Every day it seems, every single day, we are sprayed in the newspapers, on the radio and on the television with climate change propaganda. It’s like a Chinese water torture. Extreme weather events, we are told, are the result of human over-use of the so-called ‘fossil fuels’, that they will become more frequent, and that the sea-level is rising so that within a few decades waves will begin to inundate island nations such as the Maldives and undefended coastal towns and cities. We are told too, that many species are on the edge of extinction due to climate change. Polar bears, walruses and Adélie penguin colonies are held up as exemplars. We are also told that a warming planet with increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will have an adverse effect on food production. Young people are ceaselessly subjected to this at school to the extent that many of them worry about their futures and some even believe that they have no future at all. They think the world as we know it will have ended in ten years. It is relentless. And it is all a tissue of lies. 
What I aim to do over three parts is to take the reader through the history of the climate scare and how we came to be where we are today. It is especially relevant now that the Labour party is back in office after fourteen years and Ed Milliband, the man who in 2008 gave us the Climate Change Act, is once more the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero (not just Climate Change – thanks, Theresa May). Expect no realism from this government.
As I recall, the idea that the world might be facing a runaway warming due to the increase of certain greenhouse gases first came to wider public awareness in the early 1990s. When I was an undergraduate, albeit over 50 years ago now, one of the modules of my degree course was climatology which in those days was a branch of geography. After I graduated, I embarked on a 44-year career in military and commercial aviation in which an understanding of weather and climate was essential and daily interpretation of meteorological data routine. With each successive story in the media and each far-fetched doomsday scenario I found myself becoming increasingly sceptical. Then I saw Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth. Instinctively I knew something was wrong, so I started to take more than a passing interest.
The first question which need to be answered was how did a subject which hitherto had been relatively low key come suddenly to have such prominence and why were governments all over the world taking it up and adopting policies which they believed would be able to slow down the rate at which the planet appeared to be warming or even, Canute-like, to stop it altogether? What was the genesis of this proposition? Fortunately, there were plenty of people who were already onto the case so I was able to find their work and read it or listen to what they had to say. That in turn prompted further research in various areas of what had now become known as ‘Climate Science’. What must be blindingly obvious to anyone one who does so is that the Earth’s various climates are a part of an unbelievably complex global system and those who style themselves ‘climate scientists’ are still light years away from understanding it fully let alone predicting with any degree of certainty what the climatic future of the planet will be. They rely on computer models and as we have come to understand, computer models of anything are totally reliant on the data which is put into them. If input data are wrong, the output will be wrong. If input data is an assumption rather than hard facts based on observations the output will be no better than an assumption. Garbage in, garbage out.
To understand it we must go to the origin. The first hint that anyone was concerned about a possible disastrous shift in weather patterns was when two scientists, a Dr George Kukla and a Dr Robert Matthews, wrote to US President Richard Nixon in 1972. They believed that the Earth might be about to undergo a climatic change of an order of magnitude greater than anything hitherto experienced by mankind. Other scientists weighed in with similar concerns and soon the media took notice and amplified the message. What they were worried about was not global warming but rather global cooling which would lead to a return of widespread glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere. That would indeed be a serious threat to human civilisation. The Earth had been observed to be cooling down for several decades so there was a certain amount of plausibility about their concerns. For several years this fear continued to inspire a spate of magazine articles and books. Then, at the end of the 1970s, the Earth started to get warmer again and the concern disappeared as rapidly as it had arisen.
Even during this brief panic over cooling there were some scientists who thought that the real threat might not be cooling but warming. They had not forgotten the work done by predecessors starting with French engineer Jacques Fourier who in 1824 proposed that the atmosphere somehow insulated the Earth and prevented all the Sun’s heat from radiating back into space. He calculated that this ‘blanket’ kept the Earth about 33℃ warmer than it would be if it had no atmosphere. He was followed by the Irish physicist John Tyndall who in 1860 determined that only certain gases had this property, principally water vapour and CO2. This may not actually be true, but we’ll leave that aside for now. Tyndall was followed by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896 who attempted to calculate how much warmer the Earth might get if mankind continued to burn vast amounts of hydrocarbons thus adding to the CO2 content of the atmosphere. He suggested that if CO2 in the atmosphere were to double it would add 5℃ to global temperatures. Finally, inspired by the warmer decades of the 1920s and 1930s, British meteorologist Guy Callendar proposed that the cause of the increasing warmth might be the rapid increase in the rate of burning of coal and oil due to the rapid industrialisation, growth of electricity grids with their power stations and the rise of the internal combustion engine. However, he didn’t see it as a disaster; he thought it was more likely to be beneficial because it would improve agricultural production and perhaps hold off a return to an ice age.
What Callendar recognised was that although CO2 was only a negligible portion of the atmosphere at 0.03% it plays a vital role in the continuance of life on Earth. All plants absorb CO2 and using sunlight turn it into the oxygen essential to all animal life. He was aware that CO2 promotes plant growth, so he saw a higher CO2 level as likely to boost human food production. However, scarcely had he completed his work when the period known as the Little Cooling (1940-1970) arrived. There was now no immediate concern over warming but the work he and his predecessors had done would not be forgotten. It sat waiting for the modern environmental movement to pick it up when it got going in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Once it did, there appeared on the scene three men who would get the ball rolling. The first was oceanographer Dr Roger Revelle. He and his colleagues at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography were aware that the oceans were an important part of the Earth’s climate regulatory system and that they absorbed and emitted vast amounts of CO2. They also surmised that the burning of coal and refined oil might be emitting too much CO2 for the oceans to absorb, and it might stay in the atmosphere forever. To test this, he established a team to take readings at Mauna Loa in Hawaii. Their first readings in 1959 showed CO2 to be 316 parts per million (ppm) or 0.0316% of the atmosphere. This rose by 1980 to 340 ppm (0.034%). This might have seemed insignificant had not ice-core samples shown CO2 to be at 180 ppm (0.018%) of the atmosphere during glaciations and rising only occasionally to 300 ppm (0.03%) in warmer interglacial periods. Furthermore, it was widely accepted that for 10,000 years CO2 levels had been at around 280 ppm (0.028%) until the coming of the industrial revolution saw the increased burning of coal when it started to rise. Now it appeared to Revelle’s team that the rate of increase could soon see CO2 above 400 ppm (0.04%) of the atmosphere. Today it is at 415 ppm (0.0415%) of the atmosphere.
Here it seemed was the proof that the burning of fossil fuels was leading to an increase of CO2in the atmosphere and that in turn would lead to a rise in global temperatures.
Some would choose to see in this that unless immediate and drastic action was taken to curb CO2 emissions, the temperature rise would be so catastrophic that the ice caps would melt, sea level would rise disastrously, deserts would expand, and global climates would be thrown into chaos. However, Dr Revelle himself did not see it this way. He was far more cautious, saying that climate is a complicated thing and the changes so far seen may be due to other causes which we don’t yet understand. He would remain cautious to the end of his life.
It was about this time that the hyper-rich and powerful Rockefeller family became involved.
In the late 1950s, at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a Special Studies Project under the management of one Henry Kissinger, had been set up which would look at problems and opportunities facing America in the future. They were beginning to look for areas in which global problems could be identified requiring a global solution. One of them was climate. Kissinger later moved on to assist the Rockefellers in establishing the European Management Forum which later became the World Economic Forum.
One person who had heard Revelle lecturing at Harvard in the late 1960s was so impressed at the time that he had never forgotten those lectures. Having now followed his oil-millionaire father as Senator for Tennessee, has was ambitious and he saw an opportunity to create something that could lead to riches - one Al Gore whose scare-mongering film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ would lay much of the ground -work for him.
The second man who played an important role is much less well known. Maurice Strong was a Canadian who came from a poor family and was brought up during the hardships of the Great Depression. He was a passionate socialist and believed that the collective power of governments should be used to make a better world for all.
While a teenager during World War 2 Strong was much impressed by Roosevelt and Churchill’s talk about setting up a United Nations organisation after the war (with Rockefeller money). He had a vision of such an organisation becoming a future World government and it became his obsession for the rest of his life. He started as a member of security staff at the UN but quickly realised that to rise to any position of power and influence he would have to gain better qualifications. Accordingly, he embarked on a career in the Canadian energy industry and used it to make political contacts. He rose and eventually gained political appointments in Canada and back at the UN where he became the first director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP).
While Strong was ascending at the UN, David Rockefeller was involved in establishing the Club of Rome which self-describes as … a platform of diverse thought leaders who identify holistic solutions to complex global issues and promote policy initiatives and action to enable humanity to emerge from multiple planetary emergencies.
So, what exactly were these planetary emergencies this self-appointed group were dreaming up? They soon told us. In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortage, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviours that they can be overcome.The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.
In a speech in 1974 Strong laid out that he believed that many of the problems of the World were due to the selfishness and materialism of rich Western nations which pose an acute moral, economic and political dilemma for the ‘global community’. In the meantime, he had also become a member of the sinister Malthusian Club of Rome and thus a Rockefeller acolyte. In 1983 he served on the UN’s ‘World Commission on Environment and Development’. Here he met the former socialist Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Harlem Brundtland, who was to chair the Brundtland Commission. In 1979 the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and UNEP had organised the first ‘World Climate Conference’ in Vienna calling on the World to prevent potential man-made changes in climate which could be to the detriment of all mankind. This led to another conference in 1985 at Villach in Austria, funded by the Rockefellers and chaired by Strong’s successor, a Dr Mustafa Tolba, to discuss the role of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in climate variation and its impact.
At Villach, the third man who played a crucial part came to prominence - Swedish meteorologist Professor Bert Bolin. Bolin had been worried about potential warming for many years and had published his first paper on the subject as far back as 1960. In the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, he became involved in politics when his friend and the leader of the Swedish Social Democrats, Olaf Palme, became Prime Minister. Palme wanted to wean Sweden off oil and build a network of 24 nuclear power stations but was vigorously opposed by the new green movement. He therefore used Bolin’s ideas on warming as a central part of his argument in favour of nuclear power. When Palme lost power Bolin switched his attention to the two UN organisations, the WMO and UNEP.
At the Villach conference, Bolin presented a 560-page report which argued that ‘climate change was a plausible and serious probability’. The conference concluded that there was an urgent need for more research into climate change. There needed to be internationally agreed policies to reduce greenhouse gases and strategies to cope with the changes and rising sea levels. No nation had the ability or mandate to do it on its own so it would have to be co-ordinated at a global level through the UN organisations which the Rockefellers regarded as their personal fiefdom.
The architects had drawn up their plans. It just remained to be seen if the rest of the world would buy them.
Next: Constructing the Cult