Climate Change on Trial

Jacques-Louis David (1787) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates

Michael Kile

Socrates said wisdom is knowing what you don’t know. If his insight prevailed today in the Academy and elsewhere, there would be less anxiety about climate change; no frantic pursuit of Net Zero, and less support for the utopian belief that governments and agencies have the knowledge and power to create a “stable climate” on Earth.

Fewer folk would be fretting about global tipping points. Mercifully, there would be no more climate conferences, no ministers or shadow ministers of climate change, no authorities or agencies spending billions chasing the chimera of an “energy transition” based on a false premise: that their actions will improve the planet’s weather one day, preferably before the next election or United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP), now in another extravagant and futile thirtieth year.

COP30, promoted as The COP of Truth, is now underway in Belem, Brazil. So many delegates are attending that cruise ships have been chartered to accommodate them. What would the UN be if it had not transformed itself into a global “climate protector”? Fighting an invisible enemy clearly has been a more lucrative gig for a lot of people than trying to keep international peace.

Socrates was concerned about truth too. Imagine this scenario: that the following two charges were brought against the philosopher in 2025AD, not 399 BC. Firstly, he was a heretic, a “climate denier”, one of Michael Mann’s “bad state actors” who did not respect the Net Zero deity conjured up by the fear-mongering political classes. Secondly, that his unique method of seeking the truth through dialogue and logic had “corrupted the minds” of  Athenian youth.

Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates contains the three speeches Socrates made to the Court: his defence, The Apology; a counter-proposal to the death penalty – “free maintenance at the State’s expense” for giving Athenians a lifetime of “moral encouragement” and truth-telling; and a final address to the Court. Here is part of his hypothetical defence.

“I know not, fellow Athenians, how far you have been influenced by my accusers. In listening to them I almost forgot myself, so convincing are their claims about me spreading misinformation and disinformation about climate change. Yet scarcely a word of what they said was true: either about Net Zero, their model prognostications, the high cost of energy every Athenian must now pay due to the dubious schemes that have been forced upon them, or even about the atmosphere itself.

I mention these things because I want to show you how the accusations against me arose. I call as the first expert witness to my wisdom (such as it is), Zeus, the god at Delphi. You know Chaerephon, of course, a friend of mine from boyhood. One day he actually went there and asked: “is there anyone wiser than Socrates?” The priestess replied that there was no one.

Please do not interrupt me, gentlemen. I ask the Court to stop the noisy chanting in the public gallery: of “climate denier”, “we believe in climate change”, “climate change is real” and so on.

Climate change, of course, is real. It has been real ever since our planet acquired an atmosphere. How, then, could anyone imagine that making such a statement in this place, or anywhere, is some kind of revelation? Everything is in a state of change, in the cosmos and here on Earth. How could there not be climate change?

There have been and will be many different calamities that can destroy humankind, the greatest of them by fire and water, or by countless other means.

But I digress. When I heard about Zeus’s reply, his answer puzzled me. For I do not think I am wise, either much or little. What, then, did he mean by saying that I am the wisest? For he never speaks falsely: that a god could not do. So one day I chose the following method to try to discover his meaning.

I sought an interview with a person in the Ministry of Climate Change who had a high reputation in atmospheric matters. I felt that here, if anywhere, I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to Zeus, my divine authority: ‘You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I am.’

Well, I had a long conversation with this person. I need not mention his name, but it was one of our politicians. I formed the impression that, although in the opinion of many, and especially his own, he appeared to be wise, but in fact he was not. “Don’t worry,” he said, “with our Net Zero god helping us, we can control all the extreme weather events affecting our farmers, our country, and by 2050 the entire world.”

When I tried to show him that he only thought he was wise but was not really so, he naturally resented my efforts, as did the others present. They continued to call me a ‘climate denier’. I was threatened with imprisonment and worse if I refused to prostrate myself before their Net Zero god.

As I walked away, I reflected: ‘Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is very likely neither of us has any knowledge to boast of about climate change. He, however, thinks he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems to me that I am wiser than he is to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.’

 After this I went on to interview other people with even greater reputations for wisdom about climate change, some of whom had invested many drachmas and much time in trying to monetize the atmosphere by various forms of trickery, such as putting an arbitrary price on “carbon” (carbon dioxide); either for personal gain or “to save the planet” and so on. I formed the same impression again and again I incurred much public resentment.

The priestess said something else too. Zeus was emphatic: he was the god of weather, not a Net Zero imposter carefully contrived to dupe Athenians.

The evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim – how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year? – is that the temperature has changed from approximately 288.0 to approximately 288.8 degree Kelvin (14.85 to 15.65 Celsius) in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period. (I Glaever, Nobel Laureate, September, 2011)

I’m very worried that there’s been an almost obsessive focus on these bold international targets, like stopping warming below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the goal written into the Paris Agreement and adopted by almost every country. Everyone’s talking about two degrees, but it’s impossible to meet it. Some people are talking about one and a half degrees. These are just fantasy goals. We don‘t really know what’s feasible. That’s the reality of the situation. Furthermore, setting goals in terms of global temperature is highly misleading, as we cannot directly control the temperature. (Professor D Victor, UC, 10 November, 2017) Reference

Climate science is an example of what Canadian educator Sue McGregor calls ‘post-normal science’ in which “the facts are uncertain, values are in dispute, stakes are high and decisions are urgent”. In such circumstances it is virtually impossible to avoid sub-conscious cherry picking of data to suit the popular theory of the time… In the modern era of concern about climate, the problem is compounded by the existence of the vastly complex computer forecasting models that can be tuned, again more-or-less subconsciously, to yield a desired result. From theory to observation and back again — if we are not very careful, the cherry picking can go round and round in an endless misleading loop. (Emeritus Professor G Paltridge, research scientist and author, Climate Etc., 18 April, 2018) Reference

This post was prompted by an article I read last month: PR firms are spreading misinformation on behalf of fossil fuel companies. The author: Christian Downie, Professor of Political Science, School of Regulation and Global Governance, at the Australian National University.

Professor Downie and his colleagues just coined a new expression: climate obstruction. It refers to “efforts by organized interests to slow or block policies on climate change”. Did “climate denial” become too yesterday for today’s alarmists?

My research has followed the money trail between the fossil fuel industry and public relations firms. As a co-editor on a forthcoming book on climate obstruction, I can say that large PR firms have too often put their commercial interests, and the interests of fossil fuel giants, ahead of those of the public.

Misinformation is dangerous: The problem has been recognised at the highest levels. Last year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called on PR firms to “stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction”. (Professor Downie, October 2, 2025, The New Daily)

The book, Climate Obstruction – A Global Assessment, was published on October 14, 2025, by Oxford University Press, UK. It

Brings together nearly one hundred scholars and experts to advance our understanding of efforts by organized interests to slow or block policies on climate change; and

Includes sector-by-sector documentation of obstruction efforts, including by the fossil fuel industries, utilities, agribusiness, transportation, public relations, and organizations on the political far right.

What is going on here? This comment by strativarius to my last post, Midsummer Madness, in the Watts Up With That? July 2025 archive, came to mind: “While attribution modelling in scientific terms is utter garbage, in the political and cultural arenas – where it gets the full hype treatment – it can be pure gold.”

Yes: misinformation is dangerous. The above example suggests, at least to me, that hostility towards seeking truth by open discussion and free enquiry is as pervasive today as it was two thousand four hundred and twenty four years ago, even in the Academy.

One way of avoiding “planetary destruction” is by knowing our ABC: A is for atmosphere, B is for boondoggle, and C is for climate. And so on and so forth.  Z, of course, is for Zeus, the Olympian thrower of thunderbolts and nasty weather.

Seek wisdom: not Net Zero.

Michael Kile

13 November 2025

Michael Kile is the author of The Devil’s Dictionary of Climate Change. It was inspired by Ambrose Bierce’s 1906 Cynic’s Word Book, republished later as The Devil’s Dictionary.