“I believe that if things don’t move forward, activists – in tandem with lawyers and NGOs – will have to force climate protection on everyone”. On 25 September 2023, it was neither the United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, nor UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who gave free rein to their dystopian desire for state-sanctioned violence, but a German prime-time TV weather presenter. The fact that you can no longer tell the weather report from what unelected officials say, never mind activists in Day-Glo vests, is a symptom of a society in the process of self-abolition.
Being more protracted and roughly 40 years in the making, the immediate psychological damage caused by the climate scare is seemingly already more serious than the impact of Covid measures. A survey in the UK in 2021 showed roughly every second schoolchild was experiencing “serious anxiety and panic” due to climate change. The influx of young and very young people into Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the Last Generation and other doomsday cults financed by the Climate Emergency Fund and the Rockefeller Foundation, and which have been making a name for themselves for almost a decade, is consistent with this. It is well known that these cults have put their money on an all-embracing social disruption. Books with titles like How to Blow Up a Pipeline (by academic activist and self-avowed “eco-jihadist” Andreas Malm, and now a TV movie) are a direct expression of the almost sexual infatuation derived from the romanticization of underdog street violence and widespread social chaos, all from the comfortable distance of the university cafeteria.
Books like How to Blow Up a Pipeline are a direct expression of the almost sexual infatuation derived from romanticizing underdog street violence and widespread social chaos, all from the comfortable distance of the university cafeteria.
The 2016 book Riot.Strike.Riot and other “radical” pamphlets by University of California at Davis professor of English Literature Joshua Clover, who at one point suggested that the killing of police officers could be justified, is another case in point. Indeed, it is all about the social disruption itself. James Lindsay got it right for once when he said: “The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the Revolution”. It has been pointed out that the ecowarriors’ belief in and advancement of social disruption for its own sake has a deeply religious character: the political space has been eliminated and replaced by a world of plain good and evil, that justifies almost any drastic measure, the ends of which are deliberately left unclear. In a perversion of the Spinozan teaching of the all-encompassing substance as the “essence of God”, in the climate activists’ deeply nihilist, frenzied worldview, “capitalism” holds the position of an all-encompassing substance, albeit a bottomlessly evil one. “Capitalism” is perceived as a transhistorical, ethereal substance bereft of established historical transformations and of the specificities of an economic, political, technological and judicial, often quite complex and culturally varying, system. Both technological progress and a political system granting “bourgeois”, i.e. the civil liberal, rights, are viewed with deep cynicism in the climate riot club – not to mention individualism and other values related to the “decadent, colonial West”. In that sense, Greta has been rightly called the “id” of the global left: misanthropic, Malthusian, borderline antisemitic, and openly anti-Western.
Greta has been rightly called the “id” of the global left: misanthropic, Malthusian, borderline antisemitic, and openly anti-Western.
When she, a honorary theologist, ordered the world to “panic” and little more, she meant it. There is no “liberatory agenda”, no “better” future, no “saving the planet” (and to what ends?). The collective panic, the disruption, the destruction itself is the goal. It is not a coincidence that hellbent cultural revolutionaries have become our current thought-leaders, as Time magazine had it. With the destructive force of the climate cult, the vampires have left the intimacy of their castle. They have taken over the world.
The Hatred of Carbon Dioxide
This also explains why the monocausal, mantra-like short-circuit “fossil fuels → CO2 emissions → climate change” is now intended to make the hateful reflex against CO2 second nature to the new collective subject. CO2 is after all a chemical compound without which there would be no life on earth. We must be trained to develop a negative reflex against CO2. This must become reproducible, retrievable, induce a neuro-linguistic reprogramming in the strict sense. Aiding and abetting in this is the daily mafia-like climate blackmail by the UN, EU Council, WHO, WEF and other unelected bodies, on whose side Greta and academic activists like Malm find themselves, through such phrases as a “boiling planet“. This inverted view of reality – not the ghost of a “boiling planet”, but the “permanent elimination of carbon from the atmosphere“, which would indeed destroy all life on earth – serves the global war against development and (economic) flourishing. Overpriced solar and wind energy are becoming allies to “the cause”. Anything that doesn’t create CO2 in the first place is good – already a problem with solar, as Chinese solar panel production facilities are powered by coal – but anything that destroys and “eats” CO2 is better.
There is no doubt that the measures adopted in the spirit of these maxims are about the rule of man over man and not at all about “nature”. The latter, as the German cultural philosopher and Café Américain contributor Martin Burckhardt notes, rather functions as an “ideal projection apparatus”:
“The revolutionaries who strived to ‘liberate’ the tortured proletariat at the end of the 1960s were told by the workers they had no interest in this kind of redemption […] In contrast to the ‘oppressed’, nature does not respond. In this sense, it is an ideal ally for the climate policy avant-garde. You are connected to a higher power. You are practising political theology”.
Nature cannot say no. It cannot protest. Unlike the proletariat, it cannot object to becoming an instrument in the hands of the powerful. And because nature has no voice, it can neatly lend itself to any kind of power play.
Unlike the proletariat, nature cannot protest or object to becoming an instrument in the hands of the powerful.
Indeed today every social problem is effectively blamed on “climate change”. People dying in extreme weather events? Rising inflation? Covid? It’s all climate change, and always has been. This rhetoric also presupposes that climate change cannot have natural causes, but only “anthropogenic” ones. If the observable atmospheric and physical processes were of natural origin, it would hardly be necessary to revolutionize an entire mode of production and consumption in a way that amounts to the abolition of production and consumption.
Nobody disputes that humans have a part to play in the warming of land masses: the transformation of entire areas into landfill sites, and the creation of urban heat islands are important factors. But a human society, even if it wanted to, could hardly compete with the influence of annually varying solar radiation (keywords: “earthshine” and “albedo”), oceanic circulation patterns, or volcanic (underwater) eruptions that, like the 2022 Honga Tonga eruption, bombard the atmosphere with the equivalent of the water of 58 000 Olympic swimming pools – just to give you an idea. Yet, these manifest factors are ignored. The short-circuit “fossil energy → CO2 → climate change” is to be hammered into our minds. This manic rehearsal of a factually incorrect monocausality primarily serves the purpose of declaring humans to be the cause of all climate evil.
Without carbon dioxide, there would be no life on earth. And yet we are trained to develop an instinctive hatred of it.
But even here there is disagreement in the world known as the “scientific community”. In fact, the definitions of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) differ, among other things, on one key point. According to its official definition, the UNFCCC defines climate change as “a change that is directly or indirectly attributable to human activities and that is in addition to natural climate variability”. In its Assessment Report 2 (1996), the IPCC, on the other hand, says this: “Climate change […] arises […] either from natural causes or from human activities. It is generally not possible to attribute these causes unambiguously”. Assessment Report 4 (2007) does not even refer to the causes of climate change at all: climate change is here defined as “a change in the state of the climate that can be identified […] by changes in the mean and / or the variability of its properties, and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer”. In the “Summary for Policy Makers” in the 5th Final Report, published in 2014, the IPCC reaffirmed its difference to the UNFCCC and once again pointed out that its definition of climate change is not limited to “direct or indirect human activity”, but also includes natural variability, which shows enormous fluctuations. Nonetheless, Assessment Report 5 ascribed 50% of global warming to “anthropogenic factors”, directly contradicting its own claim that that “it is generally not possible to attribute causes”.
In their Assessment Report 6 (2018), the IPCC made a U-turn. It was suddenly very sure that “100%” of the measured warming was due to human influence, though nothing changed in terms of available measurement methods.
However in Assessment Report 6 (2018), the IPCC made a U-turn. It was suddenly very sure that “100%” of the measured warming was due to human influence. This should have come as a big surprise to everyone who understood that nothing had changed in terms of available measurement methods. What had changed, however, was the political and finance interest pressure exerted on the independent scholars of the IPCC Working Groups. This pressure was in no way new. In a captivating book published in 2017, science theorist Bernie Lewin has tracked down the history of influential science-policy groups like the IPCC and the trajectory of the CO2-emissions-to-climate change nexus. Identifying the culprit, humans, in things we cannot control is not a recent invention. In climate discourse, it dates back to the late 1930s.
When Climate Science became political
Scientific attempts to claim a human influence on the climate date back to the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. When the Little Ice Age (1400-1850) was followed by a warmer interglacial period in Europe, it was initially believed that the warming was directly linked to industrial emissions – particularly in England. The research findings of the British engineer Guy Callendar presented to the Royal Meteorological Society in 1938, according to which the “influence [of human behaviour on climates and weather] is not only possible, but is actually taking place at this time”, were however instantly dismissed, because water vapour (from oceans etc.) was recognized as being more relevant to the climate than CO2, a truism in climate research today. For better or for worse, Callendar and his comrade-in-arms, the American climate modeler Gilbert Plass, had to accept the RMS’s verdict that “an increase in CO2 uptake in the atmosphere does not simply [i.e. to the same extent] lead to an increase in temperature”. A major failure of the Callendar/Plass team was their ignorance of complex factors such as vertical heat distribution, globally irregular warming, and the cooling effect of aerosols (such as volcanic eruptions) and clouds, which have proven to be completely independent of industrial emission scenarios. For the time being, the theory of a human influence on a strong warming scenario was no longer tenable.
In 1938, engineer Guy Callendar tried to prove man-made climate change. His thesis was instantly dismissed at the time, because water vapour was recognized as being more relevant to the climate than CO2, a truism in climate research today.
The concept of “man-made climate change” only gained traction around 40 years later. The Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), a sub-organisation of the UN World Meteorological Society (WMO), had been investigating fluctuations in the climate since the 1960s. Unusually cold winters in the mid-1970s gave rise to theories of a “new ice age”, which were presented as a real threat to humanity in the BBC, New York Times, and the Times of London. Amid the first oil crisis, the Nixon administration took up the topic and generously distributed research funds for the creation of scientific organisations and committees to investigate the approaching global hypothermia caused by climate change and its “implications for global supply and population policy”. This created an institutional network that quickly gained political influence when interest in atmospheric pollution later merged with the question of its effects on the weather. By 1976, the cooling scare was forgotten. The GARP found that instead of a long-term global cooling, short-term strong climate fluctuations were to be expected – including “possible climate change as a result of human activities” – which were to be assessed as “just as worrying” as natural climate fluctuations. The report of the WMO’s Expert Panel on Climatic Change in 1976 named the culprits: warming and heat waves caused by CO2 and aerosols – the cooling effect of which remained unmentioned. Accordingly, the headlines went from “A new ice age before the end of the century” (Canberra Times, 1974) to “World temperature may rise” (The Times, 1976).
In the 1970s, the headlines went from “A new ice age before the end of the century” (Canberra Times, 1974) to “World temperature may rise” (The Times, 1976).
Disregarding the criticism Callendar’s theories and Plass’s early climate models had received, the World Climate Programme, which emerged in the late 1970s, put “the CO2 problem” at the top of its agenda. The decisive factor here was the shift in focus to global warming through the Carbon Dioxide Programme of the US Department of Energy (DoE). The steady expansion of fossil fuel energy consumption after the Second World War was brought to a temporary end by the oil crisis and the subsequent energy crisis in the USA. Fossil fuels became politically and economically sensitive. In collaboration with nuclear physicists and lobbyists, as well as climate researchers, the US government created the Department of Energy Research and Development, which was subordinate to the DoE and devoted itself entirely to criticizing fossil fuels for media impact. In 1979, the US government also doubled the amount of research funds for the investigation of the harmfulness of fossil fuels, thus providing a livelihood for a whole series of climate researchers whose funding the government promised to secure in the long term. The institutional foundation stone was laid for the monothematic focus on the “fossil fuels → CO2 → climate change” nexus.
The steady expansion of fossil fuel energy consumption after the Second World War was brought to a temporary end by the oil crisis and the subsequent energy crisis in the USA. Fossil fuels became politically and economically sensitive.
While one would not be wrong to assume that political lobby groups use pressure on scientists in terms of access to funding resources, including income, this is not the whole story. The emergence of the IPCC itself cannot be explained on this basis alone. Climate conventionism – binding agreements on the “level” of global warming, such as the Conference of Parties (COP) – have had a greater influence on the issuing of policy decisions than has funding dependence. To fully understand how Science was captured by Policy, it is worth tracing the history of the climate convention movement to its very beginning: a small climate scientists’ conference in the sleepy town of Villach, Austria, in the 1980s.
From Villach 1980 to Villach 1985: Dealing with reasonable doubt and the activist hijacking of science
While the ecological movement in the 1970s-1980s was still addressing phenomena such as the hole in the ozone layer caused by supersonic airplanes, CFCs in deodorant sprays and forest dieback (“acid rain”), environmental policymakers were already beginning to try to narrow the focus to the effects of greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, on global warming. At the 1979 World Climate Conference, climate researchers formulated a program to investigate the “effects of CO2-induced changes” on the climate – all other factors excluded. The Egyptian microbiologist Mustafa Tolba, then director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), played a key role in this. His pioneering work on establishing a firm connection between carbon dioxide and “man-made climate change” was decisive in decoupling political directives from scientific knowledge. Tolba’s successful exertion of pressure on experienced climatologists is well illustrated by the events of a small, privately organised climate conference in 1980 and its follow-up.
At the 1979 World Climate Conference, climate researchers formulated a program to investigate the “effects of CO2-induced changes” on the climate – all other factors excluded.
At the invitation of the Austrian delegation to the World Climate Conference, the first international scientific conference on the possible effects of CO2 on the climate took place in Villach in autumn 1980. Only 11 delegates attended. After a week of intensive discussions, the findings were sobering, but confirmed what had long been the consensus among climatologists: that due to the breadth and scope of the uncertainties, no conclusions could be drawn about a direct link between CO2 concentration and warming, and certainly not about a “human influence”. The result was disappointing for the policy makers at the WMO and UNEP. With such a finding, Tolba could hardly justify the existence of his own organization, which had dedicated itself to proving an imminent climate catastrophe caused by CO2. Research programs and a large-scale energy transition – the independence from oil-producing states in the Middle East – were at stake. Against this backdrop, it was obvious that the plan to have a global catastrophe scenario scientifically validated could not be abandoned without further ado.
At Villach 1985, it was obvious that the plan to have a global catastrophe scenario scientifically validated could not be abandoned without further ado.
After years of wrangling over discourse sovereignty in scientific journals, a second conference, held in 1985 and now attended by several dozen delegates, once again made Villach the scene of the dispute. During the conference, which is now regarded as a milestone in the formation of the climate convention movement, a rhetorically skillful game unfolded between political campaigners such as Tolba and the assembled climatologists. Tolba did not deny the uncertainties of climate research. On the contrary, he stated that “the picture that science paints of climate change is shrouded in clouds of uncertainty”. However, this flowery concession allowed him all the more easily to immediately drown any doubts in rhetorical reassurance. As Lewin reports, Tolba made the following statement:
“We have now laid aside most of the doubts as to the effect of the build-up of CO2, and other trace gases on global climate […] [The SCOPE 29] assessment has confirmed that there is almost unanimous agreement that the global average surface temperature would increase in response to a doubling of the greenhouse effect. Differences in the amount of increase are modest, in fact insignificant for our present purposes […] Scientists are reasonably confident that at current rates of build-up a global mean temperature increase of several degrees will probably occur over a period of half a century or so”.
However, the SCOPE (Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) report by no means speaks of a dramatic rise in temperature in “about half a century”, and Tolba’s subsequent assertion that the West Antarctic ice sheet would break away from its continental anchorage is directly repudiated in the same report. How then could the foundations for the climate convention process and the IPCC nonetheless have been laid in Villach in 1985? Two rhetorical techniques, both morally charged and argumentatively inconclusive, played an important role in convincing the climate campaigners: they were aimed at the problem of uncertainty and reasonable doubt.
Tolba’s “clouds of uncertainty” did not refer to the question of whether CO2 would cause dangerous uncontrolled warming at all, but to the question of how strong the warming would be, how quickly it would progress, and what ecological and social effects we should expect. All more fundamental skepticism was simply declared non-existent. Tolba thus suggested a factually non-existent consensus, which is still reproduced today in the empty talk of a “97% consensus of climate science”.
Uncertainty did not concern the question of whether CO2 would cause dangerous uncontrolled warming at all, but to the question of how strong the warming would be, how quickly it would progress, and what ecological and social effects we should expect.
According to Lewin, objections to the catastrophe scenario were reinterpreted from the outset as differences of opinion among climate change alarmists, so that a well-founded rejection of climate alarmism was not registered at all. As a result, all further objections could be portrayed as irrational suppression of justified fear of a disaster scenario, and as attempts to “contaminate” the debate among climate change alarmists who, in short, alone represented The Science.
The second rhetorical trick was Tolba’s concession that, while there were considerable uncertainties in empirical and model-based climate research, “caution is better than forbearance!”. This was a moral appeal: we should act anyway, just in case. Once the alarmism skeptics had lost discursive ground, the disparagement of a cost-benefit-analysis became a strong rhetorical vehicle.
Once the alarmism skeptics had lost discursive ground, the disparagement of a cost-benefit-analysis became a strong rhetorical vehicle.
This discourse formation is well-known from Covid, when anyone even addressing the probable social, health, and psychological costs of lockdown was lampooned as a “granny killer”. Today, we know that the thing that killed granny and was responsible for a considerable lowering of life quality, not to speak of psychological damage, was the “cure”, with no registered benefits. This panic mode, expressed in the seemingly innocuous “we should act anyway, and quick”, was modeled on the climate debate four decades earlier.
In hindsight we know that Tolba’s manipulations won the contest of ideas. An artificial consensus was created. The goal, an action plan for the climate convention process, was achieved. The IPCC, as Lewin tells us, “had been instituted because the Villach 1985 scientific consensus was not considered sufficient: it had been instituted because of concerns of policy entrepreneurism that followed”. At this stage, the implementation of new climate financial schemes became a vital incentive. What happened at Villach became the blueprint for the foundation of the IPCC in 1988. No one looked back: the unproven nexus between CO2 emissions and climate change became the primary mania of thought-leaders and global institutions.
The Noise and the Signal
The availability of scientific data has not changed since Guy Callendar and Gilbert Plass’s attempts in the 1930s to prove the human contribution to climate change. From the very beginning, the greatest challenge in proving that contribution has been to distinguish the signal – the “catastrophe signal” – from the “background noise”, natural climate variability, which has paleontologically been considerable. The first IPCC report in 1992 recognises this:
“The climate system can respond to many forcings, and it remains to be proven that the greenhouse signal is sufficiently distinguishable from other signals to be detected except as a gross increase in tropospheric temperature that is so large that other explanations are not likely”.
This quasi-impossible determination of a meaningful unit of measurement for natural variability, known as the yardstick problem, can not only not be calibrated more accurately by calculations in climate models – the calculations also distort the proportion, as both the extent of natural variability and the spatial distribution of heat effects are registered insufficiently. The models are not suitable for making objectively valid statements on climate change – and such statements are not the purpose of their existence to begin with. The purpose of the models is to prove whatever it is they have been “tuned” with, as Steve Koonin reports in his 2021 book Unsettled. They are detached from empirical and experimental set ups and could prove whatever it is we want proof of. As they are being used for political purposes alone, a paradox occurs: for the success of a climate model lies in the fact that its forecasts never materialize. This is because the model is intended to encourage “immediate action”. Therefore, if “immediate action” is taken and the predicted reality does not materialize, the model was successful. But if the catastrophe signal materializes, the prediction has also been verified and the model is therefore equally successful. Strictly speaking, climate models are unscientific because they are linked to a political agenda which has ensured they are constructed so as to remain unfalsifiable.
As the models are being used for political purposes alone, a paradox occurs: for the success of a climate model lies in the fact that its forecasts never materialize.
There is another, perhaps more pertinent paradox at play in climate alarmism: on the one hand, climate alarmists demand the uncompromising subjugation of humans to a reified view of “nature”, and “scientific facts”, and on the other hand they imagine that humans could override the rules of physical and cosmic-atmospheric systems. But either the physical and cosmic-atmospheric systems are irresponsive to a CO2 “control knob” on the weather –either there is nothing we can do about the weather – or humans are no longer defenseless. If the latter is the case, however, we must return to a more rational view of both natural systems and human society. Natural disasters, which have fortunately been globally decreasing over the last decades, are best confronted with adjustments to the infrastructure, which is a question of politics, and not turning a non-existent climate control knob, never mind the insanity of “sucking CO2 from the atmosphere”.
On the one hand, climate alarmists demand the uncompromising subjugation of humans to a reified view of “nature”, and “scientific facts”, and on the other hand imagine that humans could override the rules of physical and cosmic-atmospheric systems.
The flagellation/God-delusion paradox of climate alarmism is symptomatic of what is probably the gravest current predicament: a nihilist destructive fury. The senseless clearing of forests, the mass culling of cattle, the construction of wind and solar farms that kill whales and the wildlife, never mind the blighting of landscapes, and ensuing deliberate destruction of animal and plant biodiversity, are acts of barbarism. For humans, deindustrialisation would be an equivalent form of destruction. Not only does it mean the elimination of everything that makes life worth living today, but when the energy supply is rationed, it could also mean death for millions. The wide-scale destruction of private property, jobs and social security systems, a decline in the quality of food, travel, leisure, the hollowing out of cities and of any social fabric deserving of the name, are outcomes of deindustrialization. Pundits like German journalist Ulrike Herrmann or Japanese elite academic activist Kōhei Saitō cheerfully call for “green shrinking”, an “end to growth“, and post-World War 2 “war economy”. But a deliberate wrecking of our highly developed forces of production and of technology, rather than a quest to use them meaningfully, indicates a being-in-the-world without purpose of being. Misery is to be made the raison d’être of the neo-socialist transition.
The British Guardian, the flagship of the anti-humanist left, recently ran the headline that, due to climate change, a dramatic increase in world hunger is to be expected over the next two decades. The Zeitgeist demands reified contexts that can be blamed for the state of the world. The real causes of hunger, poverty, and inflation, shall no longer be addressed. They might reveal a relationship of domination of humans over humans.
