Andrew L. Urban
A serious question for voters in this federal election campaign: If climate change is a scientific matter, why wasn’t it presented in a scientifically credible peer reviewed paper in a scientific or educational institution?
Climate change was born as AGW. The Anthropogenic Global Warming scenario was launched on June 23, 1988 in the US Senate committee with the testimony of James Hansen of NASA.
To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session, Hansen’s Democrat ally, Senator Tim Wirth, scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer. In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras could show everyone sweating in the heat.
Wirth later told Deborah Amos (NPR News) how he did it: “What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot … The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing,” Wirth gloated.
If we can artificially warm the room, why not artificially warm the planet?
Clearly, AGW was conceived as a vehicle for the political disruption of the free market economies, not a matter of science. It contradicts established science. Yet it has been wildly successful. Obviously, you can fool most of the people most of the time. All it takes is a media with an agenda to match the foolers.
The long term ‘decarbonisation’ of the West under this agenda is designed to destroy it. (China’s communist party has started to celebrate … Already in 2025, France, China’s top supplier of sparkling wine, saw imports rise by 31.2% in volume and 12.1% in value, largely driven by Champagne sales.)
Writing in June 2022 on clintel.org, petrophysicist Andy May reported as follows: “Recently, the Biden administration has tried to use the powers of the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) to force companies to disclose information on their supposed climate-related business risks through a proposed SEC rule. Two esteemed members of the CO2 Coalition, Princeton Professor, emeritus, William Happer and MIT Professor, emeritus, Richard Lindzen have reviewed the proposed rule and filed a critical comment on the rule with the SEC. In addition, they filed an amicus curiae court brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit stating that they do not believe there is a climate-related risk related to burning fossil fuels, and the resulting CO2 and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
Models have been created to show the hypothetical human-caused changes to climate and the supposed damage these changes might cause. Unfortunately, or fortunately, perhaps, the models do not compare well to observations. Using Feynman’s rule, this invalidates the catastrophic climate change hypothesis. While the SEC can make rules mandating disclosure of valid risks to a business, it should not mandate disclosure of imagined risks that are not scientifically established.
So the expensive charade continues. Politicians misinformed by scientific facts and too brow-beaten to question the alarmism, urged on by much of the mass media working the same agenda as the agitators and activists, simply bully voters into submission. Like Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, whose trademark approach is the bare faced contradiction of reality.
It wouldn’t much matter if the Bowens of this world were participating in a university debate but they are formulating consequential policy based not on evidence but on political agendas that have destructive effects – on purpose.
The most energetic supporters of climate change energy policies are investors in renewables, whose primary objective is to make money, not good policy. The realpolitik marriage of Marxists and financial opportunists, with their bridesmaids of useful idiots, has given birth to parasitic cuckoo policies. (Of the dozen species of cuckoos that occur in Australia, the Channel-billed Cuckoo is the largest. Like many cuckoos, it lays its eggs in the nest of another bird and being a large cuckoo, it must lay its eggs in the nest of another large bird.)
The Opposition seems afraid of kicking the climate cuckoo out of the Australian nest. And the mass media (such as the Sydney Warming Herald) still seems afraid (or incapable) of asking relevant searching questions – something that is its raison d’etre.
Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson).