Guest opinion by Dr. Tim Ball
Most people were taken in by the false story of human-caused global warming. We can include all the students participating in the classroom walkout to demand governments stop climate change, organized by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg. Her goal is to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Apparently, she has no idea that the temperature was near or above that level for most of the last 10,000-years in a period known as the Holocene Optimum.
They are taken in by the false claim that a minute amount of human-produced CO2 is effectively controlling the entire atmospheric system since 1950 and causing environmental collapse through global warming. They don’t know that there is an upper limit to the amount that CO2 can increase temperature. They don’t know that the average level of CO2 over the last 250 million years is 1200 ppm. They don’t know that every projection of temperature by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1990 was wrong. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, how did so few, fool so many, to such an extent, for so long?
Similar situations occur throughout history of people fooling the world, although this is undoubtedly the largest in terms of its acceptance, impact, and cost. It is tempting to point the finger at the IPCC, but the speed with which the story took hold, spread, and deceived so many people requires better explanation. It likely won’t stop it occurring in the future because it speaks to the nature of human beings and our inordinate and pandemic fear that the sky might fall. However, we might stop the current insanity.
Global warming due to human activities was a subset of the wider moral panic created by the new and necessary paradigm of environmentalism. There are many parallels between the claims of human-caused global warming (AGW) and such events in history as the Salem witchcraft trials. In that case, the climate was probably to blame. However, it was never identified at the time and rarely mentioned by experts today. Instead, during a time of poor harvests and social hardship people were looking for something or someone to blame. Now they believe unequivocally that humans are to blame for everything.
Between February 1652 and May 1693, they brought 200 people to trial on charges of witchcraft. The symptoms were identified first in two young women brought before a tribunal and accused of hearing voices, dancing frenetically to exhaustion, all the classic symptoms of witchcraft. The problem is that these are also the classic symptoms of Ergot fungus poisoning. Conditions were ideal for the occurrence of high levels of Ergot poisoning at that time, just as they were for other periods of witch-hunting in Europe in the Middle Ages. Once people in authority formalize the moral panic through the formation of commissions of inquiry and other vehicles, the stampede is on. It takes on a life of its own that ignores facts, reason, and logic. In the Salem area they hanged 19 people, 15 women, and four men.
All this occurred in a society of Puritan’s, people taking their belief system to extremes. Today’s moral panic is occurring in an equally narrow belief system called environmentalism.
Sociologist Stanley Cohen identified the pattern of moral panic in a 1972 book titled, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. First, he identified the five stages of the panic as follows. I added in italics the names of the appropriate agent, agency, or factor as it relates to the moral panic of global warming.
- Something or someone is perceived and defined as a threat to social norms and the interests of the community or society at large.
The Club of Rome identified industrial development using resources at an unsustainable rate as the threat. They do this by burning fossil fuels and the by-product, CO2, is raising the global temperature to catastrophic levels.
- News media and members of the community/society then depict the threat in simplistic symbolic ways that quickly become recognizable to the greater public.
The UN created the IPCC that produced the false science using their computer models that isolated CO2 as the cause of global warming.
They then deliberately distorted their findings by the creation of a Summary for Policymakers.
- Widespread public concern is aroused by the way news media portrays the symbolic representation of the threat.
The IPCC produced the hockey stick graph that rewrote temperature history. It showed no temperature change for 600-years (the handle) followed by a dramatic increase after 1880 (the blade). As Ross McKitrick said, the hockey stick became the poster-child for global warming.
- Authorities and policymakers respond to the threat, be it real or perceived, with new laws or policies.
Millions of dollars were directed to alternate energies, even though a cursory look shows they cannot replace fossil fuels. Meaningful cost/benefit analyses were never done.
In most countries, no activity occurs without first receiving unnecessary environmental and climate approval.
Most countries created environmental laws that restricted energy use and development in a variety of ways.
They exploited guilt by creation of the concept of a carbon footprint; a vague and meaningless measure but visible on the landscape.
- The moral panic and actions by those in power that follows it results in social change within the community.
Energy companies that provided the basis for development that improved the quality of life for everyone on the planet became the focus of attack, including lawsuits.
The car that gave millions freedom, mobility, and wider options became evil on wheels.
Cohen then identified “five key sets of actors: involved.”
- The threat that incites the moral panic, which Cohen referred to as “folk devils”;
The folk devil is CO2 coming from those evil planet-destroying industries driven by their selfish, self-serving, profit motive.
- Enforcers of rules or laws, like institutional authority figures, police, or armed forces;
The biggest was UN Agenda 21 created through the bureaucrats of national weather offices. They even built in a Principle (15) that allows them to act even if there is no evidence.
“In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
We don’t need evidence. If we decide it is a threat, then it is a threat.
- The news media, which breaks the news about the threat and continues to report on it, thereby setting the agenda for how it is discussed, and attaching visual symbolic images to it;
The media is the great selector and amplifier of the global warming false story. Every day, they take a normal weather or climate event and say or imply it is abnormal. An emaciated polar bear was just one example of a visual symbolic image.
The media are the gossis in the global village.
- Politicians, who respond to the threat, and sometimes fan the flames of the panic;
Senator Timothy Wirth, an originator of the public panic said back in 1993 that
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Al Gore, from the pulpit of the White House, used the best storyteller in the world, Hollywood, to create the best piece of propaganda ever produced – An Inconvenient Truth. Now, there is the more hysterical claim from the UN itself that there are 12 years left.
- And the public, who develop focused concern about the threat and demand action in response to it.
Demand for action from a variety of groups across the world hasn’t produced the economy destroying total social control environmentalists sought. Now they are using the children in the ultimate form of child abuse. It is sickening to consider the use of children in the Salem witch hunts. It was two children who started the accusations but as one author notes,
“Puritan belief suggested that children were among the most likely to become servants of the Devil. They were easy to influence and take advantage of. In some cases, their environment made these children susceptible to thinking that they were evil sinners, which made it likely that their confessions were heartfelt.”
Some people will argue that we live in different times and such moral panic cannot occur today. Many will add, this is especially true in modern western society. It is true, there is no burning of witches, but the ostracization from the society of those that the mob identifies are deniers is only one step away. What you cannot deny is that the world was taken in by a patently false story and overwhelmed by exploitation of fear and guilt that we, the people, are destroying the planet because of our greed and ignorance. If you don’t believe it, listen to the children, whose future you are putting in jeopardy.
A cynical definition of a Puritan is a person who is afraid that somewhere somebody is having a good time. Environmentalists are the new green Puritans. Is this why the attendees at the Second Continental Congress, the authors of the Declaration of Independence, identified the Pursuit of Happiness as an inalienable right – or were they just having a laugh.
Anthony: To get an idea of just how “off the rails” these people are, have a look at this CNN thread on the topic:
As usual I can only commend Dr. Ball for his compelling analysis of today’s witch-hunt industry.
There is something I might add. Friedrich A. Hayek’s seminal and still indispensable study of socialism, “The Road to Serfdom,” devotes an entire, though very dated, chapter to the phenomenon, “Totalitarians in our midst.” In it he devotes several pages to long forgotten excerpts by his contemporaries, which he describes as taken directly from Nazi doctrine. It should come as no surprise to any of us that this depraved state of mind has never lacked for advocates and votaries, or that it should take so little effort to survey and enumerate the totalitarians who seem to dominate the public forum today.
I regret being a broken record in recommending Hayek’s analysis whenever the opportunity arises. It is a difficult text to read, but I believe that an acquaintance with this brilliant piece of historiography is essential to every person in every age who values, cherishes individual freedom.
What history teaches us is that just about everything we believe to be true today will in future be shown to be wrong.
Every scientific belief, every religious belief, every cultural belief, every political belief. Most will turn out to be wrong.
Consider bloodletting as a cure for illness. For 2000 years it was what surgeons relied on. And it was only comparatively recently, over the past 150 years, that it fell out of favor.
Now imagine that you are standing in front of the top surgeons in the world 500 years ago, trying to convince them that bloodletting was pseudoscience.
They would tell you that you were wrong because everyone says you are. And if you persist in your false belief the cure will be to treat you with bloodletting.
And after a few sessions of bloodletting it is very likely you would give up your claims, proving that the surgeons were correct after all.
That sufficient bloodletting will cure just about anything. It is only a matter of finding the right dosage. Which is where experimentation and observation come in.
ferd berple:
What you say is absolutely true. The cause of climate change, while real, will be shown to NOT be caused by rising CO2 levels.
Dr. Ball,
You profoundly nailed some key points with this article. This is exactly what I’ve been saying.
Scroll down at the link below and use the posts/links to obtain a treasure trove of climate crisis busting data!
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/25996/
The reality is that the anomalous warming that has occurred has been CAUSED by the environmentalists!
The mechanism is simply the reduction in dimming anthropogenic SO2 aerosol emissions due to global Clean Air efforts, and is NOT due to rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Cleaner air = increased solar heating of the Earth’s surface = “anomalous”‘ global warming.
This is indisputable.
Sequestration Costs. When you burn fuel at low pressure you have to separate the CO2 from the excesss oxygen and the nitrogen or you would be compressing a whole lot of stuff. Once you get the CO2 you have to compress it to put it underground. I’ll give my E-mail address here in case you have any questions: Rhood@BESTCarbonCapture.ca and my personal e-mail is r-l-hood@s.haw.ca. We were trying to upgrade Alberta Bitumen so that it would be inexpensive and can be processed in nearly every refinery. That means take the asphaltenes out of the bitumen. Once you get them out you have to do something with them. A company I worked for before wanted to pile them on the ground. That made a huge pile every year. so you have to burn them and dispose of the flue gas. I knew we could do that with gasification. I looked at tge gasification unit and thought to myself why aren’t they simply adding more oxygen so that they produce CO2, SO2, and NO2 from the gasification reactor. I then went to the patent literature and the only thing I found on pressurized combustion was that the equipment would be very expensive. That is the type of challenge that I love to see. I set about making the pressurized combustor as inexpensive as I could. When I git done we contacted a cost estimator from one of our client companies to do a costs estimate on my pressurized combustor design. He called me and asked if he could work with us. I asked why and he said “you have designed a pressurized combustor that will be less expensive than the atmospheric pressure combustor it replaces, and you will be able to release the flue gas directly into a sequestration facility. That will save coal fired power plants and natural gas fired power plants from the onslaught from solar and wind power. I conservatively estimate $5/MWh for flue gas sequestration.
Those young folks in the photo look so cared-for, sporting those stylish hair arrangements, tats, clothing, … looking well-nourished, clear skinned, and otherwise quite comfy, with their expressive signage, …all in a protected setting, free from exploding bombs, bullets, dirty water, disease-bearing insect swarms, rodents and other vermin.
I wonder what enables them to be so fortunate to have the comfort and freedom to strike. Oh, it seems to be the very thing against which they are striking.
Alas, irresponsible adults have not taught them any of this.
“Climate Change is Bad”
Bring back the continental glaciers.
We were once Greta…
“Senator Timothy Wirth, an originator of the public panic said back in 1993…”
Never heard of him. I do know that Margaret Thatcher pushed the idea into international politics with her speeches to the UN, and set up the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research .
https://john-daly.com/history.htm
Senator Wirth of Colorado, Democrat was also President Clinton’s first Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs for the U.S. State Department. In the State Department, he worked with Vice President Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting the administration’s views on global warming. A supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol, Wirth announced the U.S.’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. From 1998 to 2013, he served as the president of the United Nations Foundation [created by billionaire Ted Turner], and currently sits on the Foundation’s board.” -Wikipedia
In other words, Wirth was and remains a well-connected leader of the Deep State.
Some good comments, but some scientific ones I did not understand, not being a scientist. I am glad we have scientists and overwhelmingly they support the idea that climate change is happening. Or as a friend of mine calls it, climate chaos. All I have to do is watch the crazy fluctuations in temperature, in snow in February (now turning into floods), of cold. Just living through this winter, which is not quite finished, is enough to make one believe in climate chaos. But in addition there are the abnormal weather patterns being reported in the U.S., and all over the world. Not just where I live. I live in Minnesota, and in the 75 years of my life we have never had a winter like this. By the way, what is Tim doctor of? No credentials listed at the bottom of his article.
Dahr Jamail: Climate Change Has Already Happened on truthoutdotorg https://truthout.org/video/dahr-jamail-climate-change-has-already-happened/
“All I have to do is watch the crazy fluctuations in temperature, in snow in February (now turning into floods), of cold. Just living through this winter, which is not quite finished, is enough to make one believe in climate chaos. But in addition there are the abnormal weather patterns being reported in the U.S., and all over the world. Not just where I live.”
All the statistics on severe weather show there is less severe weather now than in the past. CO2 is not causing the weather to do anything it hasn’t already done before, when human-derived CO2 was not a factor. History goes back further than 75 years.
A person can see faces in the clouds using sufficient imagination.. A person can see CO2 at work in the atmosphere using sufficient imagination. But that’s the only way a person could “see” it, because there is NO evidence that CO2 is having a detectable effect on the Earth’s climate. NONE!.
The Myths of the Mayflower: History is not ‘episodic’ but is continuous as Dr. Ball seeks to clarify in the minds of many people – especially the young who have been ‘brain conditioned’ on climate change.
I once discussed with a young American just who were the Founding Fathers of that great nation: Were the Puritans Calvinists? The Quakers were not Puritans? The Pilgrim Fathers were not Quakers? The Pilgrim Fathers were Puritans?
I’m not sure that he has forgiven me for ‘de-mesmerising’ him. The evidence for this illusion – not only accepted by my young friend – may be stated briefly:
Alan Villiers, Captain of the Mayflower replica which crossed the Atlantic in 1957, attended a civic reception at Plymouth wearing a Quaker costume!
The Quakers were tolerant and quietist, the Puritans were not.
The second Mayflower myth: That the voyagers on the Mayflower were escaping religious intolerance with the intention of establishing tolerance in the New World. The word “Fathers” suggests originators, and not surprisingly we find the widely held belief that the Mayflower’s passengers were the first British settlers and hence the “Founding Fathers” of the United States of America. The six hundred families who trace their descent from the Mayflower’s passenger list now constitute an American aristocracy.
The historical facts are otherwise:
Quaker illusion: George Fox, founder of the Quaker Society of Friends was not born until four years after the Mayflower voyage.
The so-called ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ of America did not set sail from England, where they – the Calvinists – were restrained, but from Holland where they enjoyed power.
1607, April 26: Three ships sighted the land of Virginia: The historical fact of British North America is that Jamestown and “The Old Dominion” of Virginia were established in 1607, thirteen years before the Mayflower sailed.
Source: https://www.historyisfun.org/sites/jamestown-chronicles/timeline.html
Putting Jamestown into Context: BBC News
But don’t take my word for it, read what the BBC News had to say 400 years later:
The Queen has arrived in the US to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia – although many Americans will still tell you it was in Plymouth, Massachusetts – 13 years later.
“Historians in the 19th century were looking for a more noble beginning and opted for The Pilgrim Fathers. They landed in Plymouth in 1620 – 13 years after Jamestown” explains Bly Straube, museum curator.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6616037.stm
As I said earlier, real History is continuous – not episodic! Thank you Dr. Ball.
I am just a layman. I formulated my own opinion about AGW. IMO, it’s an example of mass hysteria. It’s a UN and NWO scam, designed for control and confiscation.
Take 1,000,000 pennies. Lay them out, it’s a 62.5′ square. Then call 400 of those pennies atmospheric CO2. A 15″ square.
I don’t see how there is physically enough CO2 in the atmosphere to cause heat retention. Also isn’t man made CO2 4ppm?
Also, maybe the AGW’s need a better imminent disaster. There is plenty of evidence of major planetary impacts in ancient history. We’re in a cosmic shooting gallery. They could call themselves STC -Stop The Comets.
Notice that these kids aren’t actually doing anything themselves. They are demanding that other people take responsibility for the “change”. They have every expectation to continue their comfortable lifestyles unabated.
Typical Progressive envy and greed.