The Greatest Heist in World History:
The Global Warming Scam
The Lie
Summary: In 1974, the media began broadcasting warnings of an impending ice age. Today, we are supposedly being threatened by end-of-the-world catastrophic global warming. Which end-of-the-world scenario should we believe? Or should we believe any of it? Anyone who questions the current climate change narrative is vulnerable to being vilified, cancelled, or worse. In America, indeed the entire Western world, we have been lied to so persistently, so overwhelmingly, so convincingly, that the lie has worked its way into almost every aspect of our lives. Yet the science—the actual observational data—does not support the climate change narrative.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
—Carl Sagan
In November 1974, the Guardian published an article with this breathless conclusion: “The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into ice ages of the past. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” (emphasis added). Two years earlier, Walter Cronkite had reported on the same thing. Today, we are supposedly being threatened by end-of-the-world catastrophic global warming.
Each scenario forecasts an end-of-the-world calamity at polar opposites. What are we supposed to believe? Should we believe any of it? Carl Sagan’s quote describes exactly where America, indeed the entire Western world, finds itself today. We have been lied to so persistently, so overwhelmingly, so convincingly, that the lie has worked its way into almost every aspect of our lives.
Nearly every institution of society—industry, finance, government, the education establishment, news media, and entertainment—has been saturated in the lie and has turned its attention to promoting as well as demanding we underwrite its alleged “cost.” And we participate because our pride tells us we couldn’t be stupid enough to fall for such a massive lie. Our leaders couldn’t be lying to us, could they? Especially if they are the ones we voted for. And as the lie becomes more apparent, we double-down out of fear of being seen as fools if we admit the truth.
Anyone who questions the climate change narrative is liable to being vilified, cancelled, fired from their job, and possibly even threatened with death—the usual punishments for daring to question any of the Left’s pet narratives.
The Lie
Well, let’s look at that, because we are rushing to implement a massive change in how we produce energy, that most critical sector that fuels the modern age. Will global warming really end life on earth in 12 years, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC) (D-NY) claimed? It all sounds pretty absurd, yet they are doubling, tripling down on it anyway. In January at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Al Gore said:
We’re still putting 162 million tons [of greenhouse gas] into [the atmosphere] every single day and the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth.… That’s what’s boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers, and the rain bombs, and sucking the moisture out of the land, and creating the droughts, and melting the ice and raising the sea level, and causing these waves of climate refugees.
Climate refugees? Where? 600,000 Hiroshima-class bombs every day? Where? Boiling the oceans? Are we supposed to believe such lunacy? Al Gore has been wrong on virtually all of his predictions since beginning his crusade following publication of his 2006 book and movie An Inconvenient Truth. The number of errors is too long to list here. For a more thorough treatment, see: “Al Gore’s 30 Years of Climate Errors: An Anniversary Analysis.”
But one simple example illustrates the point. Figure 1 reproduces Gore’s famous “hockey stick” graph, which Gore contended shows world temperatures changing with changes in CO2 concentrations. But changes in temperature on this chart precede changes in CO2. It is difficult to see this from the graph, because the data cover 600,000 years.
Figure 1: Al Gore’s “Hockey Stick” Graph
Source: Habitat21, “Al Gore’s Graph: Carbon Dioxide and Temperature,” http://www.habitat21.co.uk/energy86.html.
Furthermore, the graph shows that many of the prior spikes in temperature were higher than the most recent one, yet CO2 concentrations were not as high. In fact, a 1999 study of Antarctic polar ice cores published in Science magazine noted that changes in temperature precede CO2 concentrations from 200 to 1,000 years. Yet other studies based on Northern Hemisphere ice cores show CO2 leading changes in temperature.
Al Gore’s graph is based on “Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the Past Six Centuries” a 1998 Nature article by university professors Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes. In 2003, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published a rebuttal to the Mann study in the journal Energy and Environment. They identified numerous errors and omissions in the original Mann study. Figure 2 shows the original data as presented in the Mann study compared to the corrected data provided by McIntyre and McKitrick.
Figure 2: Mann data vs. Corrected Data
Source: McIntyre & McKitrick, “Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series,” Energy & Environment, 14, no. 6 (2003): 766, Figure 8.
Of course, Mann et al. claimed in a subsequent report that even corrected data support their initial study. Mann claimed that a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study confirmed his results, but that was only partly true. McIntyre and McKitrick published a second rebuttal to Mann in 2005, where they again discredited his methods. While the NAS report agreed with Mann’s findings on recent temperature increases, McIntyre told the Daily Caller,
The NAS report did not vindicate him, it said his methods were biased, and his results depended on faulty bristlecone pine records that shouldn’t be used by researchers…
The NAS panel also cautioned against conclusions about warming more than 600 years back and said uncertainties were being underestimated.”
In the next installment, climate-change fanatics ignore that carbon is the basis for all life on earth.
The Greatest Heist in World History:
The Global Warming Scam
SOURCE: CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER
