[Last updated 21 Dec 2019]
The following headline is telling of the prevailing hype, censorship and propaganda, specifically when it comes to climate change: Bernie Sanders wants to take fossil fuel companies to criminal court. Another example would be the warning by former Australian High Court Justice Kenneth Hayne that company boards must take the issue very seriously or face the legal consequences:
“International opinion is now firmly behind the need for all entities with public debt or equity to respond to climate change issues in their governance, their strategy, their risk management and their metrics and targets and, importantly, to record their responses to the issues in their financial reports.”
What Kenneth Hayne says about climate change, Australian Financial Review, 9 Dec 2019
Indeed, as the world awaits a final decision on the case brought by the Urgenda Foundation against the Dutch Government (the judgment commits the Dutch Government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by the end of 2020), and ExxonMobil and others are currently being dragged through the US courts (although without the desired result), self-righteous shareholders and lobby groups the world over are pressuring companies to take steps to not only reduce their carbon footprint (whatever that means), but to reduce their climate change liability risk (whatever that means).
There has been an explosion in scholarly legal articles which are overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, in favour of climate change litigation. Law firms are naturally quite excited about the prospect of potentially protracted litigation and advisory work, exemplified by a few recent articles by global firm Norton Rose Fulbright, The time is now – climate risk a mandatory issue for all boards, and Quelling the Extinction Rebellion. The Economist Intelligence Unit recently issued a white paper on the issue, and it even dreamed up a Climate Change Resilience Index!
But perhaps all of this is symptomatic of our times. These days the majority of people, and this is at least partially due to the death of investigative journalism and to the widespread propaganda messaging around this issue, seem to now simply assume that climate science is well and truly settled, that human activity is causing climate change, and that governments, corporations and every human being on this planet are collectively responsible for ensuring they don’t emit or contribute to the emission of additional CO2 into the atmosphere.
An entire new economy has sprung up around this wholly unproven hypothesis. Remarkably, an entire generation of children and students and professionals from teachers to scientists to company officials to lawyers have been brainwashed to believe in a doomsday theory.
It seems absurd that now even some big CO2 emitting companies themselves actually lead the charge on climate alarmism – perhaps in the hope of dissuading shareholders from commencing class actions against them, perhaps because they see the financial benefits, or to simply to score social responsibility brownie points, or a combination of all three. In any case, it seems ridiculous that the leaders of so many wealthy corporations that basically run our economy and politics are, when it comes to climate change, all such willing and docile participants in the biggest scientific fraud ever. Clearly there must be a payoff…
Lawyers too, like most people, simply assume that man-made climate change is real and well and truly happening, and culpable people and companies and countries must be sued and punished and need to pay compensation and/or be slapped with criminal penalties. So far there is no resistance. Incredibly, it doesn’t even seem to occur to companies to turn to scientific arguments and call out the widespread junk science, which shows just how far this issue, which should foremost be a scientific one, has been politicised to the point where nobody talks about the science any more. The propagandists have obviously done great work. Well done to the Edward Bernayses of the day.
However, if one takes a step back from the hysteria, and digs just a little deeper into the issue than simply relying on mainstream media, it would become quickly obvious to most people, I think, that at the very least there is no consensus at all about climate science, neither amongst so-called alarmists nor amongst so-called sceptics.
The main scientific questions circle around the effects of the additional CO2 which human activity has undoubtedly pumped into the atmosphere. There is a vast array of opinions on this, anything from people who are convinced that this gas is the most important driver of climatic changes, in other words it’s basically a control knob; and on the other side there are people who say that CO2 generally has a very minute effect on the climate, and even some who say there is no such thing as the greenhouse effect in an open system like our planet.
My prediction is that within the next 10-20 years it will become increasingly obvious that the anthropogenic climate change alarmism was completely unjustified. However, by then serious policy measures with far-reaching consequences will already have taken a foothold; it is possible that the courts will have started to dish out sentences against “carbon sinners” left right and centre, based on junk science that is reminiscent of the long discredited science of phrenology. The 2008 article Anecdotal Forensics, Phrenology, and Other Abject Lessons from the History of Science by David L. Faigman is well worth reading with climate science in mind.
Why am I so sure? I’m satisfied that I’ve done my homework, I’ve simply been doing what every citizen, and every scientist, politician, lawyer, and especially every journalist in fact should do. I’ve taken on board peace researcher Daniele Ganser’s advice and looked at this hotly-debated and emotive issue with an open and as dispassionate a mind as possible, carefully considered all sides of the argument, informed myself very broadly, did not take anything for granted, and then came to a conclusion as to which arguments are more convincing, also keeping in mind all the surrounding noise (eg human psychology, propaganda) about the issue.
I think that over time more and more people will come to realise that they’ve been completely hoodwinked by junk science, aided and abetted by lazy and opportunistic journalism, by short-sighted lobby organisations, been manipulated by economic and political interests, because beneath all the data contortions, statistics stunts and modelling trickery and deceit there is simply no real, observable, tenable and plausible scientific evidence to demonstrate that any climate change we experience and observe is caused by an increase in CO2, let alone human CO2 emissions.
That realisation doesn’t mean, of course, that much will change, at least not very quickly, because nobody likes to admit they’ve been believing in a fairy tale. This thing about man-made climate change is definitely much bigger than Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It’s also much bigger than the ice age scare of the 1970s and early 1980s, which I still remember and which climate alarmists prefer not to talk about. And let’s not forget: there is an awful lot of money at stake here.
So unfortunately for a long time to come climate change alarmism will drive economical, social, political and legal agendas, and it will take at least one or more generations for the hype to fade away and for reason and proper science to prevail.
We sure live in fascinating times, but I do sincerely worry about the environmental, social, economical and political damage that is being done whilst economic and political decision makers are in the grip of this collective madness.
