“Anthropogenic Global Warming is Political, Not Physical, Science”, by Arvid Pasto
The Club of Rome was a group of mainly European scientists and academics, who used computer modelling to warn that the world would run out of finite resources if population growth were left unchecked
Anthropogenic Global Warming is Political, Not Physical, Science
Arvid Pasto
By now, almost everyone knows that “the world is warming”, and has been told over and over by the mainstream media that it is due to man’s emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), principally but not limited to carbon dioxide (CO2). This claim is largely due to the efforts of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A history of this institution is very instructive, as its roots trace back to the Club of Rome (a MUST read is https://climatism.blog/2018/12/19/draconian-un-climate-agenda-exposed-global-warming-fears-are-a-tool-for-political-and-economic-change-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-actual-climate/ Jamie W. Spry).
I quote extensively from this reference below, in brackets […]:
[The Club of Rome was a group of mainly European scientists and academics, who used computer modelling to warn that the world would run out of finite resources if population growth were left unchecked. The Club of Rome’s 1972 environmental best-seller “The Limits To Growth”, examined five variables in the original model: world population, industrialization, pollution, food production and resource depletion. They noted that “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that…the threat of global warming…would fit the bill…the real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Not surprisingly, their study predicted a dire future for mankind unless we ‘act now’: “We are unanimously convinced that rapid, radical redressment of the present unbalanced and dangerously deteriorating world situation is the primary task facing mankind…Concerted international measures and joint long-term planning will be necessary on a scale and scope without precedent…This supreme effort is…founded on a basic change of values and goals at individual, national, and world levels…”(Arvid’s bold italics)
Around the same time, influential anthropologist and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Margaret Mead, gathered together like-minded anti-population hoaxsters at her 1975, North Carolina conference, “The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering”. Mead’s star recruits were climate scare artist Stephen Schneider, population-freak George Woodwell and former AAAS head, John Holdren (Obama’s Science and Technology Czar). All three of them were disciples of Malthusian catastrophist Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb”.
The conference concluded that human-produced carbon dioxide would fry the planet, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life. The idea was to sow enough fear of man-made climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development.
The creator, fabricator and proponent of global warming alarmism, Maurice Strong, founded the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and its ‘science’ arm, the UN-IPCC, under the premise of studying only human (CO2) driven causes of climate change.
Strong’s, and the UN’s, ‘Climate Change’ agenda was clearly laid out before the ‘science’ of climate change was butchered and tortured to fit the Global Warming narrative…
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Program (UNEP)
“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.” – Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
“It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light. We must therefore transform our attitudes, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.“ – Maurice Strong, first Secretary General of UNEP
Why Did They Choose CO2 as the Villain?
Atmospheric physicist, MIT Professor of Meteorology and former IPCC lead author Richard S. Lindzen, examined the politics and ideology behind the CO2-centricity that drives the man-made climate change agenda. His summary goes to the very heart of why carbon dioxide has become the center-piece of the ‘global’ climate debate:
“For a lot of people including the bureaucracy in Government and the environmental movement, the issue is power. It’s hard to imagine a better leverage point than carbon dioxide to assume control over a society. It’s essential to the production of energy, it’s essential to breathing. If you demonize it and gain control over it, you so-to-speak, control everything. That’s attractive to people. It’s been openly stated for over forty years that one should try to use this issue for a variety of purposes, ranging from North/South redistribution, to energy independence, to God knows what…”
“CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? – it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving – I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality.”
Energy rationing and the control of carbon dioxide, the direct byproduct of cheap, reliable hydrocarbon energy, has always been key to the Left’s Malthusian and misanthropic agenda of depopulation and deindustrialization. A totalitarian ideology enforced through punitive emissions controls under the guise of “Saving the Planet”.
STANFORD University and The Royal Society’s resident global warming alarmist and population freak Paul R. Ehrlich spelled out in 1976 the Left’s anti-energy agenda that still underpins the current ‘climate change’ scare:
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University/Royal Society fellow ]
(end of cited article by Spry)
This introduction to the IPCC ought to set the reader up to expect nothing but political polemic from them. However, to make their stand successful, they had to have some science behind the vilification of CO2. This “science” had long been prophesied, from Joseph Fourier in France in 1824, with evidence provided by Claude Pouillet in 1827 and 1838. John Tyndall showed evidence in 1896. But the effect was more fully quantified by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, who made the first quantitative prediction of global warming due to a hypothetical doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. [Names/dates from Wikipedia, e.g.- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science ]
With this scientifically proposed mechanism as a means to vilify CO2, the IPCC was off to the races! The UN gave grants to study the topic, as did many national research institutions in various countries. As academic, and non-governmental organization (NGO), scientists realized how much money there was to be had, the topic ballooned. The UN constructed the UN-FCCC (Framework Convention on Climate Change), with almost all of the countries in the world as “parties” to it.
The IPCC convened yearly meetings, where up to 30,000+ government, academic, NGO, media, and other interested people appeared. These were usually in very nice, expensive places, as their conferences were so large that only certain cities could host them. A few noteworthy were the Conference of the Parties (COPs) numbered 3 (Kyoto, Japan 1997), 15 (Copenhagen, Denmark 2009), 16 (Cancun, Mexico), 21 (Paris, France 2015), and 24 (Katowice, Poland 2018). I call these five out because I will describe some of their outcomes, and some telling, typically off-camera, commentary from the attendees as to the REAL purpose of these meetings.
The COP official attendees (representatives of the governments, NOT the press or NGOs) developed plans, many of which became “treaties” to be signed by the countries. For instance, at COP 3 in Kyoto, it was agreed that the world should reduce its GHG output. As WIKIPEDIA puts it [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol ]…
“The Kyoto Protocol implemented the objective of the UNFCCC to reduce the onset of global warming by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to “a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” (Article 2). The Kyoto Protocol applies to the six greenhouse gases listed in Annex A: Carbon dioxide (CO2), Methane (CH4), Nitrous oxide (N2O), Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), Perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).[6]
The Protocol is based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities: it acknowledges that individual countries have different capabilities in combating climate change, owing to economic development, and therefore puts the obligation to reduce current emissions on developed countries on the basis that they are historically responsible for the current levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
So, you see immediately that the push is to blame the “developed nations” (read USA), and this mantra becomes the basis of later agreements on “climate reparations” (the US and other developed nations put all of these horrible GHGs into the atmosphere, and thus they should pay those who need the money and DID NOT add significant CO2 to the atmosphere).
Bill Clinton was US President at this time, and he agreed to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, even though it had legally-binding requirements on the US, and would require Senate ratification. George Bush became president in 2001, and the Senate refused to ratify the Protocol, so, for all intents and purposes, it was dead.
Not to be defeated, the IPCC kept pushing each year to get everyone on board. And each time, they ratcheted up their demands on the developed world. The term “Loss and Damage” became the rallying call for the “developing” countries, wherein they could claim that the developed world caused the climate problems they face(d), and they could then sue (us).
At COP15 in Copenhagen, the “Parties”, emboldened by the election of Barack Obama to presidency of the US in 2008, agreed to an unbelievable (to me) wording. If we signed on to this, the United States would agree to become subservient to a “government” consisting of over 100 other nations, including giving this “government” the ability to tax the U.S. to pay “reparations” for having burned fossil fuels; to give it permission to tax our GDP up to 2% annually; and other assorted insults!
I put the word government in quotations, because that is the word the proposed Copenhagen Treaty actually used.
Meanwhile at that COP, the press was able to capture some very candid commentary from the attendees:
According to Jacques Chirac, the (1997) Kyoto Treaty is “the first component of an authentic global government.” In the words of Margaret Wallstrom, the EU’s commissioner for the environment, “This is about creating a level playing field for big businesses throughout the world.” Canada’s environment minister Christine Stewart comments “No matter if the science is all phony, there are still collateral environmental benefits” to global warming policies… “Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.” [Leo Johnson, Understanding the Global Warming Hoax, 2009, Red Anvil Press, Oakland, CA, Page 65]
How damning is that? Now we know exactly, that what we thought was true…the goal is NOT to “reduce global warming”…it is to control the world.
Further, at the later Cancun COP, in a candid interview with Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, and Lead author of the IPCC’s AR4 (Assessment Report #4), in 2007, he was quoted as saying“…climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection.”
“..the world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit, during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.” [http://www.cfact.org/a/1858/Do-you-believe-in-magic—-climate-numbers?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cfact+%28CFACT%29]
And it gets worse. At COP 21 in Paris in 2015, the UN Climate Chief stated “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to(sic) change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years…since the industrial revolution”. [https://citatis.com/a34446/077687/ ]
My question would be: the “economic development model” has worked for 150 years…why change it now? It has been very successful.
However, at COP 24 in Poland in 2018, the UN doubled down, with the UN climate chief stating…
“Failure to act will be catastrophic.” “We require deep transformations of our economies and societies.” “The impacts of climate change are increasingly hard to ignore.” [ http://www.climatedepot.com/2018/12/03/un-climate-chief-has-solution-to-urgent-climate-threat-we-require-deep-transformations-of-our-economies-and-societies/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ClimateDepot+%28Climate+Depot%29 ]
While much of this international subterfuge was happening, the US was under President Obama’s regime, which was fully bought into this socialist doctrine. He knew that there was NO CHANCE of getting any of these UN “treaties” ratified by the Congress. He also had seen that there was no chance of getting any carbon tax, or carbon “cap and trade” agreement passed. So, he unleashed the EPA to do the dirty work.
The EPA managed to get a court ruling that CO2 was “pollution”. Many lawsuits were brought against this “finding”, resulting in its going before the Supreme Court. Without ANY scientific background, the SCOTUS allowed the finding against CO2. Now, under the Clean Air Act, EPA could wreak havoc.
And they tried to, numerous times. For instance, in 2011, they promulgated new rules on carbon dioxide. “Using their own figures: they said that the new regulations would cost the US $78 billion per year.” [http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/13/how-much-would-you-buy/ ]
And the EPA chief (Gina McCarthy) said that these regulations were estimated to lower global mean temperature by 0.006 to 0.015C by 2100. (ARVID’s note…this is ABSOLUTELY INSIGNIFICANT compared to the 3+/- degrees of warming that the IPCC was claiming, by the year 2100.) These EPA costs represented $1900 TRILLION PER DEGREE!
What the hell were they thinking? You will see later….
In 2015, EPA released new regulations, designed to bankrupt America. These new regulations were cheaper than the 2011 versions, and would only cost us about $2.5 TRILLION. That is $125 trillion per degree of saved warming. And then, under questioning, EPA’s chief (Gina McCarthy) said thatthe global cooling effect would be less than 0.02F, but that it was important that we do it to set an example to the world!
Really…the US will bankrupt itself to set an example to the world?
And then, in 2016, again under Senate questioning, the truth comes out: “…she says the rule is about “driving investment in renewables…,[and] advancing our ongoing clean energy revolution”. McCarthy says, “That’s what… reinventing a global economy looks like.” https://www.climatedepot.com/2016/05/12/epa-chief-concedes-no-climate-impact-from-climate-rule-its-about-reinventing-a-global-economy/ ]
McCarthy has to be some special kind of stupid, or a raging socialist, or both!
At this point, I don’t even need to get into the incredibly poor “science” used by the IPCC and then totally swallowed by the lamestream media. I can talk about it until the world ends, but surely to no avail.
Many people with access to world-class computers have shown the ridiculousness of the IPCC’s attempts to “control global warming”. Some examples follow:
‘If the U.S. delivers for the whole century on President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.’
The cost of the UN Paris climate pact is likely to run 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year.’
An analysis in 2013 showed that…
“…if the US as a whole stopped emitting all carbon dioxide emissions immediately, the ultimate impact on projected global temperature rise would be a reduction, or a “savings”, of approximately 0.08C by the year 2050, and 0.17C by the year 2100…amounts that are, for all intents and purposes, negligible.”
I hope you got that…if the US “completely disappeared”, it would NOT stop global warming.
The UNIPCC Conference(s) of the Parties have continued, with gatherings in major world sites, from COP-22 in Morocco through COP-28 in Dubai (for complete listing, see https://unfccc.int/process/bodies/supreme-bodies/conference-of-the-parties-cop ).
At each of these, the world’s leaders convened, and wrangled over thorny issues, trying to push to a “FINAL” agreement. Two major issues were (1) trying to end production and use of fossil fuels, and (2) implementing a means of “loss and damage”, whereby those countries deemed to have produced the most global warming via fossil fuels would compensate those countries most affected by “climate change”.
In Dubai in 2023, the participants came close to agreeing to stop fossil fuels. The closest they could come to “stopping” fossil fuels was to agree to “phase down” their production and use. This was most unsatisfactory to the strongest climate alarmists. “However, many countries walked away from the talks frustrated at the lack of a clear call for a fossil-fuel “phase-out” this decade – and at a “litany of loopholes” in the text that might enable the production and consumption of coal, oil and gas to continue.” [ https://www.carbonbrief.org/cop28-key-outcomes-agreed-at-the-un-climate-talks-in-dubai/ ]
Regarding the second topic…” Despite an early breakthrough on launching a fund to pay for “loss and damage” from climate change, developing countries were left disappointed by a lack of new financial commitments for transitioning away from fossil fuels and adapting to climate impacts.” [ https://www.carbonbrief.org/cop28-key-outcomes-agreed-at-the-un-climate-talks-in-dubai/ ]
Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions, principally CO2 and methane, have been inexorably increasing, even as thousands of megawatts of renewable energy have been brought on line. And global temperature has been slowly increasing. And the alarmists and liberal media continue their shrill voices demanding “change”.