest or least fit are much more likely not to survive and remove their genes from the pool.
When a species, or group of related subspecies and other species change their environment they survive better. The Sarengeti plane in Africa is a good example. Ungulates, predators, birds, scavengers, insects of many kinds, have all developed together to fit an environment that they create which is more productive for them all.
People have done the same thing. Developing big brains and ways to work together along with society and culture have allowed the development of much, much better ways to use energy resulting in a huge expansion of humankind- probably the fittest species on the earth. We are now at the point that we can conserve the genes of even not so fit individuals that have genes we don’t know about that could be useful in the future.