The Collapsing Minds of the ‘Collapsing Climate’ Cult: Part IV – The Cost of Misdiagnosing, and Are We Dealing With a Scam?
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace.
Originally published on A Plague on Both Houses substack.
The cost of misdiagnosing the problem
Even if we assume that the obsession with eliminating CO₂ emissions stems from a good-faith misdiagnosis of environmental problems, there is a cost to misdiagnosing illness – the treatment can make the existing problem worse. There is much evidence that this is already happening, and it’s set to get worse.
The increased use of biofuels in an attempt to move away from oil and gas has “played a major role in global food crises in 2008, 2011, and 2022. In 2022, global food insecurity hit record highs. Nevertheless, approximately 10 percent of the world’s grains are being turned into biofuels.”[1]
Writing in 2023, Judith Curry observed that[2] [3]:
- “The European Union plans to allocate one-fifth of Europe’s cropland to producing fuels for bioenergy and also plans a four-fold increase of wood imports to burn for energy equivalent to approximately 40% of Canada’s (the world’s largest exporter) annual wood harvest.”
- “The United States uses about 40% of its annual corn crop, grown on tens of millions of acres of cropland, to produce ethanol that comprises only about 10 percent of US transportation fuel. It has been estimated that the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions of ethanol are no less than those of gasoline, and likely greater.”
- Corn ethanol has exacerbated environmental problems such as soil erosion and poor water quality, contributing to the degradation of agricultural land that would be more importantly used for food production.”
- The lifecycle emission of biofuels can be worse than the displaced fossil fuels.
- Biofuels exacerbate fuel shortages and degrade farmland.
- Land used for renewable energy is far greater than land used for the current energy system. The land footprint of renewable energy systems displaces natural ecosystems, leads to land degradation, and creates trade-offs for food production and conservation.
- Densely populated countries simply do not have sufficient land to support a majority of the energy supply coming from renewables.
There are very real environmental problems to solve, but you won’t hear the New Left Conspiracy Realists obsess over them the way they do over carbon. Here is a list of some[4]:
- Land use and deforestation resulting in habitat destruction and loss of species.
- Overfishing.
- Pollution of the air, water, and soil from agrochemicals, mineral extraction, and burning of wood and dung for energy.
- Degradation of the earth’s surface from mining, littering, and household and industrial waste.
These real and scientifically proven problems – the effects of which you can actually see and touch – are ironically not such a focus for climate alarmists and the billionaire-funded ‘think-tanks’ promoting their narrative. Despite all these problems, or perhaps because of them, it is far easier to relentlessly quack the words ‘climate collapse’, and then advocate for simplistic, but very costly, energy austerity. Just turn off the CO₂ knob and everything will be fine.
However, energy austerity promises to decrease the quality of life for billions on the planet, and will in fact increase some of the problems above, such as deforestation and the burning of wood for fuel. Energy austerity promises to make access to nutrition, healthcare, and education even more unattainable for the poorest on the planet.
Given the unscientific nature of the claim about the catastrophic link between CO₂ and ‘dangerous’ warming, the thing I find most disturbing is the total disregard for the at least one billion people currently living at unacceptable poverty levels, whose lives would be greatly improved by access to electricity derived from gas and oil. Michael Northcott writes that:
“International Energy Authority data indicates that four in five families across sub-Saharan Africa still cook with wood, charcoal, or dung over open fires, practices that cause over 800,000 premature deaths each year from household air pollution — the majority among women and children. The G7, the World Bank, and the United Nations have, in pursuit of net zero commitments, systematically cut funding and investment in fossil fuel electricity generation in Africa, on the basis that it would accelerate the transition to renewables. Instead it accelerates deaths. The 960 million people in sub-Saharan Africa without access to clean cooking are the human consequence of a governance agenda built on a contested atmospheric theory, enforced by the denier framing, and insulated from accountability by the institutional network this article [Northcott’s article] has traced from Veblen and the Rockefellers to the carbon derivatives markets of the City of London.” [emphasis]
This is what both the neo-liberal and the anti-imperialist Left is defending. I cannot find words to describe the horror of the contradiction the Left has created for itself. The purpose of a system is what it does, and if the Left know what the IPCC-UN Climate agenda is doing, they are wilfully complicit in a crime.
It is both patently obvious and humane to acknowledge that “the poorest populations would benefit far more from access to grid electricity […] than from reductions to the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.”[5] And if the Left wishes to cling to its obsession with extreme weather events, the poor would benefit far more from help in coping with and adapting to these events, rather than remaining poor and lacking the resources to deal with them.
There are far more important environmental issues than CO₂ to resolve if the lot of humanity is to be improved, and they are not being raised by the climate alarmists in the Western Left intelligentsia. Whatever psychological reasons we might use to make sense of the madness, Occam’s razor demands the simplest explanation to it all – they just do not care. Callousness.
There is a growing realisation that nuclear power has the potential to deliver abundant and clean energy. Curry, along with many other experts, is of the view that the fear of nuclear power is not consistent with the actual risks. However, the US-NATO alliance reserves the right to veto a nation’s nuclear energy development on the grounds that only those nations approved by that criminal syndicate may have nuclear technology.
It’s all quite Kafkaesque in its insanity, but perfectly congruent with the logic of a global scam, and equally congruent with the war on humanity that began in earnest in March 2020.
Perhaps the most perverse twist to the purported concern for the environment is the insanity of geoengineering – specifically attenuating solar radiation by stratospheric aerosol injection, something that the UK government announced last summer that it would start doing, but which has in fact been going on long before its official start. The Chicken Little geniuses in the barmy climate alarmist army have decided that blocking the sun’s rays by dumping into the atmosphere untold millions of tonnes of undisclosed synthetic chemicals, which many investigators have revealed to be particulates containing aluminium, barium, and strontium among other things, is the answer to our problems. Kafka could not have conjured such insanity in his wildest imaginings.
Even if you don’t know what they’re spraying, the absence of this disclosure is horrific enough. All you need to know is that we are being sprayed on a daily basis with tonnes of material that is not natural, and not biologically organic. It is heavy metal particulates. How do you square that with ‘saving the planet’? If industrialisation is seen as an unwelcome human intervention in nature, how is it sane to claim that dumping industrial chemicals and metal particulates into the atmosphere on an industrial scale is the answer?
Every time I write about geoengineering, I find myself involuntarily stressing the barbarity of the savages of science trying to steal the sun from us, while spraying us with a cocktail of chemicals and heavy metals. The sun is the source of all life on Earth. This is a scientific fact, or so NASA says. Here’s what NASA thinks about the importance of the sun:
“Nothing is more important to us on Earth than the Sun. Without the Sun’s heat and light, the Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice-coated rock. The Sun warms our seas, stirs our atmosphere, generates our weather patterns, and gives energy to the growing green plants that provide the food and oxygen for life on Earth.” [emphasis added]
Oh look! Did NASA say that the sun “generates our weather patterns”? Isn’t that substantially denied by the climate alarmists in their hypothesis of catastrophic human-made climate change?
Now, here is a confession from a scientific body that not only confirms the completely unscientific nature of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), but also serves as an indirect confession that the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) hypothesis is unprovable. The statement is by the National Research Council of the National Academies in the US, and it refers to SAI as “albedo modification”. Albedo refers to the earth’s reflectivity of solar radiation. Therefore, human injected aerosol particles are expected to increase the reflection of the sun’s energy. The National Academies of Sciences admitted in 2015 that:
“The uncertainties in modelling of both climate change and the consequences of albedo modification make it impossible today to provide reliable, quantitative statements about relative risks, consequences, and benefits of albedo modification to the Earth system as a whole, let alone benefits and risks to the specific regions of the planet.”[6]
This is as comprehensive an admission as any that you’re going to get that we are being treated as lab rats. And don’t give me that bullshit response: “Oh, but why would ‘they’ do this to themselves?” When you ask that question, all you’re doing is looking for a reason not to do anything about an ongoing crime. Does anyone truly know why a psychopath does the things they do? It’s not relevant to the undeniable fact that we are being experimented on, and our silence is treated as our consent. We’ll only know why they’re doing it when we stop them and investigate the crime.
But here is how we extrapolate that confession about albedo modification to the unprovability of the CAGW hypothesis. Steven Koonin points out that if industrial carbon emissions represent a human influence on climate, so does albedo modification. Thus, all the reasons given by the National Academies for being unable to quantify the risks and effects of albedo modification apply with the same precision to human carbon emissions. Simply take the quoted confession from the National Academies and replace the words “albedo modification” with the words “rising greenhouse gas emissions”, and hey presto: you have a comprehensive statement about the total lack of certainty about the CAGW hypothesis.
Both the Covid ‘vaccine’ fiasco, and now ‘albedo modification’ serve as comprehensive confirmation that we are powerless to stop the global ruling class from treating the entire human species as lab rats. You can hear them guffaw as they say, “Let’s inject them with this, then spray them with that, and see what happens,” as we dutifully drink water spiked with fluoride, eat bread laced with folic acid, and watch the circuses they prepare for us. We are being held captive by a death cult, and the Western Left intelligentsia are fully paid-up members of that cult.
Is the climate narrative a scam?
After all this effort to demonstrate the deep uncertainty in climate science, how can I be certain that the dominant narrative is a scam?
The two most consequential scientific issues of the 21st century thus far have centred on the Covid debacle and climate science. In A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell opined that: “Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.” If one puts any stock in that observation, then judging by the scientific establishment’s performance on the 21st century’s two most consequential scientific debates, science in the West is now indistinguishable from the logic and tenor of the Medieval European religious persecutions that preceded science’s apogee. We have come full circle.
Throughout this piece, I have been at great pains to avoid advocating alternative theories and climate mechanisms to counter the official CO₂ narrative. To the extent that alternative theories are mentioned, it is to show that a large body of climate scientists dissent from the official narrative, and not that I know with absolute certainty that the alternative theories are correct. There simply is no scientific consensus on the climate debate. Not only is there no scientific consensus, there is deep uncertainty about the knowledge of climate change mechanisms and how to quantify them. In layperson’s language, we need to admit that we don’t know. In such a climate (excuse the pun), it is puerile or, worse still, malicious, to adopt certitude.
In short, if you cannot admit that climate science is incredibly complex; if you cannot admit that the boys and girls in white coats haven’t figured it all out yet; if you cannot admit that the deep uncertainty in climate science precludes decision-making that assumes certainty and bets the house based on unfounded certitude; if you claim to know what science is, and yet haven’t grasped all of this, then you are not a serious person.
The question that now arises is: how does one square the uncertainty permeating climate science with being certain that the dominant climate narrative is a scam? Claiming that the human-made climate alarmist narrative is a scam while also advocating for scientific scepticism appears, on the face of it, to be a contradiction. Scepticism implies that there is a possibility, however small one might rate it, that man-made CO₂ emissions are the primary driver of global warming. And if that possibility exists, then surely you can’t be sure that the dominant CO₂ narrative is a scam, right? Wrong.
At the top of the capitalist pyramid – at the top of the scam and propaganda machine – is a group of privileged people who know that they don’t know, but are pretending that they do. They understand the deep uncertainty, but they have chosen to manufacture certainty with influence and money. The institutions and people driving the manufactured consensus actually do know what science is. They know that we don’t know, and yet they are leading an ignorant population to believe that there is certainty about the hypothesis. Even if, at some point in the future, CO₂ ends up being proven to pack the punch they’re claiming it does, that won’t change the fact that they’re running a scam right now because they know there’s no basis for certainty, and yet they are claiming that there is. That’s dishonest. That’s a scam.
What evidence do we have that they know it’s a scam? Well, confessions work pretty well in a court of law, don’t they? You see, they can’t help telling us from time to time, and if you’re prepared to read reliable dissenting sources, you’ll find the scammers’ confessions. Here are some quotes from the high priests of the climate cult who are responsible for perpetrating this scam. If you want some insight into what the Western Left intelligentsia is doing, these quotes are a good starting point.
The late Stephen Schneider, who was a prominent climate researcher, said this in 1989:
“On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but […] On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”[7]
This presentation of a ‘double ethical bind’ to justify political activism within science is pure sophistry. There is no professional ethical duty in political campaigning, but there is one in science. Therefore, there is no ‘double’ bind to speak of. There is only one bind – the scientific one. Here is a climate scientist openly advocating for the mixing of science – telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, which includes admitting ignorance – with politics, which he describes as “making the world a better place […] by reduc[ing] the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. When you mix science with politics, you get politics.
There is no way to be an effective political campaigner and an honest scientist at the same time. In your capacity as a scientist, you must abide by the scientific method. That doesn’t stop you from holding political beliefs. It means you cannot abuse science to advocate for those beliefs, especially when political campaigning impedes your scientific objectivity. Notice Schneider’s judicious use of the word “potentially” to describe the “disastrous climatic change”. He knew the science wasn’t settled. He knew there was no scientific consensus, and he was invoking the precautionary principle, the damaging consequences of which I discussed in Part II.
Here is a more explicit admission of doing the wrong thing for the ‘right’ reason:
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation.[8]
This one comes from someone who was not an alarmist, but was exposing his alarmist colleagues:
“Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is alright and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve.” – Daniel Botkin, former Chair of Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.[9]
And here’s the icing on the cake:
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace.[10]
The early and mid-20th century witnessed attempts to move societies in the right direction; to make “the world a better place” with gulags and mass famine. Energy austerity is very far from being a victimless crime, so it seems to me that history is rhyming all over again, albeit to the tune of a more cunning strategy suffused with plausible deniability – scientism. Plus ça change.
Let me remind readers of Nick Hudson’s rule of thumb for identifying a power-grabbing scam by global capital:
“If we can detect: (1) a propagandised global crisis; (2) admitting only global solutions, and; (3) with dissenting voices viciously silenced, then we know with absolute certainty that we are dealing with a scam.”
Of course, contradictions are another sure sign of scams. Establishment manager Tony Blair, who (as I will never tire of pointing out) also does an eerily excellent job of channelling Bob from Twin Peaks, is now at great pains to emphasise that, while he’s “not a climate denier”, it’s time to U-turn on Net Zero and use cheap energy (aka ‘fossil’ fuel) because there’s no point in being a sacrificial lamb when the rest of the world has got its foot flat down on the oil and gas pedal. From a leading Establishment manager who was once tasked with singing from the Net Zero hymn sheet, this does not square with the narrative of ‘climate collapse’. He tangentially mentioned the word AI, which as we know has a voracious energy appetite. So, that’s a clue as to what might be going on.
It looks to me as though the Establishment may be in a bit of a pickle, having found itself needing to gobble up vast amounts of oil and gas to feed the AI beast while also wanting to cleave to the Chicken Little climate cover story.
Michael Northcott has done an excellent piece on his own Damascene conversion to climate scepticism. I urge you to read it. In it, he highlights the fact that the propaganda of climate collapse coexists bizarrely with the ongoing savagery of wars and genocide. The US Department of War, which is exempt from scrutiny in the carbon emissions framework, emits more than the entire national emissions of Portugal or Sweden. Again, I remind you that the purpose of a system is what it does. Ignore the sanctimonious avowals of caring for the environment and the planet.
Most telling of all contradictions is how the climate narrative was born, and who birthed it. It starts with the birth of the Technocracy movement in the 1930s, of which I’ve written a fair bit. That movement described Technocracy as the science of social engineering, with its aim being “the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism”, using energy rationing as the basis. It received two major boosts in the early 1970s: first from the formation of the Trilateral Commission by a Technocracy acolyte, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his sponsor David Rockefeller. Then the Club of Rome, a global capitalist think-tank founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrial magnate, produced its influential Limits to Growth Report in 1972 predicting civilisational collapse. The centrepiece of its message was the need to curb population growth. To peddle its Malthusian message, it established the spurious catastrophising computer-modelling template now used by the ‘collapsing climate’ industry.
Crucially, “the man who translated the neo-Malthusian revival of the Limits to Growth report into the architecture of global environmental and climate governance was Maurice Strong: a Canadian oilman and David Rockefeller protégé”. Strong chaired the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, which created United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). He then chaired the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which resulted in setting up the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which in turn birthed the IPCC. Northcott points out that:
“What Strong built institutionally, the Rockefeller network funded intellectually. The same dynasty whose Standard Oil fortune created the petroleum economy bankrolled, through various philanthropic vehicles, the research programmes that would mandate its dismantling. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund announced its divestment from fossil fuels in 2014, a political signal and a portfolio decision positioning the fund’s capital for the ‘green energy transition’ it helped to engineer.”
Having funded the UN, the Club of Rome and the Stockholm Conference, the Rockefeller network then funded “much of the early climate science, and … over 900 climate and environmental campaigning NGOs.”
In its 1991 report – The First Global Revolution – the Club of Rome’s mask slipped in discussing its strategy under the heading: “The Common Enemy of Humanity Is Man”[11]:
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we suggested that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions, these phenomena constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”
This is not a scientific discussion about the potential cause of global warming. This is psychopathic discourse for engineering a bogeyman scam to harm humanity.
Again, as I’ve tried to point out in previous pieces, carbon trading is just another financial scam. Northcott puts his finger on it in this part of his piece:
“The carbon markets that Kyoto (1997) and Paris (2015) created are not, in any meaningful sense, environmental instruments. They are derivatives markets: carbon credits are certificates representing the right to emit a tonne of CO₂, traded, bundled, hedged, and speculated upon by the same institutions that packaged mortgage-backed securities before 2008.” [emphasis added]
The agenda has been decided, and The Science™ is being used as a sword to clear a path to the destination. There is a moral to the Chicken Little fable which the ‘collapsing climate’ fear peddlers would do well to heed: sowing unfounded panic led to Chicken Little’s coterie of frantic followers being taken in by a cunning fox.
The three-layered control system of programmable money, asset tokenisation, and digital ID needs a control narrative that convinces people to cooperate with greater restrictions, and the climate scam fits the bill psychologically and economically. The psyop is: ordinary people are responsible for the destruction of the planet, and the consumption of ordinary people must be monitored, tracked and controlled. Society must be re-engineered and the ruling class’s new toy of Technocracy stands ready, with your permission, to be deployed.
Our uncritical acceptance of the utterly idiotic notion of ‘decarbonisation’ opens up infinite possibilities for consumption control, and therefore social engineering using the ‘energy certificates’ concept envisioned by the founding fathers of Technocracy. Despite the quandary they face in needing cheap energy to fuel the data centres that will form the edifice of the digital panopticon, I cannot see the controllers giving up on climate hysteria unless a majority of people themselves actually reject it. One of the main barriers to this happening is the hysterical Left, which is doing a fine job of propping up the propaganda machine.
The so-called Western Left intelligentsia has completely lost its street smarts, if it ever had any. The New Left Conspiracy Realists now posing as the new hip and trendy kids on the block aren’t that much better. Labouring under the delusion that intellectual superiority will guarantee success, the anti-imperialist Left still have their dialectical materialist heads so far up their own arses, they can’t see the transnationalist mugger standing in front of them, and rifling through their pockets.
Lately, they’ve taken to a form of regression therapy in which they revel in doing exposés on the assassinations of the 1960s. Look, doing good history is important, but what’s the point of being able to tell us everything we need to know about the JFK and MLK assassinations if they can’t see the scam that’s slapping them in the face right now – ‘catastrophic human-made global warming’? I’m not saying don’t do truther history, but ‘They’ don’t really care any longer if you’ve figured out the JFK assassination. The revolutionary momentum has passed. History is expected to be ugly, and the older it is, the less They care about how ugly it looks. Time has dissipated the reaction into calmly sipping one’s coffee and saying: “Gosh, thank heavens we don’t do that anymore!”
We need to stop the getaway car while it’s in motion, not once they’ve dumped it in a forest and burnt it to a husk. We need to call out the climate fraud while it’s in train. Frankly, I’m not interested in jumping into the time machine with a Lefty posing as a Conspiracy Realist when they don’t know what the score is today.
Is the ‘collapsing climate’ narrative a scam? I’m as certain as I can be that it is. For those who wish to maintain an attitude of scepticism on whether it’s a scam or not, I’ll remind you that politics is not science. Here’s my guide to assessing the probability of this being a political scam:
“No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.” – William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
In Part V, which I found the most interesting and most difficult essay to write, I’ll put the ‘collapsing climate’ cult on the couch and try to get inside their heads.
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[1] Judith A Curry, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response, Anthem Press, 2023, Ch. 14, Pg. 231.
[2] Ibid., Pg. 232.
[3] Ibid., Pg. 235.
[4] Ibid., Ch. 3, Pg. 37.
[5] Ibid., Ch. 10, Pg. 154.
[6] Steven E. Koonin, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters, BenBella Books Inc., Dallas, 2024, Ch. 4, Pg. 96.
[7] Koonin, op. cit., Introduction, Pg. 8.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid..
[11] Alexander Kind and Bertrand Schneider, The First Global Revolution: A Report by The Council of The Club of Rome, Simon & Schuster Ltd., 1991, Pg. 102
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