A Change in the Weather

Fifty Years in the Making

We have come a long way in fifty years - from one extreme to the other. And we still don't know where we are headed. Is it net zero or 500 ppm of CO2?

The weathermen say it is all or nothing. Change or collapse. A return to pre-industry or calamity. Phase out fossil fuels or bake on a boiling planet. Transition to net zero or it is the end of humanity. Bet the farm or bust. But, if we do suck up the coming stringency for all us plebs, what will actually change? Will CO2 parts per million miraculously revert to the lauded 280? What difference will that make to the weather? Will the droughts and floods and heat domes and extreme weathers miraculously halt? 

Climate Deceptions

Computer modelling has a lot to answer for - a lot of obfuscation, a lot of false leads, and a lot of fear-and doom-mongering.

The BBC announced The ice age cometh on the cover of Radio Times, 16 - 22 November, 1974 edition (see image above)

The April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek soon after presented a one-page feature authored by Peter Gwynne in its 'Science' section entitled The Cooling World. It wrote: " The central fact is that after three quarters of a cenury of extraordinarily mild temperatures, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and effect of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climate change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic."

National Geographic then published a lengthy feature about climate change in its November 1976 edition, right at the height of the 1970s global cooling scare.

From the seminal work Plunderers of the Earth by Canadian geologist Julius Ruechel, published in 2024:

"There are two take-home messages from National Geographic’s 1976 four charts, which are important in order to understand...

1. Climate is not stable, but rather it is driven by a multitude of powerful cyclical forces acting over both long- and shorter-time scales, which are constantly tugging climate in one direction or another.  

2. The heat of the 1930s was much warmer than both the cold climate of 1880s (just after the world came out of the Little Ice Age) and the cool climate of the 1970s (when scientists were warning us about the next ice age).

And yet, in 2023 we were told that global temperatures were allegedly the hottest in more than 100,000 years......"

Thirty years later, An Inconvenient Truth morphed into serial inconvenient untruths. Way back then, in 2006 (just eighteen years ago!) we heard from Al Gore that:

- Africa’s tallest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, will be snow-free ‘within the decade'

- temperature rise from increases in man-made carbon dioxide emissions are ‘uninterrupted and intensifying'

- heatwaves will become more common, like the one that killed 35,000 people across Europe in 2003

- within the next 50 to 70 years, polar ice could be completely gone. (He later said the ice would be gone by 2013, which was even more ridiculous.) 

- Sea levels could rise twenty feet

- Unless the world dramatically reduces greenhouse gases, we will hit a “point of no return (in a mere ten years).

- depictions of San Francisco and Florida disappearing under the rising sea level played up drama at the expense of accuracy.

In the ensuing eighteen years, oil and gas have continued to be extracted, unabated. The sky has not fallen in, though global average temperatures continue their incremental rise in many places but certainly not all, in the oceans and on land. This rise has not accelerated. Sea levels have risen a millimetre or more but not drastically. And the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro continues to be snow-covered. Any mitigation measures have failed to halt the rise of CO2 parts per million, the new demon of 'anthropogenic global warming'. Weather modification and solar geo-engineering boondoggles continue to be taboo to exposure by the military, governments, and the fawning, uninquisitive media.

The mechanics of the climate are complex and subject to regional and local variances.

CO2 is a minor consideration (400 parts per million or 0.004% of the Earth's atmosphere) compared to water vapour at 70%. Desertification, deforestation, loss of soils, loss of biodiversity on land and in oceans, droughts, floods and, yes, warming weathers emerging here and there are far greater contributors, brought on as they are by natural cycles and intensifying environmental mismanagement, geo-engineering, weather manipulation.

“The science shows us that fears of a climate apocalypse are unfounded. Global warming is real, but it is not the end of the world. It is a manageable problem. Yet, we now live in a world where almost half the population believes climate change will extinguish humanity. This has profoundly altered the political reality. It makes us double down on poor climate policies. It makes us increasingly ignore all other challenges, from pandemics and food shortages to political strife and conflicts, or subsume them under the banner of climate change… If we don’t say stop, the current, false climate alarm, despite its good intentions, is likely to leave the world much worse off than it could be… We need to dial back on the panic, look at the science, face the economics, and address the issue rationally.” 

― Bjorn Lomborg