Climate: The Movie

Expressing skepticism about climate change was basically career suicide. Activists are even demanding that all skepticism be made a criminal offense. It's the story of an attack on individual freedom. It's a wonderful way to expand the power of the state. If there is an existential threat that affects the whole world, then you need a powerful world government, you know, to deal with it. We're seeing all these authoritarian measures being taken in the name of saving the planet. Suddenly you have the world's population under control.

We called it industrial progress. Since the Industrial Revolution, free, capitalist mass production has made more and more goods affordable for more and more people. Mass production went hand in hand with mass consumption. Today, ordinary people enjoy a level of prosperity unlike anything in human history. Yet we're told we are destroying the planet.

Computers have calculated what awaits us if we keep producing and consuming more and more. The weather will get worse. The planet will boil. We greedy humans must accept restrictions. Consume less. Travel less. Anyone who denies the climate crisis is not only wrong but dangerous. They spread the poison of doubt among a gullible population. These deniers should be shunned, shamed, and censored. Because these climate deniers are flat-earthers. They are anti-science.

At New York University, one of these climate deniers teaches. Professor Steven Koonin is one of the leading physicists in the US. He was a science adviser to President Obama, as well as vice president and provost at Caltech, one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world.

I teach my students at NYU about climate science. And I always tell them: check the data or the studies yourselves. And everyone leaves that course with their eyes wide open. Professor Koonin's bestseller "Unsettled" argues that established scientific studies recognized by official bodies do not support the notion of a climate crisis of any kind. Of course, I've been called a denier. And my answer is: tell me what I'm denying, because I'm quoting directly from the UN's official scientific reports. Dick Lindzen also rejects the claims of the climate alarmists. He is one of the world's leading meteorologists, was a professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT, and contributed to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC.

Even the IPCC, if you look at the Working Group One area, that is, the science, doesn't support any of these claims. And I assure you, I was there myself: it's biased. But real scientists don't agree with some of the nonsense that's being spread. Will Happer is also a denier and another leading US physicist. He was a science adviser to three presidents and a professor of physics at Columbia and Princeton. The insidious notion is being spread that scientific truth is determined by consensus. In real science there is always dispute; no science is ever settled. It's simply absurd to say that climate science is settled.

There is no settled science, least of all when it comes to climate. Dr. John Clauser is one of the most respected scientists in the world. In 2022, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. The science being done there is, in my opinion, appallingly bad. Many scientists vehemently disagree. They call themselves skeptics. Since I no longer have to fear losing research funding or a job, I call myself a climate change denier. These highly respected and esteemed scientists, and others like them, are not flat-earthers. They don't deny science. So what evidence led them to dismiss climate alarm as nonsense? We're told that today's temperatures are unprecedented and dangerously high.

You can check whether that's true, because we have evidence of the Earth's climate history going back hundreds, thousands, even millions of years. The Judean Desert by the Dead Sea. Professor Nir Shaviv of the Racah Institute of Physics is looking for clues here. Thousands of years ago, this place was under water, and lines are imprinted in the rocks that, if you know how to read them, tell the story of the Earth's climate history. And here is the climate. We're standing in the lake bed of the former Lake Lisan. It's a lake that existed until the end of the last ice age. Back then, the lake level was perhaps 100 meters above where we're standing. If we want to reconstruct the climate of the past, we have to look for evidence, for clues.

And when the lake existed, it formed deposits. From these layers here, we can actually reconstruct how the climate changed. Warmer water means more life, more shells and bones of marine animals, and other changes that are reflected in the ancient layers of the lake bed. The lines act like a kind of thermometer, and that is just one way geologists reconstruct past climate. Elsewhere, we can visit dripstone caves and look at the annual rings in stalagmites, or we drill cores from the seafloor and examine the layers there, or in many other places. But I think this is one of the most beautiful places, because you can actually see how the climate has changed.

So what do we find when we look back in time? 200 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth, an Earth with fertile, dense forests full of life. And at no time in those 200 million years was it as cold as it is today. If you go back, say, 200 million years, it was perhaps 13 degrees warmer than now. So from a geological perspective, it's by no means unprecedented. Over the last 500 million years, temperatures fluctuated greatly. But almost the whole time, the Earth was much, much warmer than today. Compared with the last half billion years, the Earth is now exceptionally cold. In fact, it has only very rarely been this cold. We're relatively cold. Perhaps not quite the coldest in 500 million years, but pretty close. We're experiencing a remarkably cool phase in the last 550 million years. In fact, in only one other phase of those 550 million years was the temperature as cool as it is now.

The mammals that populate the Earth today began to evolve about 60 million years ago, when the world was much warmer than today. Let's look at just the last 65 million years. That's the time after the extinction of the dinosaurs, when mammals take over, and our ancestors begin to live on land. Every phase of the last 65 million years was warmer than it basically is today. The Earth's mammals, humans included, evidently thrive when it's warm, warmer than now. Without doubt, warm is better than cold in Earth's history. We are a tropical species. A naked human in the shade dies of hypothermia at 20 °C. We evolved at the equator in Africa, and only thanks to fire, shelter, and clothing were we eventually able to leave there.

Over the last 50 million years, temperatures fell steadily and plunged the Earth into what geologists call the Late Cenozoic Ice Age. We are still in this ice age. All the ice at the poles exists because we are in an ice age. Anyone who knows anything about Earth's history knows that. This is an ice age. We are at the end of a 50-million-year-long cooling, and they say it's too hot. If we zoom in on the last few million years, we see falling temperatures, fluctuating between extremely cold and somewhat milder phases. The extremely cold phases are called glacial maxima, when the planet is mostly covered in ice, and the somewhat less cold ones are called glacial minima, when there is ice only at the poles.

For the last 10,000 years, we have fortunately been in a somewhat less cold glacial minimum, the so-called Holocene. With milder weather, people came out of their caves, and several thousand years ago the first great civilizations emerged during a fortunate phase that, according to many studies, was significantly warmer than today. This is the Holocene Climate Optimum. It was called an optimum because people thought warmer was better. Since then, temperatures have fallen and begun to fluctuate. In Roman times there was a gloriously warm phase, followed by a harsh cold period in the early Middle Ages. Then came the mild Medieval Warm Period, according to many studies as warm as or warmer than today, followed by a particularly cold phase, the Little Ice Age, possibly the coldest of the last 10,000 years.

And here it is: the Roman Warm Period, the cold Early Middle Ages, the Medieval Warm Period, and then the very cold Little Ice Age, from which we have been recovering for about 300 years. The world's longest instrumental temperature record comes from Central England, and it shows the following. Since the low point of the Little Ice Age around 1650, the temperature has risen gently, by a little more than one degree Celsius. The Central England temperature series is a world treasure. It is the longest unbroken record we have, and it is certainly not particularly alarming. It began in the depths of the Little Ice Age, and you can see the slight warming that followed the Little Ice Age. And there is certainly nothing alarming about what is happening today, at the very end of the record. Most of today's warming is the recovery from the Little Ice Age, whatever caused it.

We are talking about the entire industrial era, during which it was about one degree Celsius. To put that one degree into perspective, let's look at Central Park in New York. Records show that the temperature here has not changed overall since 1940. Yet from one year to the next, the average temperature can swing by three degrees Celsius without many New Yorkers noticing. In fact, between the warmest year of the 1960s and the coolest in 2000, there is a difference of five degrees Celsius. The average temperature on this day in this year can differ by five degrees from that of a year or two ago. When I hear people ranting that one and a half degrees will lead to the end of civilization, I think: What have they been smoking?

Are you crazy? All right, … According to thermometer measurements since 1880, there has been a very mild temperature rise. Only by stretching the y-axis in this graph does the rise become visible. This is the rising line that official bodies use as proof of global warming. But is it correct?

Professor Ross McKitrick is an expert in statistical analysis at the University of Guelph. He noticed something strange about modern thermometer records. Thermometers, even in the same region, give very different readings depending on where they are located. I was interested in the question of how to explain the spatial pattern of warming. Some places warm a lot, others hardly at all. It turns out that it is strongly correlated with the spatial pattern of economic activity. Where there are more people and more human activity, there is more heat. This is called the urban heat island effect. The urban heat island effect is basically London, right? Take London. With buildings, with lots of activity, it's usually a few degrees more.

I mean, we're talking Celsius now, right? Even four or five degrees Celsius warmer than on the outskirts. This is a phenomenon of urbanization. Nowadays the obvious effect is concrete, which stores heat. This can be illustrated with a satellite heat map of Paris. The center of Paris can be up to five degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside. Paris, London, Beijing, Shanghai, whatever you like, New Delhi – all of them show these effects very clearly. How has this affected the official temperature records? In the early 20th century, weather thermometers were usually set up on the outskirts of cities. Close enough for daily checks, but far from the heat of city life.

But over the course of the 20th century, these cities grew. Suburbs spread. There are more roads, more cars. Thermometers that once stood outside the cities are now surrounded by shopping centers, offices, factories, and residential buildings. These cities, and all thermometer sites, have on average grown in population, say, since 1880. Buildings are growing up around the thermometers. There are parking lots. So there are all these non-climatic influences affecting temperatures, which raises questions about the quality of thermometer data for monitoring global warming. To correct this distortion of the data, it makes sense to use only records from rural weather stations, which are less affected by urbanization.

A team led by Dr. Willie Soon has now done exactly that. We combine all the best rural stations. Anything that can be corrected, we correct. And we show: if you don't use that dataset but only rural data, you get a very different picture. According to rural temperature records, temperatures rose from the 1880s but peaked in the 1940s. Then there was a marked cooling until the 1970s. After that, temperatures recover, but today they are barely higher than in the 1940s. We basically see a warming from the 1900s, the 1850s or so, to the 1930s and 40s, then a marked cooling until the 70s, around '76. Instead of a long-term, systematic warming trend, there is multi-decadal variability, a fluctuation about every 50 or 60 years.

It's not only rural thermometers that show little warming. Merchant ships and other naval vessels have been measuring sea temperatures since the 19th century. In red we see land temperatures since the 1860s, inflated by urban thermometers. Sea temperatures are in blue. From around 1900, the two begin to diverge. The ocean data show far less warming in the 20th century, and the pattern more closely resembles the rural temperature data.

The ocean is supposed to be, so to speak, uncontaminated by the urban heat island effect. Is that right? Yes? So if you compare both records within the margin of uncertainty, this behavior does indeed fit. Scientists have also studied temperature change using tree rings, which in turn show very little warming. There is a gentle rise until the mid-20th century, a cooling until the 1970s, followed by a mild recovery. Again, it turns out that temperatures today differ little from those of the 1930s and 40s, and the pattern strongly resembles rural temperatures.

Satellites, too, seem to tell a different story. Our ability to measure global temperature accurately took a leap when satellites began orbiting the Earth. One of the scientists who pioneered the use of satellites for temperature measurement is Dr. Roy Spencer, in the 1980s a senior climate scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Over lunch we wondered whether we could use satellites to monitor global temperatures, because the thermometer network is quite sparse worldwide, which makes it hard to determine a global temperature. Dr. Spencer's development of weather satellites was revolutionary. He and his colleague Professor John Christy received NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal.

Our satellite data begin in January 1979. From then on we have complete global coverage, right up to today. There was one crucial temperature question that satellites were uniquely well suited to answer: Has a spurious warming crept into the global land temperature data that is due solely to population growth? We have analyzed this a lot recently and worked on it, and we find that it is large, especially in urban areas. Since 1880, most of the warming appears to be due to the urban heat island effect. We are fortunate to have some independent scientists like John Christy and Roy Spencer with their satellite temperature measurements.

You know, the temperature records went haywire. They rose like crazy, without limits. But now they have to come to terms with the fact that there is this independent and probably better method of measuring the temperature of the entire globe, and it is not alarming at all. Evidence from multiple sources now agrees: The official global temperature record, as governments use it and as the media around the world report it, shows far too much warming over the last 120 years, artificially inflated by urbanization. Look at the weather balloon data, the satellite data, the rural data, the ocean data: they are nowhere near as warm as the land. All of these indications show that the big warming impulse in the data is the Northern Hemisphere land record.

And that is exactly where most of this data distortion takes place. But can any of the mild warming of the last 300 to 400 years be attributed to human CO2 emissions? Professor Henrik Svensmark visits the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and strolls through the Evolution Garden, which preserves the oldest living plant species on Earth. These plants are not only beautiful to look at. They can also tell us something about the CO2 content of the atmosphere in the Earth's geological past. Here we have a ginkgo tree, a living fossil in the sense that this tree species first appeared about 270 million years ago. On the underside of the leaf are the so-called stomata, the cells through which they take in CO2.

So they actually measure how much CO2 is in the air, and adjust the number of stomata to the CO2 level. If you examine fossils and count how many there were at different times, that tells you something about the CO2 level in the past. So what do we find when we look back in time? For almost the entire last 500 million years, the atmospheric CO2 level was far, far higher than now. Even with the contribution of modern industry to the CO2 level, today's atmospheric CO2 level is, by geological standards, almost as low as it has ever been. Currently we have about 400 ppm. 50 million years ago it was perhaps 2,000 ppm. So a much, much higher CO2 concentration.

I believe current estimates for global CO2 today are around 423 ppm. In the Phanerozoic, the last 550 million years, we would see CO2 on the order of 7,000 ppm. CO2 is plant food, and the result of much higher CO2 levels in the past was a much, much greener world. Periods of elevated CO2 tend to be periods of enormous biodiversity on the planet. In fact, viewed over the last 550 million years, we are living in a CO2 famine. At the low point of the most recent glacial maximum, the atmospheric CO2 level fell so low that nearly all life on Earth almost died out. They say CO2 is higher than at any time in 100,000 years, but they don't mention that during that period CO2 fell so low that all life on Earth nearly died.

20,000 years ago, CO2 was at its lowest level in all of Earth's history: 180 ppm. Had it fallen another 30 ppm, we would all be dead. There is a CO2 low point at which photosynthesis becomes so inefficient that plants would die. After that, everything else starts to perish. During the last glacial maximum, there is good evidence that in many parts of the world, plants were starving from a lack of CO2. So we should be very grateful that CO2 levels are rising again. We are still far from the historical norms, which would be several thousand ppm. There are not enough fossil fuels to get there, but we are at least making a start. But has the small recent rise in CO2 affected temperature?

We would show you a picture of CO2 now, but we can't, because it is invisible. CO2 makes up only a tiny fraction of the gases in the atmosphere, just 0.04 percent. It is only one of 25 greenhouse gases, which together make up only one part of the Earth's complex climate system. So what evidence is there that this trace gas has a noticeable influence on the climate? If it were true that higher CO2 levels cause higher temperatures, we should be able to see that in the Earth's climate history. Here, scientists are drilling into ancient ice cores. These cores tell us both the past temperatures and the CO2 level. Scientists have indeed found a connection between temperature and CO2.

The problem: It runs the other way around. For the last few million years of the Ice Age we are living in, it is true: CO2 and temperature correlate. But if CO2 were the driver, it would have to change first and the temperature only afterward. If you look closely at the data, exactly the opposite shows up. First the temperature rises, and about one to several centuries later the CO2 level begins to rise as well. It has long been known that temperature changes first. The temperature rises, then the CO2 rises. The temperature falls, the CO2 falls. Ice ages begin when carbon dioxide is at its highest and end when it is at its lowest. That is exactly the opposite of what would happen if carbon dioxide controlled temperature.

Whether CO2 drives the climate is easy to settle. You can look back hundreds of millions of years: the CO2 level has often changed drastically. Did that change the temperature? No, absolutely not. CO2 has never driven temperature changes in the past, never. Even in recent times, it is not clear that CO2 has any influence on temperature. Here we see industrial CO2 emissions since 1750. From the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century, there was only a slight increase. Only in the 1940s does industrial CO2 production really take off. But that doesn't match the temperature record. According to thermometers in rural areas, most of the warming of the last 200 years took place before the 1940s and has barely changed since.

One of the embarrassments the IPCC doesn't like to talk about: The 1930s, when the human influence was much smaller, were especially warm. That is the puzzle: In the early phase with such strong warming from 1900 into the 1930s and 1940s, CO2 could not possibly have caused the temperature rise. That the 1930s and early '40s were so hot is puzzling. Even more puzzling is what happened next. Toward the end of the Second World War, CO2 rose sharply, and yet the temperature fell. From 1940 to 1970, CO2 continued to rise, but it cooled. What was going on? Journalists wrote about the coming ice age. It was on the cover of Time magazine. In the 1970s, the new ice age was the big topic.

And what about since the 1970s? According to climate computer models, rising CO2 should have led to this temperature rise over the last fifty years. But numerous satellite and balloon measurements show that what actually happened was the following. Climate models. The satellite data show that the global atmosphere is not warming as fast as the climate models predict. There are now about two dozen climate models, which have been worked on for decades. Billions, indeed tens of billions of dollars have been invested in this climate modeling. And in general, we find that virtually all climate models produce too much warming for the period from 1979 to today. Even if we assume that the surface thermometers are right, they do not show as much warming as most climate models predicted for, say, the last 50 years.

The models are wrong individually, and even collectively, even when you average them all in so-called ensembles. You can already see it: the mainstay of the climate alarm movement, these giant computer models, is obviously wrong. They don't match our observations. They all run far too hot. They don't come anywhere near getting the geographic distribution of temperatures right. Nor the El Niño and La Niña cycles. That's simply nonsense. All climate models are based on the assumption that CO2 drives temperature change. But actual observations and historical evidence clearly indicate that it doesn't. Yes, I claim that there is no connection whatsoever between CO2 and climate change.

In my opinion, it's all complete nonsense. It's not true that the Earth is warmer now than in the past. That's a lie. It's not true that CO2 is higher than it should be. That's a lie. The Earth's climate has changed many times throughout its long history and will keep changing without any help from us. The climate simply always changes. Who denies climate change? It's constantly changing. But if CO2 doesn't drive climate change, what does? Powerful forces are at work in the Earth's atmosphere, and perhaps the most powerful of all are clouds. CO2 is fairly insignificant in controlling the Earth's climate. What matters is clouds. Clouds don't absorb any energy at all.

They reflect all the sunlight back into space. Big, bright, white clouds. When you look at the Earth, you see a great many of them, and they fluctuate dramatically from one day to the next.

The effect of CO2, by contrast, is trivial. But what determines the number and density of clouds on Earth? Professor Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute is in Jerusalem visiting astrophysicist Nir Shaviv. Together they research cloud variation and its effect on the climate. And strangely, they found a connection between clouds and exploding supernovae far away in our galaxy. Big stars don't live very long. Relatively speaking, only a few million years, up to 40 million years. But they end their lives in a gigantic explosion we call a supernova.

An exploding supernova hurls out huge amounts of debris, tiny charged subatomic particles called cosmic rays, which travel at almost the speed of light. When they hit the Earth, they develop into seeds that attract water vapor and form clouds.

Professor Shaviv noticed that the Earth's cloud cover is linked to our journey through the Milky Way. As our solar system orbits the galaxy over millions of years, it passes through the galaxy's spiral arms, dense clusters of stars. In doing so, we are exposed to more or less cloud-forming cosmic radiation. This corresponds to historical temperature changes on Earth. The astonishing thing is that, with the help of geology, you can reconstruct the Earth's climate over the last billion years, as well as our galactic journey, and both tell the same story. But what about temperature changes on shorter timescales? The Sun, our source of heat and light, a seething mass of gigantic magnetic storms that vary in strength and number over time and affect the Earth directly and indirectly.

When it is very active, the Sun sends huge gusts of solar wind through the solar system. The solar wind warms us indirectly by acting as a barrier and limiting the number of cloud-forming cosmic rays that reach the Earth. So from the Sun we have the solar wind. It carries the Sun's magnetic field far out and acts like a shield against cosmic rays. When the Sun is more active, there is a stronger solar wind, and fewer cosmic rays reach the inner solar system and the atmosphere. The clouds that then form are less white. They reflect less sunlight, which means it gets warmer here on Earth. Here is a proxy reconstruction of ocean temperatures over thousands of years.

And here is the one for solar activity over the same period. What changes ocean temperature is clearly fluctuations in solar activity. Because the IPCC insists that only CO2 can drive the climate system, it basically switches off the Sun, doesn't it? To it, the Sun is just a background thing that does nothing. Astrophysicist Willie Soon decided to take another look at the temperature record of rural areas over the last 150 years. Then he looked at the record of solar activity over the same period. For Dr. Soon, it was clear that the Sun, not CO2, was driving temperature. As of 2023, the IPCC says that the Sun has absolutely no chance of explaining large-scale changes in the climate system, such as global warming in the Northern Hemisphere.

We say no. We can easily show that the Sun can explain everything. Zero for CO2, 100% for the Sun. What? Why are these and other studies never mentioned in the mainstream media? And if climate change is natural, what are we to make of the supposedly alarming increase in extreme weather events, heat waves and hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and the rest? My first instinct as a scientist, and what I teach my students, is: let's look at the data. And then you find, as you can read in the IPCC reports themselves, that it is quite difficult to find trends in extreme events, let alone attribute them to human influence.

For decades, people have been told that every time the weather is bad, climate change and greenhouse gases are to blame. I think people can't help it by now. If there's a heat wave, everyone immediately thinks: oh, what have we done to the weather? If someone on the news says it's the hottest day since 1980 or so, you can look up the temperature records and see for yourself whether it wasn't actually hotter in the 1930s, which is often the case. The US temperature records are the best in the world. And here is the US government's official record of heat waves in the US over the last century. It shows very clearly that there were far more heat waves in the 1930s than there are today.

Not only were there more heat waves in the 1930s, they were also much hotter than today's. Likewise, official figures show that the number of hot days in the US has declined significantly.

In the 1930s it was much hotter in the US. North Dakota reached 121 degrees Fahrenheit. South Dakota reached 120 degrees. Wisconsin, 114 degrees. Such temperatures are completely outside anything people experience today. A common mistake is to assume that a higher average temperature means more hot weather. But that's not true. Here is the Central England temperature series once more, the longest instrumental temperature record in the world. Summer temperatures over the last 300 to 400 years, since the end of the Little Ice Age, have hardly changed. It's winter temperatures that have risen slightly. The Earth's climate hasn't become hotter, but milder.

You see this worldwide when you look at the temperature records. High temperatures are almost unchanged. But cold temperatures at night or in winter are rising a little. Not very much, but you can measure it. If the average rises, it's more because the coldest temperatures are getting warmer, so it's getting milder rather than hotter. What about the growing number of wildfires we're so often told about? If you look at the actual number of wildfires using satellite observations, it's actually falling. Here is an estimate of global wildfires since 1900. It shows a clear decline. And here is a record of the area affected by wildfires in the US.

It shows that wildfires were far worse in the 1930s. From the 1930s and 1920s, for which there is data, they were huge. Five to ten times larger than today. And hurricanes? The US has by far the best records of hurricane activity in the world. Over the last 120 years, there has been no overall change. The trend is even slightly downward.

If you look at the data on hurricanes, or more precisely tropical cyclones, there is no long-term trend. And the rest of the world? Here is a chart of global hurricane activity over the last 40 years. Hurricanes have always existed. We have good proxy data on hurricanes, and their frequency has not changed. Even the IPCC admits this. What about melting ice caps and drought? Here is a satellite record of temperature in Antarctica since the late 1970s. It shows no increase at all. And here is a record of global drought since 1950. There is no discernible increase whatsoever. Polar bears are supposedly going extinct, but studies suggest their numbers are growing.

The Great Barrier Reef, of course, has recently reached record highs. There is currently no climate emergency on this planet. There is no evidence for one. Yes, the story about extreme weather events is simply absurd. It has no basis whatsoever. It rests on nothing but propaganda. The actual data show the opposite. I have shown you the official data, the official science. Tell me what I am denying. Climate alarm is nonsense. It is a hoax. I never liked "hoax." In my opinion, "fraud" is the better word, but I can live with "hoax."

But why are we told again and again that human-caused climate change is an undisputed scientific fact, beyond any question or doubt? To answer that, we need to examine the so-called consensus on climate change.

Until the 1980s, global warming was little more than an eccentric horror story told by radical environmentalists. But then an ambitious young senator took up the cause: Al Gore, who soon became vice president. One billion dollars a year in public funds was made available for climate change research. That quickly rose to two billion. Up to this level. Researchers from various disciplines began applying for this climate money. If you want to get money that's called "climate," you take whatever you're already doing, add a little climate language, and off you go. You study the sexual behavior of cockroaches. Then you add: "and the effects of climate." I only have to add a small twist to my grant application, explaining that I fear climate change means the death of all maple trees, and suddenly you're eligible for funding.

Scientists of every kind lined up for climate money. Climate became an exciting new field of interest for sociologists, biologists, English professors, gender studies lecturers, and many more. And it also served to create a community. You're now a climate scientist, even though you know nothing about the physics of climate. Thousands of papers appeared on climate change and prostitution, climate change and beer, climate change and the Black Death, climate change and disability, climate change and video games, and everything else imaginable. There is an almost comical list of studies. Just google "climate change," and all sorts of things come up. Few of these papers ever questioned whether climate change is even true.

Once you've done the research and are writing the paper, you sometimes find that there is no climate effect at all, but you still have to write in your papers: Yes, climate change is real, we just need to investigate it further. Since so few of these so-called climate studies questioned the idea of climate change, a scientific consensus was declared. Climate change must be true. Climate also became the new focus of government-funded research institutions. Scientific research in the US is predominantly financed by government grants, and whatever the government funds largely determines which science gets done. During the Cold War, many government research institutions were founded.

But the end of the Cold War and pressure on government spending have left many struggling to justify their continued funding. The US Congress only funds problems, that is, research on problems, whether the money goes to NASA, NOAA, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, or some other agency with an alphabet-soup name. It was always a problem to justify your own research or existence, your raison d'être. And so climate was a godsend. If Congress is willing to pay you to find evidence of global warming, then we scientists will find it, because that's what we're paid for. And guess what: if you don't find evidence or say the evidence points to no problem, the funding ends. That completely corrupts how we view science.

What was the name of that famous gangster who was asked why he robs banks? He said: Well, because that's where the money is. Climate alarm brought money. And the greater the supposed threat, the more money seemed to flow. The publicly funded science establishment now had a direct financial interest in hyping the alarm. So there is a huge incentive to exaggerate or speak in exaggerated terms, even when the data don't exactly support what you're saying, because that brings in the money. I was in that boat. As a PhD student, I defended climate change quite often, because the truth is I didn't think much about it, but told myself: It's getting an enormous amount of attention.

It brings loads of money into the geosciences. Even if I don't believe all the exaggeration, what's the problem? In the late 1990s, what had begun as an environmental horror story gained momentum.

Western governments and their senior officials were more than ready to take on the climate problem. Green taxes were levied, green regulations expanded, and that in turn created more climate-related jobs and activities. Take the banking sector. You tell a banker: You must submit reports to the regulator on how climate change will affect your bank. The banker knows nothing about this subject, so he has to commission studies from scientists. And the scientists, of course, are happy to tell him that it will be terrible for his bank. It will cause all sorts of problems, and they need to be given money to research it. Green subsidies and regulations meant that you could now make money with climate.

Renewable energy companies sprang up. Consulting firms offered advice on what they call sustainability and climate compliance. It's a wonderful business opportunity, isn't it? You want climate, we deliver climate. The renewable energy industry alone now turns over a trillion dollars a year, and that is expected to double in the coming years. What was once a small trade has now blossomed into an important part of the global economy. The growth of this climate industry has produced an explosion of well-paid green jobs: sustainability officers, carbon offset consultants, ESG advisors, climate compliance lawyers, and countless others. Students came to our institutes, the geosciences, with a focus on climate.

That didn't exist before, but they looked at their career prospects, and they were smart, they looked at who was hiring, and the fact was that across the entire job listings, somewhere "climate" was in the title. A few years ago I saw programs like a master's in climate finance, and I wondered: What on earth is climate? I don't understand what a master's in finance is. Now you need a university that teaches this program, you need professors of climate finance. Every school, university, or company has a climate officer, or several, and a climate program, and if you look at these institutions or companies, you find that everyone is on board, and anyone who doesn't take part comes under pressure.

At the most recent meeting of the publicly funded UN IPCC, 70,000 delegates flew in from around the world. Government bureaucrats, green NGOs, carbon capture consultants, environmental journalists, heads of renewable energy companies. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Many hundreds of thousands of jobs worldwide now depend on the climate crisis. This creates a huge group whose job is to manage the crisis and, explicitly, to make sure people are alarmed, because this entire industry depends on the crisis continuing to exist. But therein lies the one great danger for this multi-trillion-dollar industry. All the jobs, all the money, depend entirely on there being a climate crisis.

If CO₂ doesn't have the enormous negative effects we originally claimed, how do we stay in business? How do we justify our existence if climate change isn't the existential threat we've claimed it to be for the last four decades or so? People like me: our careers depend on climate research funding. I've been doing this for almost my entire career. The other climate scientists have been doing it their entire careers. They don't want that to end. If NASA said global warming was not a problem, where would their funding go? So they can't say that. And then there's the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If it said the climate wasn't changing, it would have no reason to exist.

The IPCC has a self-preservation instinct to show that climate change is an existential threat. Otherwise there would be no reason to collect the money and do the work at all. It's no longer just billions, but trillions of dollars at stake. We're talking about an enormous amount of money. This is a huge fraud on a grand scale. Many people make their living from it. They're not going to give it up. If it suddenly became obvious that this isn't such a big problem after all, that would be seen as an existential threat. Scientists who studied the natural causes of climate change were increasingly viewed with suspicion, as two Harvard astrophysicists found. How much does the Sun change, how does it change, and why?

We didn't even want to get into the temperature records and the climate issue. They went after us immediately, because when we estimated that the Sun had changed quite a lot in climatic terms, the attack came right away, since that doesn't fit the narrative, because they need CO₂ to be the only, the sole dominant factor. If you try to say you're only looking for the background of natural variability, the answer was: There can be no natural causes. It must be man-made. Some of it was said directly, but most of it indirectly. Your funding for such projects will be cut. A project like that leads nowhere. At that point, nothing that contradicted the narrative of global warming as a serious problem was being funded anymore.

Journal editors were pressured not to accept papers considered skeptical of the climate crisis. We don't publish anything that challenges it. And that doesn't happen in secret. Scientists who dared to say publicly that there is no climate chaos were increasingly pushed to the margins and shunned. If a scientifically qualified person stands up and says, "In the data on typhoons in the Pacific, we don't see an upward trend," then suddenly that person loses the authority to speak about Pacific typhoons, not because the statement is wrong, but because it isn't in line. You can marginalize any criticism of the narrative by saying: You're not qualified to talk about this, because you don't support the narrative.

That's how it is, and once you've pushed out everyone who doesn't support the narrative, you can turn around and say: Everyone who matters supports the narrative, so we must be right. Environmental journalists ignored skeptics and instead gave headlines to anyone willing to make the most outrageous claims and predictions about a climate apocalypse. It no longer has anything to do with science. It doesn't matter if your alarmist prediction doesn't come true. You still keep your status as an expert, and the media keep coming and asking for your opinion, even though your predictions were completely wrong.

But the climate consensus is not enforced by the climate industry alone. To explain the broader appeal of climate alarm, we have to look at the politics behind climate. From the very beginning, the climate panic was political. It came out of the environmental movement, the sworn enemy of industrial market capitalism.

At last we have them. We can claim that free markets are destroying the planet, and that we need a strong state to save us. The climate problem, we are told, stems from the irresponsible behavior of greedy, thoughtless people who have too many children, drive too much and consume too many products, and from capitalist corporations that pander to their whims. The solution: the state should be given more power to regulate private companies, but also to steer the lives and habits of individuals. The political agenda has expanded to micromanaging everyone's life down to the smallest detail: which stove you may use, which heating system you may have, how high you may set your thermostat, where you may drive, and in what car.

According to the planners, in an hour there will be no more combustion engines. That doesn't work. For all of this the state has to get involved, because the state has to force change on the public, so to speak. If it were left to the public, we wouldn't buy electric vehicles because, you know, they're impractical. Support for climate alarm today is practically synonymous with contempt for market capitalism and a longing for a bigger state. In the US, liberals and conservatives face off. And generally, liberals worry that we are destroying the planet. And of course they are also in favor of a strong state. Conservatives are at the other end of the spectrum; many of them don't believe we are destroying the planet, and they don't want the state interfering in their private lives.

Lip service to climate alarm has become almost universal among those who depend on the state for their livelihood. That includes the publicly funded sectors of education, the arts and science. Tony Heller remembers his time at Los Alamos Labs. The entire county of Los Alamos was kept running with government money. We had the highest incomes in the state. Of course the people in Los Alamos supported a strong state, because that's where their livelihood came from. That's where their good schools came from. Everything good in Los Alamos came from the government. So of course everyone believed in a strong state. In the predominantly publicly funded Western intelligentsia, more government spending and regulation is almost a moral badge of identity.

In these circles, it is socially unacceptable to question climate alarm. Being a climate skeptic is taboo. Those who oppose it really do encounter a lot of anger and venom, and you're called a denier, a science denier and a heretic. Colleagues stop talking to you. You're no longer invited to conferences. Students may run away from you. It's really all terrible. Professors Henrik Svensmark and Nir Shaviv describe what happened when they published their findings on the climate effects of solar activity. All hell broke loose because of this work. I had no idea it would escalate like this, and it completely changed my life. When we said it, people didn't like hearing it, and we became persona non grata.

I've seen so many cases where people did really nasty things. When I applied for a position, a group of scientists wrote to the university saying I shouldn't be hired. And that's a typical story,

unfortunately. If you don't agree with the usual polemic, you become an outcast. You are shunned. As if you had leprosy. For Professor Sallie Baliunas, the personal attacks became too much. I retired early,

and my family said I should have left much earlier, years earlier. So they noticed that it had taken a toll on both her and me. Dr. Matthew Wielicki was an assistant professor of geology at the University of Alabama when he decided to speak out about the climate panic. Because of the hostility, he decided to leave teaching. Speaking out as a climate skeptic was basically career suicide, absolutely. I couldn't possibly have published in many of the established journals where I needed to publish. I basically isolated myself from many funding institutions. That's how you can manufacture a consensus in a community: those who are skeptical of that consensus are essentially thrown out of the community. To

Speaking out scientifically against the consensus is, I would say, a career killer for people at the start of their careers. If I were 30 and wanted to build a career at a university, I would definitely keep my mouth shut. And in fact, when I was younger, I did try to keep my mouth shut. Back then I knew the climate issue was nonsense, but I was somewhat careful. If a young person questions it, he can't put that in a grant application. The application will be rejected. And he can't publish either, because the gatekeepers keep him out. That would be the end of his career. You have to go along with the global warming story. If you know better, you get cut off, lose your funding, ruin your own career, get trashed by the community and despised by your colleagues.

The so-called climate consensus has itself been weaponized, turned into a form of bullying, intimidation and censorship against those who don't comply. It is a tool for bludgeoning opponents and skeptics and attacking their character. According to critics, the militant, intolerant climate consensus is anything but scientific; it is a devastating assault on free scientific inquiry. I see my job as a scientist as laying out the facts and letting people decide what they want to do. If you can't talk about the facts, it becomes corrupt. Anyone who shuts the door on ideas, who says they must not be examined, that you must not have this idea, has left the realm of science.

I don't believe climate scientists will ever back away from their claim that rising CO₂ is the control knob of today's climate system. I don't believe they will ever back away from it, no matter what the evidence shows. It's clear that it is now a cult, completely detached from science. But the seemingly unstoppable climate panic is not just an attack on science. It is beginning to shape a new kind of society for us.

Environmentalists like to present themselves as anti-establishment, yet their demands are parroted, approvingly and piously, by King Charles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC, the UN, the EU, heads of government, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum. In fact, by the entire state-funded establishment. Global warming is the perfect problem for the state to get involved in to expand its influence. It's a wonderful way to increase state power, and if there is a worldwide existential threat, you need a powerful world government to deal with it. Anyone who is a climate activist is in truth helping to massively reaffirm the state that directs our lives.

Many environmentalists, most environmentalists, all the environmentalists who consider themselves radical, progressive alternatives, are really just reaffirming the mantras and mainstream arguments of the entire establishment. The demands on the state mean that it suddenly gains the authority to intervene in every corner of our lives and our way of living. A climate narrative is attached to everything. How much you consume, what you spend your money on, how much you travel, whom you associate with, what food you eat, whether you eat meat. In everything there is an aspect that can be controlled through the climate lens. Suppose that 20 years ago someone had come up with the idea: I would like to ban cheap energy. I would like to control which appliances everyone buys.

I would like to tell everyone where they are allowed to go, and basically have dictatorial control over everything. That wouldn't have worked. Everyone would have thought you were crazy and ignored you. But 20 years later, that is exactly what is happening. The publicly funded establishment in the West is so big and powerful. It can enforce the official climate consensus through its control of schools, universities, government and much of the media.

State broadcasters like the BBC exclude climate skeptics. Broadcasting regulators forbid private broadcasters from airing skeptical views and threaten them with the loss of their broadcasting license. What normally happens in an emergency: all normal forms of openness and democracy have to be suppressed, because how else are you supposed to deal with an emergency? So we face a situation similar to the lockdown, in which basically all normal behavior, normal forms of social communication and normal forms of democracy are effectively ruled out. Activists even demand that any skepticism be made a criminal offense. In certain professions, it is now dangerous to voice dissent on climate.

It is no surprise that more skeptical people think twice before voicing their concerns, because they could put their careers, their businesses or their jobs at risk. If you are any kind of professional in science, law or medicine, if you belong to a professional association or work at a university, you can be fired for saying what you believe. The result is a censorious, authoritarian regime that has to control every movement, every word, everything you want to do, because everything you do is a potential risk to the survival of humanity. Climate protesters condemn capitalism, but at their anti-capitalist rallies you hardly see anyone who looks like a worker, like a dockworker, crane operator, steelworker, beautician or trucker.

Workers are apparently completely absent from these rallies, and for a very good reason. Today's climate alarmists don't complain that capitalism produces too little, but that it produces too much. The modern capitalist system has led to prosperity. More and more people have more and more things. Modern anti-capitalism criticizes capitalism for giving us too much. The belief is that the problem today is that it provides ordinary workers with far too many benefits en masse. Instead, what they want, and they often say so quite explicitly, is a much stricter, simpler lifestyle, in which mass consumption, the consumer choices of most of the population, are controlled or even banned. You're supposed to consume less, take fewer vacations, drive less, eat less and so on.

Many environmentalists are apparently bothered not by the failure but by the success of capitalism, which supplies the masses with an abundance of affordable goods. Ordinary workers: we have reached a point in history, at least in the Western world, where mass manufacturers have made cheap clothing, cheap food and cheap furniture possible for them. That is why conflict arises when wealthy environmentalists express their contempt for mass consumption, for people on those huge cruise ships, thousands of them, and ask: What are they doing there? Oh my God, all these cruise ships are ruining Venice, ruining all our beautiful … – they belong to us, right? What do they even want there?

This is a classic example of class hypocrisy and self-interest disguised as concern for the common good. You could take these green socialists far more seriously if they lived self-sufficiently, cut their own consumption to the minimum and never flew. Instead, you constantly hear that human consumption is destroying the planet, yet the people who say it show no sign of reducing their own. What environmentalists call degrowth is achieved by destroying our conventional energy and transport systems and by forcing the introduction of expensive and unreliable alternatives. That is already having the desired effect on industrial production, which is groaning under the burden of punishing green taxes, regulations and higher energy prices.

The people behind the climate alarm don't care about industry at all. They have nothing to do with it. They don't know people who work in manufacturing and whose jobs and lives depend on it. Industry and industrial progress don't excite them. They explicitly want to shut them down.

Kisii, Kenya, East Africa. According to many leading environmentalists, the world's poorest people should not aspire to the lifestyle of people in the First World. The planet couldn't cope with it. Grace Nyakananda is one of many Africans without electricity or gas for cooking and heating their homes. Indoor smoke from burning wood and dried dung is the deadliest form of air pollution worldwide. For millions, it causes lung disease, blindness and early death.

Africa doesn't just need cheap, reliable electricity. Agricultural productivity here is incredibly low. Increasing it requires fossil fuels for fertilizer and to power tractors and other farm machinery. Jasper Meshogu is a farmer. Every African wants to develop, and improving agriculture is one of the easiest ways to do it. Agriculture is closely tied to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels that, according to Western governments, we're not supposed to have access to. Around a third of the food produced in Africa spoils before it ever reaches the mouths of consumers. To prevent this terrible waste, Africa needs plastic packaging, refrigerated trucks, and good roads. Western environmentalists oppose all of it.

All of this is part of industrial development. All of it depends on affordable energy from fossil fuels. Diarrhea from contaminated drinking water still kills hundreds of thousands of African children. But clean water requires large industrial water treatment plants and a modern water supply network. And that only exists with cheap energy. I think it's pretty obvious that the West has what it has thanks to fossil fuels. When people say Africa doesn't need fossil fuels, I wonder: I don't believe they want what's best for us. They don't want us to develop, and that means we keep going hungry. We stay poor. Most people don't know what climate change is.

They don't care. They just want food on the table. They want to defeat poverty. They want to defeat hunger. They need money to improve their lives. They want to flourish. That's what it's about. When they say "sustainable development," they don't mean development. Exactly. Developing sustainably means not using too much energy, not emitting too much carbon, net zero, the idea that you mustn't use too many resources, that you mustn't produce enough consumer goods, because consumption is bad. Ultimately, that takes the idea of development off the table. The Greens believe Africans should never use their resources the way Europeans, Americans, Canadians or Australians have used theirs. They also advocate punitive taxes, border levies on every African country that wants to export its goods to Europe if it uses its resources.

That sums up the ethical unscrupulousness and depravity of the green agenda. But climate alarmists have a problem. Many countries in Africa and across Asia simply ignore the environmental demands of Western governments and international organizations. Communist China is estimated to be building an average of two new coal-fired power plants per week. China now consumes more coal than the rest of the world combined. That is one of the reasons this whole climate agenda is falling apart, because the rest of the world is not cutting emissions and is not switching to renewables. In the West, too, climate alarmism is losing credibility for many people.

Ordinary people aren't stupid. They have watched one absurd claim after another fail again and again. That leaves people with a deep and justified cynicism toward what the scientific establishment says and what the government says. To solve the climate crisis, we are supposedly meant to give up our cars.

We're supposed to pay more for fuel, heating, clothing, food, fly less, restrict where we drive. This attack on mass travel, mass tourism and mass consumption finds little favor with the masses.

People realize it will cost them a lot of money simply to go on living the way they always have and the way they want to. As soon as that started, I saw people in the United Kingdom who had previously been indifferent to environmentalism suddenly thinking: How dare they? How dare they try to take away from us what we see not as luxuries but as necessities? All of the sustainability policy is about renunciation. It's about restrictions, about doing less, and for most people that is an abomination given their everyday needs. That there is actually an ideological movement of people who think cheap mass production, whether of houses or anything else, is a problem.

For heaven's sake, no wonder people find the middle-class view of environmentalism contemptible. But that is literally what people are saying. How can we stop people from buying cheap things in shops? When climate protesters in London's East End climbed onto a Tube train, they weren't cheered on by the commuting workers. They were abused, pelted, angrily dragged out of the train and roughly handled on the platform. If you go into a pub that is mostly frequented by what Americans call blue-collar workers, you won't be thrown out for being skeptical of climate policy. On the contrary, someone will probably buy you a drink.

They realize that behind all the talk of a climate emergency and climate crisis there is in reality hostility and hatred toward them, toward their lifestyle, their beliefs, and a desire to change that, by force if necessary.

Punitive and restrictive measures in the name of climate change and COVID have triggered protests in Britain, Canada and other Western countries. Anti-establishment politicians and movements are gaining support. They underestimated the anger this would meet among ordinary people who simply say: You can't do this. And so suddenly this new movement emerges. Many workers are not merely skeptical but downright angry about climate alarm and everything that follows from it. There is a suspicion, or perhaps a realization, that climate change is a made-up scare, driven by self-interest and arrogance, cynically promoted by a parasitic, publicly funded establishment hungry for ever more money and power, an attack on the freedom and prosperity of everyone else.