by Richard Schulman
Nature dominates Earth’s climate: there is no climate crisis. Human combustion of fossil fuels has powered unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. The human contribution to the warming that has taken place since the 1880s — when temperatures began recovering from the Little Ice Age (1300-1850) — has been minor and, in fact, beneficial, promoting forest growth and increased agricultural productivity. In this connection, we strongly recommend reading the transcript of a presentation that Princeton emeritus physics professor William Happer recently gave in Phoenix.
The claim that there is a climate crisis is a political fraud being promoted by progressive politicians and corporate media to justify a vast expansion of government and grab for near-total control of the economy. Defeating this fraud will require a political movement uniting Republicans, libertarians, political independents, and refugees from the Democratic Party. While this is ultimately a grass-roots political-organizing task, its success will require winning intellectual hegemony among a significant portion of the larger population. This is something every movement for political change must accomplish. As John Adams rightly observed, the 1776 Declaration of Independence was the culmination of a revolution in thinking that had already taken place in the minds of a plurality of Americans. Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist intellectual whose ideas have strongly influenced the present generation of leftist professionals, understood the importance of intellectual hegemony. It’s crucial that the opposition to Gramsci’s successors understands that as well.
The importance of intellectual hegemony
This means that climate scientists and their supporters must not give up efforts to discredit the quack climate nostrums and computer models the Biden administration is using to justify its colossally wasteful and expensive programs. They must at the same time explain the basic ideas on which an empirically confirmed climate science is being founded.
In this respect, Professor Happer’s lecture tours are exemplary. Let’s have more such explanatory lectures and popular writings by those who are qualified to give them. Hegemony won’t come from winning over the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Facebook, Amazon, and the faculty of progressive dominated universities. It will come from building alternate media and educational institutions. The progressive institutions will increasingly lose their prestige and credibility, as the corporate media already have to a considerable degree since 2017.
What follows is one journalist’s attempt to describe the scientific breakthroughs that demonstrate how fraudulent are progressive claims that a climate crisis exists to justify their economy-destroying power grab.
Hothouse / icehouse cycles
There have been four cycles of alternating warm and cold intervals since the Phanerozoic eon began 541 million years ago. The CO2-centered “climate science for dummies” being promoted by President Biden and the Schumer-Pelosi Democrats in Congress cannot credibly explain the naturally caused cycles that have dominated Earth’s climate since the planet began over four billion years ago — well before man’s appearance on the scene two million years ago — much less the alternations between the icehouse and hothouse intervals of the Phanerozoic, when animal life burst forth on land and began complementing the teeming seas.
We are now transitioning out of the fourth cold era, an ice age usually dated as ending around 11,700 years ago. The warming interval we are presently in is called the Holocene. There is some indication that we may now be entering a pause in the inter-glacial warming or even a cooling like the Maunder Minimum in solar magnetic activity that produced the Little Ice Age.
Natural causes dominate even in the modern period
Genuine climate science as it has developed especially over the past three decades can explain how these climactic shifts derive mostly from natural causes. Despite the great multiplicity of influences on climate, recent climate science has also made a fair start toward explaining what caused the lesser variations in temperature that took place within the four icehouse / hothouse cycles, as well as those occurring during the present inter-glacial, the Holocene.
Progressives opportunistically claim that past and present climate is monocausally determined by CO2 and that mankind’s continued combustion of fossil fuels will therefore create a planetary catastrophe of melting glaciers, droughts, resource wars, and rising oceans. This makes for great Hollywood disaster movies, but it’s not science. It’s just scare politics to justify runaway spending and dictatorial control over the economy by power-hungry Democratic politicians and their corporate allies.
What needs to be explained
Why isn’t the progressives’ CO2 narrative even science? A climate science worth its name must explain why ice ages happen, why hothouse and icehouse epochs are often punctuated by contrary intervals, and why some past epochs were glacial but had high CO2. If the CO2 fixated theory of the progressives were true, those epochs should have been hothouse dominated. The Democratic Party promoted narrative can’t explain these facts — nor why the Antarctic cools when the Northern hemisphere warms (and the converse). It can’t explain why there was a Medieval Warming followed by a Little Ice Age. Nor can it explain the bursts of cooling years within the post-1880 warming, such as the 1970s cooling that caused progressives to worry about an imminent ice age. And it can’t explain the 1998-2012 pause that caused progressives to change the name of their narrative from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Humans weren’t even around for the three earlier warming periods. The warming that took place during these previous Phanerozoic warming intervals took place entirely without us, our campfires, and our recent fossil fuels. We’re transitioning now out of a fourth glacial era, an ice age usually said to have ended around 11,700 years ago. The warming interval we are presently in is called the Holocene. Within it, even the general warming trend has been interrupted by cold spells, such as the Little Ice Age (1300-1850). Nor, contrary to the climate alarmists, are the recent decades the warmest that the Holocene has seen. The Medieval Warming, for example, witnessed decades even warmer than the present. Population doubled in China and Europe revived from the Dark Ages. Cathedrals were built and universities founded. Warming hasn’t been a big problem for humans, though cooling has.
Minor effect of CO2
The CO2 added in the past century through mankind’s combustion of fossil fuels has increased warmth by only a small increment. Atmospheric CO2 is presently a little above 400 million parts per million (ppm). If CO2 were doubled to 800 ppm, the increase in temperature would be at most 0.8 degrees C. (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit). Furthermore, that small increase in temperature and CO2 would, on net, be beneficial, by expanding cultivable land and increasing agricultural productivity.
Since World War II, despite President Eisenhower’s warning in his Farewell Address, government has come to dominate scientific research in the US. Through control of research purse strings it has manipulated climate science to support a drive for vastly increased government power to head off a climate crisis that exists only in progressive politicians’ heads. President Biden and a Pelosi-Schumer-led Congress are using this fictional climate crisis to justify wasting trillions of dollars to achieve a barely noticeable diminution in temperature by the year 2100. Never in history is so much wealth being wasted in such self-destructive folly.
Several important enigmas resolved
Real climate science — versus the fake government product — shows that nature not CO2 (anthropogenic or otherwise) still dominates climate. We briefly summarize several key developments in climate science that underline this point.
A century ago the Serbian scientist Milutin Milankovitch proposed to explain earth’s ice ages and warming periods by the slight variations in the orbiting earth’s distance and positioning relative to the sun. The three cycles he proposed were verified as having a modest effect, but they couldn’t by themselves account for the drastic switches between hothouse and icehouse conditions.
A crucial Shaviv-Veizer paper
A 2003 paper by Nir Shaviv and Ján Veizer cleared up the mystery. The major driver of ice ages was seen to be our solar system’s successive visits to the several spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. (See Figure 3 above)
The spiral arms host many more stars (young clusters in particular, a key source of the cosmic rays that bombard Earth) than the relatively star-deprived spaces between the arms. Those cosmic rays seed an increase in clouds that can cool the Earth enough to trigger an ice age. Earth’s visits to successive spiral arms show a striking inverse relationship to alternating icehouse / greenhouse epochs. (See Figure 4 below) Alongside that near-perfect inverse correlation there is a very good causal explanation for the relationship between the two.
The connection between cosmic rays and cold temperatures on Earth had already been worked out beginning in 1996 by the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark and his collaborators. Incoming cosmic rays, if not blocked by the sun’s magnetic field, earth’s magnetic field, or earth’s atmosphere (in descending order of blocking effectiveness), create ions which seed low-lying clouds. These then cool Earth by reflecting more of the sun’s energy back into space. Enough clouds for a long enough time and, voila, an ice age.
The cosmic ray / cloud hypothesis
Svensmark’s work on the modulating of the cosmic-ray influx by the sun’s variable magnetic field made possible a more fine-grained characterization of climate variations on Earth. His cosmic ray – cloud hypothesis survived tough tests – notably the Antarctic anomaly, Laschamp Event, and Forbush decreases. Svensmark and Nigel Calder’s semi-popular 2007 exposition, The Chilling Stars: A New Theory of Climate Change, explains the details and is highly recommended reading.
But suppose, playing devil’s advocate, we argue that even if the climate science outlined by Shaviv, Veizer, Svensmark, and others accurately characterizes Earth’s pre-1880s climate, how relevant is that for describing the post-1880s climate warming? First of all, that warming has amounted at most by a barely noticeable one degree C. since the Little Ice Age ended in the mid 19th century. Secondly, as physicist William Happer and others have shown (see also Figure 2 above), a doubling of CO2 from present levels will have a very minor effect on temperature.
Noble lying
But progressives are too deeply committed to their false CO2 narrative to retreat at this point. Accordingly, they fall back on the noble lie. They reason: surely we know what is better for the helots even if we have to depart from the truth. Like Plato, the noble lie’s originator, they are uncomfortable with commerce and its modern expressions, population growth and industrial civilization. Maurice Strong, another noble liar, founded the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Socialist, close friend of Communists, and member of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Strong wrote: “[I]sn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
That, friends, is the ultimate logic of the Biden and European Union green energy programs. The winner, if any, will be the Chinese Communists among whom Maurice Strong spent many of his last years.
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