From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr.

“Many people think that the threat of ‘global warming’ arose only towards the end of the twentieth century…. Climate change, either natural or anthropogenic, has been discussed from the classical age onwards, evolving from the expected benefits of climate engineering to today’s fear of global disaster.”

– Hans von Storch and Nico Stehr, “Climate Change in Perspective,” Nature, June 8, 2000, p. 615

It is all gloom, what Michael Mann cautioned against as “doomism.”[1] Such alarm has been the mainstream narrative—and wrong—since the 1960s. And warnings about how exaggeration can backfire (New York Times: “In Climate Debate, Exaggeration Is a Pitfall“) have been thrown to the wind in the futile, costly pursuit of Net Zero.

This post presents the climate alarm quotations of today with the quotations from Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the late 1960s/early 1970s for historical perspective.

Guardian (May 8, 2024)

We begin with The Guardian US story by environmental editor Damian Carrington, “We Asked 380 Top Climate Scientists What They Felt about the Future … They Are Terrified, but Determined to Keep Fighting. Here’s What They Said

An exclusive Guardian survey of hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts has found that:

• 77% of respondents believe global temperatures will reach at least 2.5C above pre-industrial levels, a devastating degree of heating;
• almost half – 42% – think it will be more than 3C;
• only 6% think the 1.5C limit will be achieved.

So the Guardian contacted every available lead author or review editor of all IPCC reports since 2018. Almost half replied – 380 out of 843, a very high response rate.

Quotations in Article

“Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken. After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”

“We have seen these extreme events happening everywhere. There is not a safe place for anyone. I find it infuriating, distressing, overwhelming…. I got a depression.”

– Ruth Cerezo-Mota (National Autonomous University of Mexico)

“I’m relieved that I do not have children, knowing what the future holds.”

Anonymous expert

“It looks really bleak, but I think it’s realistic. It’s just the fact that we’re not taking the action that we need to.”

“Scientists are human: we are also people living on this Earth, who are also experiencing the impacts of climate change, who also have children, and who also have worries about the future. We did our science, we put this really good report together and – wow – it really didn’t make a difference on the policy. It’s very difficult to see that, every time.”

Lisa Schipper, University of Bonn

“I expect a semi-dystopian future with substantial pain and suffering for the people of the global south. The world’s response to date is reprehensible – we live in an age of fools.”

African scientist (anonymous)

“Running away from [unescapable reality] is impossible and will only increase the challenges of dealing with the consequences and implementing solutions.”

Joeri Rogelj, Imperial College, London

“Humanity is heading towards destruction. We’ve got to appreciate, help and love each other.”

Scientist, Pacific Island nation (anonymous)

“It is the biggest threat humanity has faced, with the potential to wreck our social fabric and way of life. It has the potential to kill millions, if not billions, through starvation, war over resources, displacement. None of us will be unaffected by the devastation.”

James Renwick, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

“I am scared mightily – I don’t see how we are able to get out of this mess.”

Tim Benton, Chatham House

“Most people do not realise how big these [tipping point] risks are.”

Wolfgang Cramer, Mediterranean Institute of Biodiversity and Ecology.

“[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inheriting.”

Lorraine Whitmarsh, University of Bath, UK

“The tacit calculus of decision-makers, particularly in the Anglosphere – US, Canada, UK, Australia – but also Russia and the major fossil fuel producers in the Middle East, is driving us into a world in which the vulnerable will suffer, while the well-heeled will hope to stay safe above the waterline…. Civil disobedience [is the next step].”

Stephen Humphreys, London School of Economics

“The enormity of the problem is not well understood. So there will be environmental refugees by the millions, extreme weather events escalating, food and water shortages, before the majority accept the urgency in reducing emissions – by which time it will be too late.”

Ralph Sims, Massey University, New Zealand

“I feel resigned to disaster as we cannot separate our love of bigger, better, faster, more, from what will help the greatest number of people survive and thrive. Capitalism has trained us well.”

US scientist (anonymous)

“… our societies will be forced to change and the suffering and damage to lives and livelihoods will be severe.”

Michael Meredith, at the British Antarctic Survey

Paul Ehrlich: 1960s Forward

A half century ago, the Malthusian mainstream, the establishment, was equally alarmed.

“At the moment we cannot predict what the overall climatic results will be of our using the atmosphere as a garbage dump. We do know that very small changes in either direction in the average temperature of the Earth could be very serious. With a few degrees of cooling, a new ice age might be upon us, with rapid and drastic effects on the agricultural productivity of the temperature regions.  With a few degrees of heating, the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps would melt, perhaps raising ocean levels 250 feet. . . .  In short, when we pollute, we tamper with the energy balance of the Earth.”

Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (Cutchogue, New York:  Buccaneer Books, 1968, 1971), p. 39.

“As University of California physicist John Holdren has said, it is possible that carbon-dioxide climate-induced famines could kill as many as a billion people before the year 2020.”

Paul Ehrlich, The Machinery of Nature, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1986, p. 274

MIT/Club of Rome (1972)

“If all the policies instituted in 1975 in the previous figure are delayed until the year 2000, the equilibrium state is no longer sustainable. Population and industrial capital reach levels high enough to create food and resource shortages before the year 2000.”

• Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), p. 169.

“Although we have many reservations about the approximations and simplifications in the present world model, it has led us to one conclusion that appears to be justified under all the assumptions we have tested so far. The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.”

• Donella Meadows et al. The Limits to Growth, p. 142.

“Limits to Growth … ‘astonishingly young’ (the oldest was 30) authors were true believers. Dennis and Donella Meadows retreated to a New Hampshire farm after completing the book ‘to learn about homesteading and wait for the coming collapse.’ ‘We definitely felt like Cassandras,’ Donella Meadows added, ‘especially as we watched the world react to our work’.”

• Quoted in Robert Bradley, Capitalism at Work: Business, Government, and Energy (2009), p. 234.

And older …

“Climate apprehension did not begin in 1988 or in 1957, or even in 1896.  There were colonial, early modern, and even ancient precedents. . . .  We have arrived, late in the twentieth century, at a climate discourse that is again saturated with metaphor, values, and apprehensions.”

• James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 136.

“‘Something is wrong with the weather’ is the title of a recent article in U.S. News and World Report, and an article in Saturday Review asks, ‘Is man changing the climate of the earth?’  The layman, and the nonspecialist on reading these articles and the many others in the newspapers will probably be convinced that the climate is changing, for the accumulating evidence is considerable. He will probably be confused also, for the reasons given for the change are as varied as the authors. One author will blame the change on sunspots, another on the consumption of fossil fuels producing an increase in the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere. Still another author will suggest air pollution as a significant cause, and another maintains that a complicated feedback of energy between sea and air is sufficient to produce irregular climate fluctuations. . . .   Who is right?”

• Reid Bryson, “‘All Other Factors Being Constant . . . ’ A Reconciliation of Several Theories of Climate Change,” Weatherwise, April 1968; reprinted in John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), pp. 78-79.

“The debate over climate change, both from natural causes and human activity, is not new.  Although the Baron C.-L. de Montesquieu is undoubtedly the best known Enlightenment thinker on the topic of climate determinism, others, notably the Abbe Du Bos, David Hume, and Thomas Jefferson, observed that climatic changes exerted a direct influence on individuals and society and that human agency was directly involved in changing the climate.”

• James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 11.

“As public awareness of global warming reached an early peak in the mid-1950s, the popular press began to carry articles on climate cooling.  Fortune published an article in 1954 entitled ‘Climate: The Heat May Be Off,’ and in 1958, just as the IGY was winding down, journalist Betty Friedan wrote an article for Harper’s Magazine on the coming of a new ice age.  Her article was a review of a recent theory by Maurice Ewing and William Donn which held that climate warming could lead to a breakup of the Arctic ice pack.”

• James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 131-32.

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[1] States Mann, “hot takes, hyperbole, and polarizing commentary best generate clicks, shares, and retweets. I often encounter, especially on social media, individuals who are convinced that the latest extreme weather event is confirmation that the climate crisis is far worse than we thought…. increasingly today we see it with climate doomists…. This is not true, or at best partly true.”

This article was published in Korean on the Epoch Times Korea, May 6, 2024

Seok Soon Park, Ph.D. Former President of Korea National Institute of Environmental Research, Professor of Environmental Science & Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul Korea

On March 8, 2007, the British TV Channel 4 aired a documentary titled “The Great Global Warming Swindle.” This film was the complete opposite of the fourth report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in February of the same year. It also directly challenged the documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” by the 45th Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, released in 2006. At that time, fear of man made global warming was sweeping across the world due to the IPCC report and Al Gore’s film.

Under these circumstances, British brave director Martin Durkin produced and aired a documentary on TV denying man made global warming, based on interviews with world-class scientists and the Earth’s climate history. This film featured compelling interviews with several prominent scientists, including Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT in US. Even now, 17 years later, director Durkin’s outstanding screenplay and interviews with scientists are enough to argue that “global warming is a large-scale fraud.”

On the other hand, big lies were hidden in the IPCC’s fourth report and Al Gore’s film. Notable examples include the ‘Himalayan glacier gate’ and the ‘Antarctic Vostok Ice Core fraud.’ However, these lies passed scrutiny by the Nobel Peace Prize committee, and Al Gore and the IPCC were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2007. The Nobel Committee stated that their awarding was for their efforts in raising awareness of the seriousness of global warming and urging action to address the issue. Furthermore, the Committee linked their efforts to maintaining world peace, stating that “excessive competition for the Earth’s resources leads to global warming and, as a result, increases the risk of violent conflicts and wars.“

The ‘Himalayan Glacier Gate,’ which came to light after the award, is a lie that the huge Himalayan ice cap will melt by 2035. Taking advantage of this lie, Rajendra Pachauri, then chairman of the IPCC, received research funds of 2.5 million and 310,000 pounds from the European Union and the Carnegie Foundation, respectively, to his Indian research institute TERI(The Energy and Resource Institute). The justification was that the melting of all Himalayan glaciers would cause serious problems in drinking water supply for nearly 2 billion Asians. However, sceptics continued to raise suspicions, and in 2010, the IPCC admitted that it was a lie. The IPCC’s excuse was that the number of years 2350 described in a Russian paper was written as 2035 in typos. Misleading the world into climate panic and receiving large amounts of research funds due to the number typo is the absurdity level of the UN IPCC report.

Al Gore’s Vostok Ice Core fraud is even more ludicrous. In his film, Al Gore showed data from ice core in the Vostok station of Antarctica, as if CO2 had raised the Earth’s temperature, proclaiming, “The increasing CO2 will turn the Earth into a furnace in the future.” However, this was a blatant lie. It had already been proved by the peer reviewed papers in 1999 and 2003 published in the famous ‘Science’ journal, that the Earth’s temperature rose first, followed by a subsequent increase in CO2 levels several hundred years later. These papers also explain the reason with the perfect scientific theories. He reversed the cause and the result to deceive the world. Furthermore, during the Eemian interglacial period 120,000 years ago, the CO2 concentration did not reach 300ppm which is much lower than today, but the temperature was 8 degree Celsius higher than today. This is solid proof that CO2 doesn’t drive the Earth temperature increase. Yet, Al Gore ignored this solid proof to deceive the world.

Martin’s 2007 film was sufficient to expose to the world the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize, given without scientific validation, was nothing more than a shabby and shameful emblem. Not only that, but the film also wielded another remarkable power. A London truck driver who watched the film filed a lawsuit against the British government for attempting to screen Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” in schools, arguing that “the decision to show a politically one-sided film in schools is wrong.” He didn’t want his two children, who were attending school, to be exposed to “An Inconvenient Truth.“

The London High Court, which took charge of the ruling, examined the scientific truths behind Al Gore’s claims in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Ironically, the court released its judgment outlining nine scientific errors on October 10, one day before the announcement of Nobel Peace Prize. These errors included assertions made by Al Gore himself in the film, such as predictions of a 6-meter sea level rise and the submergence of Pacific atolls in near future due to global warming. The court pointed out that the film was produced in the context of “alarmism and exaggeration,” and that science had been manipulated for political advocacy purposes by politicians and publicity experts. In particular, some of the nine errors were deemed closer to falsehoods than exaggerations. While allowing the use of “An Inconvenient Truth” as a teaching resource in schools, the court also emphasized the importance of presenting opposing viewpoints to prevent one-sided arguments. The government received an order from the court to send 77-page guidelines for correction containing these contents to all schools.

In March of this year, after 17 years, Director Durkin released “Climate the Movie: the Cold Truth”, the Sequel to the 2007 “The Great Global Warming Swindle.” Collaborating with American producer Tom Nelson, they crafted a more meticulous and solid script using scientific data released since then. It features interviews with world-renowned scientists such as the 2022 Nobel Prize laureate in physics Dr. John Clauser, along with William Harper, Steve Koonin, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, and others. The film has been uploaded on YouTube, Rumble, Odysee, and Bitchute, with subtitles in 29 languages, including Korean and Japanese, so that people around the world can watch it.

The film begins by explaining scientific facts such as the Earth’s climate history, the role of carbon dioxide, the true causes of climate change such as sun and cloud, and the trends in extreme weather events. In the latter part, it exposes the deceitful agreements, the climate bandwagon, and hidden politics behind the emergence of the ‘climate crisis’ narrative. It highlights how individuals’ freedoms and impoverished nations are severely affected. The film concludes in the final remark by stating, “There is a suspicion, or perhaps realisation, that climate change is an invented scare, driven by self-interest and snobbery, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly-funded establishment, hungry for ever more money and power. An assault on the freedom and prosperity of the rest of us.”

The film also reveals the basic truth that the climate scam was initiated by the environmental movement that regarded the free-market economy and industrial capitalism, which have brought prosperity to humanity, as it’s sworn enemy. The climate alarmists have been pouring increasingly apocalyptic narratives over the past 30 years, claiming that the catastrophes are imminent. However, none of the catastrophes has occurred, and casualties from climate disasters have rapidly decreased. They put people around the world under mass hypnosis called the ‘climate crisis’ with blatant lies. There is a Korean proverb that says, “Even the hard bank of a large reservoir can be easily collapsed by a small ant hole, if there is a flaw inside.“ The tremendous impact of this film, now accessible to audiences worldwide, is eagerly anticipated.

※Professor Seok Soon Park translated the subtitles of “Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth” into Korean. He currently serves as the South Korean ambassador for the World Climate Declaration by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (www.clintel.org) and a member of the CO2 Coalition (www.co2coalition.org). In 2021, he translated “Inconvenient Facts” by Gregory Wrightstone and “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom” by Patrick Moore into Korean. In 2023, he co-authored “Climate Apocalypse: the Greatest Scam in Human History,“ with British non-fiction writer David Craig, and wrote “[Fact Check] The Climate Crisis Myths” in Korean. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Environmental Science from Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey USA) in 1983 and 1985, after his B.S. from Seoul National University (Seoul, Korea) in 1980.