Andrew L. Urban
The biggest and most successful political sleight of hand in history is playing to a world divided between those who know how the trick works and those who have been tricked by it. The trick has to retain its attraction long enough to achieve its aims in a suite of economic and political outcomes. Like spinning plates atop tall sticks, it must defy the gravity of facts and rationality as the magician runs from one spinning plate to another, shaking the sticks to keep the plates from crashing down. How long will the trick last?
The trick was started over 30 years ago with the sleight of hand to be found in the original mandate from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the IPCC. This was to address ‘dangerous human-caused climate change’. That set the plates spinning; the agenda became the ruling orthodoxy, a circular argument that starts with the conclusion it is trying to prove: the in-built assumption that dangerous human-caused climate change was a fact. The IPCC was to ‘address’ it. In other words, to enshrine it and provide the façade to be used in the propaganda that would drive the illusion. Research grants followed like so many Niagara waterfalls. They continue to gush over those scientists and institutions who adhere – sincerely or otherwise – to the ruling orthodoxy.
Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines ‘climate change’ as:
“a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”
The UNFCCC thus makes a distinction between climate change attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition, versus climate variability attributable to natural causes. This redefinition of ‘climate change’ to refer only to man-made climate change has effectively eliminated natural climate change from the public discussion on climate change. Any change that is observed over the past century, on whatever time scale, is implicitly assumed to be man-made. This assumption leads to connecting every unusual weather or climate event to man-made climate change from fossil fuel emissions.
This is the very nub of the issue: the trick is that climate variability has been fused to climate change to such an extent that those who do not know the trick cannot conceive the difference. Climate variability is not caused by human activity. The planet can warm and cool (and has done for billions of years) unconnected to human activity. (The ice age is over; the ice melted before we burned coal.)
So if the magician stops manipulating the sticks supporting the plates, they will stop spinning and submit to gravity. Trick over. Gravity rules.
Determined tricksters on the climate stage will do anything to defy gravity.
As climatologist Dr Judith Curry has pointed out, “the 1992 Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.”
Manufacturing a scientific consensus has led to a blind rush to renewables, the pyrite (fool’s gold) of the policy settings so eagerly embraced by Australia and other countries – even while knowing that even if emissions were responsible for warming, the miniscule amounts from Australia or from the UK, for instance, make the reduction efforts suicidal in economic and social harm terms – without achieving anything.
“This monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil fuel emissions distracts us from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions,” says Curry. “Common sense strategies to reduce vulnerability to already diminished extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future. Each of these solutions is ‘no regrets’ – supporting climate change mitigation while improving human well-being. “These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate.”
The manic contortions – aka political gridlock – about climate change, renewables and nuclear energy of Australia’s Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, are testament to ideology driving policy – especially when that ideology is unsupported by evidence.
Over 1960 international signatories to the 2022 Climate Declaration[1], some 300 scientists in a petition to former US President Trump, 33 current and former Fellows of the Geological Society and many individual scientists have affirmed that there is no climate emergency.
MIT Professor, emeritus, Richard Lindzen has ridiculed the alarmist playbook: “What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that carbon dioxide from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin.
“It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world … ”
Princeton Professor, emeritus, William Happer, who visited Australian earlier this year, is of the same view: “There isn’t a climate crisis. There will not be a climate crisis. It is utter nonsense.”
The question that must be asked is why the Minister (and his ilk around the world) remains so uninformed about his portfolio, given the vast amounts of information that is available to him and his departmental advisors?
Newspaper articles and entire books by credible researchers that challenge the orthodoxy could fill a library. It’s all accessible.
Back in 2010, 43 Fellows of the Royal Society (The United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, a Fellowship of some 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists) wrote to its then president, Paul Nurse, to complain about the unscientific tone of the society’s messages on climate change. Eight years later, a group of 33 current and former Fellows of the Geological Society wrote an open letter to their president in similar vein.
The letter notes that: “The IPCC position matches observations that almost half of the warming that has occurred over the last 150 or so years since industrialisation, had already happened by 1943, well before the rapid rise of industrial CO2. This difference of opinion is critical, for if CO2 did not cause the pre-1943 warming, the claimed consensus that Catastrophic AGW is caused by human CO2 emissions since the Industrial Revolution, which is supported by GSL, must be mistaken.”
Do the mandarins of Bowen’s department ever do research? As post Covid reassessments have shown, policy makers must have an open mind to a broad range of inputs – especially on matters that are in contention.
In Mark Steyn’s A Disgrace to the Profession (Stockade Books, 2015), a comprehensive debunking of the consensus and in particular targeting Michael Mann’s infamously influential but since discredited hockey stick graph, there are 100 scientists quoted who, far from supporting any consensus on global warming, raise their dissenting arguments and their concerns about misleading information.
“Some of them,” Steyn explains, “are distinguished emeritus profs and Fellows of the Royal Society, but some are young up-and-comers. Many are from the heart of the Anglo-American climate establishment, but others are from Europe and elsewhere and don’t quite understand why a small clique of outliers singlehandedly determines the “consensus” in the field …”
These scientists contradict the view that deniers are all right-wing nut jobs. Some are from the Scandinavian social democrat left, some are hardcore Marxists. And Stephen McIntyre, the Toronto mining engineer who dismantled Mann’s hockey stick graph (and is included in the book), is regarded as a ‘conventional Trudeaupian liberal’, as Steyn puts it. Mainstream scientists like Eduardo Zorita and Simon Tett are far from ‘deniers’. This group of scientists demonstrate that there is no consensus to support CO2 as the main driver of climate change. (Zorita is a Spanish paleoclimatologist; Tett is a climatologist working at the University of Edinburgh.)
There are many more examples of credible, serious scientific papers that challenge the basic assumptions that climate change is a result of burning fossil fuels. Why are policy makers not taking notice? Could it be group think?
The Conversation, its academic rigour ablaze, has this to say:
“So does the accusation of groupthink stack up when it comes to climate science? No, not at all. Science thrives on debate. It lives by argument and counter-argument. It handsomely rewards breakthroughs that upset the status quo. If someone could publish a paper tomorrow that provided a rigorous and scientifically defensible alternative interpretation of human-made global warming they would become a (science) superstar.”
There are three flaws in this response: 1) ‘rigorous and scientifically defensible alternative interpretations’ can be found in abundance, published over the years, which have been ignored, not least by The Conversation as this statement proves (refer to works by those mentioned in this essay for starters); 2) for all the propaganda, there has never been a rigorous and scientifically defensible paper that shows how the 3% of human made CO2 drives warming but 97% naturally occurring does not. If there were it would be quoted ad nauseum; 3) science does indeed thrive on debate, but climate change proponents have confused science with politics, resisting such debate and deriding those who attempt it as deniers.
The Conversation, it seems, is itself locked into the orthodoxy.
The bottom line: policy makers (and the public) must separate the notion of warming (such as it is) from the accusation that we cause it. Carbon dioxide is not guilty. Fighting (and paying billions in compensation (?) to the likes of a ‘developing’ China) to control emissions is the equivalent of batting at ghosts.
[1] Climate Intelligence Foundation established in 2019 by emeritus professor of geophysics Guus Berkhout and science journalist Marcel Crok.
Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Change Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing).