Andrew L. Urban
While Anthony Albanese welcomed the King warming to climate action the other day in Samoa, I was enjoying a BBQ dinner as a guest with new acquaintances. The conversation turned to the topic of climate change. Not my fault, I’d never bring it up in company whose views on the matter I didn’t know. Like religion. Turned out my hosts were profoundly invested in the ruling orthodoxy that the planet is in a climate crisis due to the burning of fossil fuels and increasing extreme weather events are proof of the climate emergency. They even claimed to have witnessed the increase. (The power of propaganda?)
Aware that my hosts had been recruited to the cause by endless propaganda, I cautiously and politely articulated that my research* shows how climate change is two distinct notions fused into one agenda. The earth’s climate often changes but warming is not actually due to humans burning fossil fuels. I referred to geologists who explain how over millennia CO2 increase in the atmosphere always follows, not precedes, global warming. As for extreme weather events, even the publishers of the climate change bible, the IPCC, have debunked that claim.
I could tell from the sour looks on the faces of my new, kind, generous, if misguided hosts that such facts were just denialist falsities to them. They had invested large amounts of emotional effort in nurturing their belief in the fear of fossil fuels. It was too traumatic to ditch all that. It struck me as a perfect micro example of the macro reality in which our political leaders live, notably our own current mob in power.
It has to be stated (repeatedly) that it has never been shown that CO2 warms the planet. Which explains why such specific scientific results are hinted at but never specifically quoted by climate activists – or ministers. The only claim to validate climate change policies is to a ‘consensus’.
An Australian scientist’s contribution to the global warming debate – the claim of a scientific consensus – has been described as ‘unethical’ by US research scholar Michelle Stirling^. She writes: “a claimed consensus is a powerful tool for driving policy but an inappropriate and unethical means of conducting scientific inquiry or informing the public.”
Referring to the oft-cited report of a consensus by climate change communications, psychology and BSc researcher John Cook (and others) Stirling says: “Cook et al presents a collaborative work by several consensus study authors, who claim a 97% agreement by undefined climate science experts that “humans are causing recent global warming.”
Stirling writes; “The statement illustrates the problem of trying to use a social proof of consensus in place of scientifically defined evidence. The lack of empirical parameters that specifically identify the claimed ratio of human effect versus natural influence, the timescale in question, the level of risk or benefit, and the human activity or causative factor(s) are undefined. The notion of consensus defies the fundamental principle of scientific inquiry which is not about agreement, but rather a continuous search for understanding.”
By failing to reference natural variability or these uncertainties “Cook et al (2016) creates a false and misleading public perception that humans are solely responsible for global warming/climate change, that fossil fuel use/greenhouse gases are the sole factor, that humans can successfully stop global warming/climate change by reducing fossil fuel use, and that ‘any’ cost is acceptable to prevent a perceived danger.” Cue photo of bushfire…
The danger is not so much global warming but global misperception, says Stirling. “Efforts …to establish a consensus statement on climate change for the public is improperly creating consequential misperceptions, such as the sweeping but inaccurate claims in President Obama’s tweet: “ninety seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
Stirling’s paper, “97% Consequential Misperceptions: Ethics of Consensus on Global Warming”, is published on the Social Science Research Network, a website established in 1994 and devoted to the dissemination of scholarly research in several fields.
Yet there is no point in presenting the Climate Changers with evidence to disprove what is clearly an irrational fear of CO2. They have painted themselves into a corner. There is no way out of that corner. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has no conceivable way to arrest his plans to save the planet (starting with Australia) with “the cheapest form of energy” … The inbuilt inflexibility condemns those policies to break before they bend.
This is why the Coalition ingesting the kool aid and setting policy sail for Net Zero was such a huge mistake. It has painted them into the political corner shared with Labor that disables debate over the most consequential policy area of our time.
The only escape route from the climate corner would be via a repudiation of the Net Zero policy, supported by a comprehensive, scientifically argued debunking of the entire fossil fuel phobia. Only from opposition could such a policy be launched. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is the only political party that challenges the climate change orthodoxy and believes Australia should withdraw from the UN’s Paris Agreement of 2016. Yet even One Nation fails to clearly distinguish warming from what drives warming – such as it is. So well has the propaganda worked that it doesn’t occur to policy makers that it is fossil fuel phobia that fuels climate alarmism – not scientific research.
In his book Green Murder, Australian geologist and author Ian Plimer flays the “cherished illusions” of a ruling orthodoxy.
“Some 500 years ago, the mainstream establishment said the sun rotated around the earth. 150 years ago, the mainstream scientific bodies said that manned flight was impossible, 100 years ago, the mainstream scientific opinion was that flight across the great oceans was impossible, 90 years ago, the mainstream opinion was that space flight was impossible and 80 years ago the mainstream opinion was that the continents did not move. In all cases, the mainstream was wrong.”
In June 1989 the UN Environment Program was quoted saying: “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”
The past is the key to the present in more ways than one, he writes: “There was once a consensus about eugenics…. Eugenics research was funded by the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, both of whom now fund climate activism. With such eminent citizens and respectable foundations supporting eugenics, how could it not be correct consensus science. The same logic is used for climate science. We now know eugenics was a racist, murderous, anti-immigration social programme masquerading as science.”
*
^ Michelle Stirling works for Friends of Science, which receives funding from the fossil fuel industries. The targets of her criticisms work for state funded organisations supporting renewables.
*Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing)