Climate The Movie
A funny thought occurred to me, dealing with Michael Mann, noted climate alarmist scientist and the inventor of the famous hockey stick. The thought was Mann own hockey stick with excessive CO2 and rise in temperature coincided with the most rapid growth of prosperity world have ever seen. We have seen more people being fed better diets, less people living in poverty, and multiple rise in economic growth and GDP per capita growth. Mann own research supports the narrative that higher CO2 and warmer temperatures are not bad for the planet but are variables that is actually good for the planet.
Climate the Movie directed by Martin Durkin and produced by Tom Nelson is full of many gems that debunk much of the science behind the recent Climate crisis scare. Durkin interviews many experts and when I say experts, I mean some of the leading scientists in the field including Will Happier, Richard Lindzen, Steve Koonin, and John Clauser among others. These experts have taught at Princeton, MIT, University of California among others and Clauser was just rewarded a Nobel Prize in Science. That is an elite group of experts.
The film examines the science behind climate change alarmist arguments, beginning with the actual climate history of this planet which goes back hundred of million of years of data collected. We find that our planet has been warmer and CO2 levels higher but life flourished. Even in the past thousands of years, we have seen our planet as warm if not warmer than today including the Roman warming period and the Medieval warming period.
The scientists noted that we are living through overall cooling period that has lasted for thousands of years and many of the scientists interviewed added we are also in the midst of a CO2 dearth and as one scientist noted, we may have come close thousands of years ago of a catastrophic event when the CO2 sunk to extreme low and if it had reached lower, life as we know it would cease to exist.
The case made by the scientist are far superior to the arguments of the alarmists and this has been shown when these ideas get explored side by side. A few years, Richard Lindzen and a team debated a team led by Galvin Schmidt and after the debate, many who sided with Schmidt reversed their position and changed over to Lindzen (going into the debate, nearly two out of three favored Schmidt assertion we had a climate crisis but afterwards a plurality sided with Lindzen. Schmidt never has debated a climate opponent again.) Two years ago, Steve Koonin debated Andrew Dessler in Greenwich village and again the results were the same, Koonin changed 20 percent of the audience over to his side and easily won the debate. It got so bad for Dessler that he was forced to apologize to Koonin about an article he coauthored attacking Koonin position and Koonin’s book, Unsettled.
So why isn’t the position of climate skeptics taken more seriously? As the film makes clear, despite the expertise of these individuals, the reality is that there is a systemic censoring of their ideas. Many scientific journals will not publish their ideas, they are attacked as deniers and many younger scientists understand that to take a position counter to the narrative will cost them their academic career plus government grants goes to those who accept the narrative of climate crisis. They are shunned and there is an attempt to silence anyone who dares to oppose the climate alarmist point of view. The term denier was originally designed to equate these brilliant minds as no better than holocaust deniers. During the recent Pandemic, we saw similar attempts to censor opponents of the lockdowns, but the evidence was so overwhelming that the lockdowns were failures, it was hard not to hide the anti-lockdown arguments. The one optimistic view that film leaves us with is that when the average voters see the price of the alarmists ideas of dealing with the crisis, they are starting to rebel including farmers who being told, don’t farm, to the rise in energy cost for the average consumers. Developing nations around the world, in particular Africa, are being told they have to forsake fossil fuels that led to prosperity of much of the developed world and many don’t like the message they must continue to live in poverty. China and India are developing coal plants for energy and ignoring by policies that will reduce their own ability to prosper. They may pay lip service to green arguments but in practices, they simply don’t care and ignore the alarmists arguments.
This film is worth the view and remember that when fossil fuels along with free market economics began to take hold on a worldwide basis, we saw prosperity never before experienced. While much of the environmentalist movement has used this “crisis” to declare war on free market, the reality is that without fossil fuels whose development came as result of market economy has allowed much of the middle class to enjoy a lifestyle that was reserved only for the rich a century ago. One place you can see the film is here Climate The Movie: Watch Here – Watts Up With That?.