Andrew L. Urban
As the world cops another irritating/boring/lying/self-centred, panicky climate change conference, COP31 in Turkey (Nov 9 – 20, 2026), allow me to re-re-repeat the argument that it is really a bunch of climate alarmists (with a sprinkling of opportunists) barking up the wrong tree. To rephrase a famous election mantra, it’s the climate, stupid. Let me explain.
The words ‘climate change’ now refer to the scientifically unproven scenario that mankind burning fossil fuels is heating the Earth’s atmosphere to dangerous levels, threatening our very existence on the planet. This is a politically engineered lie (see below) in which two different elements are fused: 1 – the climate is warming and 2 – the warming is caused by human activity. The first is a natural historically recorded variable phenomenon, the second is bullderdashit, to coin a word. The wrong tree. Here’s the story:
Once upon a time (June 23, 1988) in a village far, far away from the public gaze, (US Senate Committee, Washington, US), there was a hearing on what was to be called the Anthropogenic Global Warming scenario with the testimony of James Hansen of NASA. A dastardly secret plot was hatched. 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. This was the first recorded example of exaggerating the warming for political effect.
Those villagers who were captured and encouraged by this fakery had a thought: If we can artificially warm the room, why not artificially warm the planet? After all, this was a political event in the US Senate, not some scientific paper presented at a scientific or educational institution. Thus was the wrong tree planted. The strange tale of how suddenly mankind could alter the weather, against its own natural variability became legend. What strange wickedness was this? Is this?
Al Gore
As the villagers soaked up the ‘warming’, along came a man who had heard some villagers talk about this newfangled legend with a movie in his backpack – and a motive. The most energetic supporters of climate change energy policies are investors in renewables, whose primary objective is to make money, not good policy.
His backpack had old stickers of “Al Gore for President!” and the villagers remembered. His new bumper sticker on the travelling cart he dragged around said “Al Gore for Climate Messiah!) The Gore bible was eagerly consumed by gullible children and adults alike. Village idiots including politicians, academics and the town crier (mass media), which put aside its professional raison d’etre – to be sceptical – and led the howling in the village square against those who were indeed sceptical deriding them as ‘deniers’. (Could this be explained by the left adopting the topic and the mass media being left leaning?)
Those so called ‘deniers’ included some of the most highly respected climate scientists – those that were not captured by the largesse on offer from governmentthink. Here is a small sample, extracts from my book, Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing, 2022):
Princeton Professor, emeritus, William Happer and MIT Professor, emeritus, Richard Lindzen have 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.
Happer, who has studied possible CO2 related climate change for over 40 years, succinctly stated his opinion:
”There isn’t a climate crisis. There will not be a climate crisis. It is utter nonsense.”
Lindzen has studied climate even longer than Happer, his comment:
“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 – that carbon dioxide, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.”
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.
Melbourne based climate data analyst John McLean, whose PhD thesis is titled “Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings”, claims that the climate data being used to propagate warming theories is essentially unreliable. He describes carbon dioxide emission mitigation policies as “a solution in search of a problem”.
His lack of confidence in climate data grew out of the many weaknesses and failures of data since 1850 being used to underpin conclusions. For example:
– For the first 4 years the number of reporting observation stations in the Southern hemispheres was one – on the west coast of Indonesia;
– During the 1860s and 1870s Western Europe supplied a high proportion of Northern Hemisphere data despite being a very small proportion of the total area;
– About the same time a large proportion of Southern Hemisphere data was from the latitude bands 30S to 50S, this being much of the shipping route between Australia and Britain;
– In the 1850s Europe (and maybe the rest of the world) had hardly started to emerge from the Little Ice Age, so warming is no surprise;
– It’s not until about 1950 that there is “decent coverage” of the two hemispheres, but it was only in the 1970s that sea surface temperature (SST) data was available for some parts of the Pacific.
McLean says these measurements were “often obtained by measuring the temperature of a sample of water drawn from 500mm below the surface and the technique was largely but not completely replaced by measuring the temperature of sea water that’s drawn aboard to cool the engine, from a point two meters or more below the surface. In fact, about six different methods have been used, usually the data from all but one method somehow adjusted to match the single remaining method. It’s all a bit of farce really. Argo buoys[1] seem to be more accurate but they’ve only been in common usage [in recent years].”
composition of atmosphere
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.
Worse still is the repeated lies told notably by the Prime Minister to the effect that extreme weather events are getting more extreme as a result of climate change. That is plain political porkie, easily debunked by historical statistics. That is the opposite of denying climate… that is boosting climate change propaganda.
In Turkey this week and next, there is much political porkie being served up.