Our good friend, The Male Brain, was able to spare some time from his busy schedule to send over a translation of an interesting post from Israel that breaks down the epic swindle that is the “climate change” racket. The post was originally written by one Hillel Gershuni, and makes the very simple point that the whole thing is one gigantic scam, designed SOLELY to waste epic amounts of money.

This is quite a long article, but it is well worth reading all the way to the end. Many thanks, as always, to our good friend for taking the time to break all of this down, and for his continued excellent contributions to this site.

“Climate Crisis”? You’re Being Swindled

By Hillel Gershuni

Nature is angry. And you cannot play tricks with Nature. Nature strikes back. And we are seeing Nature striking back.

— U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres, 2019 Climate Summit

Nature is upset with us, or so we are being told by activists and politicians. She is angry because we used fossil fuels, and that is a sin. That is why we are bringing the Apocalypse upon ourselves. The Climate Crisis is hitting us hard, and the only way to salvation is to disengage from the sin and purify ourselves with clean fuel. That is the only way to salvation.

Franky the Dinosaur says so too. In a UN produced video, for the Glasgow climate summit 2021, better known as COP26, we see him entering the UN assembly hall saying: “I know a thing or two about extinction… Going extinct is a bad thing. Driving yourselves extinct? That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. At least we had an asteroid. What’s your excuse?”

Franky the Dino there blames Mankind for spending hundreds of billions of dollars each year on subsidizing fossil fuels and compares it to supporting giant meteors. We could help poor people around the world instead of ending our existence.

And if you thought that threatening the end of mankind does seem a bit tad, how about the “journalists” writing about “saving the planet”?

On Our Way To Extinction? Not Hardly

Is Mankind on its way to self-annihilation? Judging by actual science – no way. Not even hypothetically close. A large asteroid may hit us (the estimated likelihood of this over the next 300 years is 1:1750), but we don’t see any UN Conventions being assembled.

As for “climate change”, there is no need to work too hard. A new report by thousands of scientists was just published. Mild predictions on climate future, based on the best of research. In this 3,949 page report, you’ll be encouraged to know, there is no mention (not even a hypothetical one) of extinction, including in the worst-case scenarios. It’s a bit odd that the UN clip producers didn’t know about it, as it is published by the UN: IPCC AR6 – The Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Fine, we are not heading to extinction. But dinosaurs can’t talk, as well. It’s clearly a metaphor, to drive us to action and visualise how bad things are. What’s going on? You know, giant forest fires, extreme weather going more extreme, sea level rising, polar caps melting, oceans acidity rising, hurricanes increasing, desertification, droughts, floods, heat waves and what else. Catastrophe and it is on us. We emit way too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases, they remain in the atmosphere, the climate warms up and those are the results. All listed in the IPCC 3,949 page report, which you are welcome to read.

Baseless Panic

If you read the articles, which all read alike, you’ll find that they are based on the worst-case scenario, named RCP8.5 (or its updated version SSP5-8.5). We’re expecting a rise of 3 degrees above the current mean global temperature level, and that means a global sea level rise of 70 cm. (BTW, if you read the report it states 4.4 degrees and 90 cm. That is because the reference point is 120 years ago. Neat trick, out of a series, which aims to scare us more).

That worst-case scenario is not nearly bad enough. So you see quite a few articles about rising sea levels of 2-4 meters in a few decades. Scary, but completely divorced from reality and even mainstream science.

Coming back to RCP8.5 . It is referred to as “Business As Usual” (BAU) by the authors, the media and public influencers. BAU is what happens if we don’t do anything. Over the years the scientific community had louder and louder criticism on using it as default, and using it in general. In 2020 Nature magazine published an article slamming the scenario, emphasizing it assumes 5 times more usage of coal by the end of the century. Looking at the last few years, coal is taking a dive and natural gas is going up. We may have reached “Peak Coal” in 2013. In the last UN report, scientists called it “unlikely”, but still used it. Oh, and the interactive app of the report also kept it as default. Coincidence? You decide.

Global Warming – Known and Unknown

Is human economic activity contributing heavily to warming? Most scientists believe so. The greenhouse effect is a non-disputed fact, and emissions are also undisputed. However, here things get complicated. How much are we contributing? That question is still under discussion, even though it has been decades of heavily funded research. This is partly due to the fact that we are dealing with a multi-factor chaotic system. So many things are involved, starting with aerosols and up to CO2 ocean and plants absorption.

That question is known as “climate sensitivity” and adds up to the simple question: How many degrees will the average global temperature rise if we double the CO2 concentration? Somewhere in the past it was somewhere in the area of 1.5-4.5 degrees – a very significant and wide range. That remained for decades, until recently it was reduced – to 2.5 to 4.5 degrees.

Warming – The Honey and the Sting

Warming causes issues, that is clear. However, the thought that the Earth has an ideal temperature, which accidentally we live in, is bizarre. History had its share of hotter climates, and man flourished: the Roman era was quite hot, and so was the late Medieval period. There is a scientific debate still going on about the warming being local or global, but this still undermines the claim that “Warmer is worse”.

Is global warming all bad? If you look up the UN reports you may think so, but it is obviously not so. Warming in Russia, Canada and Alaska may unfreeze new agricultural land as well as living space. Northern Europe will also enjoy it. One should also remember that global warming is not uniform, it is greater near the poles and lighter near the equator. The benefit (to northerners) outweighs the damage (to people near the equator).

Global warming and unfreeze near the poles means defrosting of polar sea ways, which will shorten route time and reduce carbon emissions and also availability of minerals which are very hard to produce at the moment.

Warming causes less cold waves, and reduces their intensity (page 2889 of that report). What causes higher mortality, heat waves or cold waves? Some believe that cold raises mortality, so less cold waves equal more lives saved. Others are less curtain. When presenting one side (Heat waves. HELP!), instead of both sides, it seems more like propaganda and less like science.

Don’t Worry – Mankind Adjusts

Sea level rise has been portrayed as trouble, but in most countries we expect a moderate rise of ~30-70cm over the next century, and it won’t be noticeable (have you noticed that sea level went up in the 20^th century by 20 cm?). In other places there will be ample time to respond and mitigate, either by building dams, relocation or more. In various articles a catastrophic image quoting a research that by 2050, hundreds of millions of people will be living in flooded cities. The fine print stated that the maps don’t take coastal defences into consideration, and are based on topography and not flood models. In other words, the articles (and the research itself) were published to spread panic and not provide information. In reality, most of those places are already under sea level and have coastal defences. Did you know that the Netherlands are under the tidal sea level? Or that about a million people living in London are also below that line? As long as the water doesn’t reach you, “rising sea levels” mean nothing.

In a recent article, the global GDP reduction due to sea level rising was estimated to be 0.14-4.5% till 2200, with no adjustment to human adaptations. If you take adaptation into consideration, you get a whopping 0.19%.

If you calculate the economic damage from global warming, which is extremely hard to quantify, since financial models are weak and climate models are even worse, you end up with 7.2% on a 0.04 annual temperature rise. That is if you use the RCP8.5 . Remember that one? Yes – the unlikely one.

It seems that most studies estimate it in under 5% given a rise of 2-3 degrees. Among them is the work of Nobel Prize winner, William Nordhaus, who won the prize for his pioneering work on climate economy. The Nordhaus model factors some 25% additional damages to cover unforeseen costs, and he estimates the damage at 3% till the end of the century.

Let’s put things in perspective. Those scenarios also predict a great economic growth of 435% relative to current GDP. Compare that with the 5% damage. Let’s say we are totally wrong, and the growth will be far less, that means that our contribution to the global warming will be reduced. Moreover, since the world is moving from coal to gas, which is clear and emits way less carbon and other emissions. That energy is what activists want to leave in the ground – go figure.

Nature is Doing Fine – Thanks for Asking

All this is good and well about mankind. What about Mother Earth? Our beloved Nature? You can’t measure it with GDP, can’t you? Well, let’s first remember that nature doesn’t care. Earth can be Venus, for Nature it doesn’t make any difference. The only reason we worry about Nature is because WE worry about it. We want to live in a diverse, blossoming and flourishing world. But our focus is on people.

OK, let’s move away from people. We worry about polar bears, right? Those poor hungry polar bear, floating on a piece of ice, the model of global warming (as seen on the cover of TIME magazine in 2006. His older brother made the front page in a 2000 issue titled “That polar bear is endangered, and so are you”). Apparently, the bear population is growing, at an unprecedented rate, because of regulations – prohibiting hunting them (this ban is also controversial). Actually, the polar bears are not an endangered species at all, unlike other species. That poor bear was probably ill, or something, just like the photographer who took the picture, and had nothing to do with global warming.

And what about species extinction? Isn’t it “the sixth mass extinction”? Facts aren’t showing it. For the last 500 years we documented 900 extinct species, mostly destroyed by Mankind in ways unrelated to global warming. For example, settling in new territories where Man never laid foot previously. Only one rodent living on rubble coral near Australia was declared extinct in 2019 due to climate change. So if we worry about extinction, we should pay more attention to other things, such as wind turbines, which contribute to the ACTUAL extinctions of bird and insect species.

Good news for plant life as well: the world is getting greener, so say NASA satellite maps. This is partly due to extended tree planting in China and increased farming in India – and some of it is actually due to CO2. Yes, that same greenhouse gas is fertilising plants and helps them grow. In turn, that growth reduces the rise in temperatures on Earth.

Ocean acidity and coral dismemberment are also non-catastrophic. For example, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia is doing well lately, so those apocalyptic prophesies are not aligned with reality.

It is important to note that apocalyptic prophecies are a dime a dozen, especially when “it is only an optional scenario”, meaning it can’t be contradicted. Reporters and journalists alike, love those doomsday scenarios. If one looks at reality, you see no upcoming crisis. Not even close.

No, There is No “Climate Crisis”

Change of weather carries damage with it, but is there a “climate crisis”? None whatsoever. In fact, if you check the latest UN report, you’ll notice the absence of that term, apart from a side note stating that this term is used by newspapers.

“Crisis” is not a scientific word, yet it is there in other contexts. For example, the Cape Town water shortage, which was an actual crisis. It is in the report as a climate issue, but was actually caused by poor management of resources, which is the case for other crises. Another example is the California forest fires, which were caused mainly by the refusal to cut down trees to reduce fires, and so on. The drastic gap between readiness and ill preparation can be shown by Katrina (2005) which took the lives of 1,836 people, and Ida (this year), which caused only a few deaths (one of them being due to an alligator which ate a guy who was walking outside in the floodwaters left by the hurricane). [Louisiana. Enough said – Didact]

Subsidising Fossil Fuels?

Let’s back up and return to that lovely dinosaur from the UN. It blames us for subsidising fossil fuels, the same way the UN says we do – by about US$320B annually. Odd, isn’t it? Here in Israel we pay a heavy carbon tax – on fuel. Other nations also tax carbon-derived fuels, and are certainly not subsidising it. What gives? Well, if one dives in to the said report, there certainly are subsidies. Here is the list of the top 10 nations that use them: Iran, China, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, UAE and Venezuela. Even down the list there is not one Western nation. So when the UN is blaming us of subsidising, it uses English (and Hebrew) but uses data that should interest Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi and Russian speakers. That sounds like a slight deception, does it not?

In other places in the report, the subsidies are inflated with improper taxation. So if a nation did not tax carbon the way the calculator think it should have, that is considered subsidisation. All this is done to divert the spotlight from the heavy and frightening subsidisation of renewable energies, or more accurately “the unreliable energies”.

The Dangers of Renewable Energy

Nations subsidise unreliable energies. Heavily. Between 2010 and 2019, total cumulative subsidies crossed the US$2.5T mark, which were used to erect wind turbines and solar panels across Europe and North America. Climate results? SQUAT. The UN itself called the last decade “the lost decade”. The IPCC report noted that modern renewable energy went up from 8.7% to 11.2%, the proportion of fossil fuels remain the same – meaning it actually went up due to energy requirements increase.

Why is it “worrying”? First, since the money went down the drain: Mankind continued to emit CO2 and the gas concentration in the atmosphere went up. Second, wind and solar power are extremely problematic as a main energy source. For loads of reasons, but the main one is that you want your energy on demand. If you are a hospital, and in the middle of operation a cloud blows by, you don’t want to cut down power, not to mention the fact that the Sun doesn’t shine at night (at least for now). The wind also doesn’t blow when we want. Last summer, Europe had a “windless summer” which pushed Europe into the ongoing energy crisis. Europe is a warning to us all – they shut down nuclear power plants and refused to develop reliable power sources, while chasing the wind (literally). Now the prices are spiking and many elderly people may freeze due to not having the resources to pay the electric bill, or may even be cut from the grid due to system destabilisation.

“We Have to DO SOMETHING!”

That gloomy joke just keeps on and on when we bump into the local activism. As noted, global activity of giant Western nations doesn’t help, here come those activists and politicians telling us to “reduce our carbon footprint”, go net zero by 2050 and other ludicrous demands. For example, Israel is contributing 0.18% of total CO2 emissions. Even if that nation gets wiped out the face of the earth, the Earth wouldn’t notice. But they want to “do something”.

“But” you’ll say, “if everyone is too small to act, nothing will happen!”. Maybe. But if all those small nations will waste a fortune because “something needs to be done!”. The result will also be nothing – no good but some bad. Weighing those options, it is clear what the right choice is.

Actions have consequences, not just benefits. If we “keep the gas in the ground” or heavily subsidise solar or wind energy, or spend money in other ways, the benefit is not measurable. However, the damage will be felt: we will keep seeing our electricity bills going up, and they are expected to rise even more. Energy prices doubled themselves – in Germany, Denmark and other nations in Europe which subsidised unreliable power sources. That has an immediate negative effect on our ability to defend ourselves from the climate, while getting zero benefit.

Pascal’s Climate Wager

To conclude, let’s first refer to the repeated argument stating that the likelihood may indeed be small, but if it does happen it will be so severe that you have to do anything to stop it. Ergo, listen to the panicky crowd and prepare for worst case scenario. If it comes true, we’re in DEEP shit.

We are reminded of “Pascal’s Wager“, in which he used to prove that being a good Christian is better than not. According to Pascal, being Christian means one pays a small price in this life, but gains an everlasting pay in the Afterlife. So if one is not following the Christian path, you only pay the price in this world and your upside is eternal. So when in doubt, it is better to be a good Christian, just in case Jesus, Paul, and the other Apostles were right.

That bet sounds good, but it is not convincing to any other religion and for a good reason. It is possible that Christianity is wrong, and Judaism (for example) is right. In that case you get eternal punishment for being Christian. Pascal had a false dichotomy: Christian and non-Christian, Christian God and no god at all. The picture is more complex. How about if God doesn’t like being worshipped out of cold stats?

Deriving the lesson for the “environmental bet”, we see the trouble. It could be that those minuscule chances for catastrophe makes us do things that cause a chain reaction, which in turn brings about an unforeseen catastrophe. For example, in order to reduce the harm to the ozone layer, CFC gases were banned and HFC gases replaced them. This caused a surge in the greenhouse effect.

Some may portray it as insurance: we pay a small premium to protect us from future catastrophe. However, if the premium is too high and the fine print is massive (meaning you can’t collect) than we won’t buy that insurance. That’s climate mitigation for you: On the one hand, heavy regulations and a fortune is invested. While on the other hand, the benefit is zero. That is one costly insurance policy, and there is no insurer – what kind of “good deal” is that?

The hockey stick of human progress

Climate alarmists love to use the “hockey stick graph” of rising temperature, which shows a relative moderation for millennia and then a sudden rise currently. On that graph, which was also present in the IPCC management brief (but not in the report itself!) was heavily criticised. Reconstructing exact temperatures before we actually measured them is not an accurate procedure at all.

Let’s say it is true, than it goes along with another hockey stick graph – that of human progress. Reconstructing that data was done by Angus Madison, and gives us the following:

The main component of the meteoric rise in Mankind’s overall welfare, which grows hand-in-hand with a longer lifespan, better protection from the elements, and dramatic reduction of global poverty, is fossil fuels. Without gas, coal, and oil, the Industrial Revolution would not materialise. Everything we know in our day to day life was made easier because of fossil fuels: gasoline for cars, trucks carrying goods, ships and planes. Fossil fuels also facilitate creating high-temperature tensile materials such as steel, allowing us to build everything from satellites to advanced agricultural tools – allowing us to feed the entire world. Oil’s main byproduct – plastic – is used for almost anything we have: cell phones, computers, printers, electrical cables, clothes, cars, toys, plumbing, furniture and a million more things.

Solar and wind energy can’t replace it, both because they are unreliable, and they have an enormous footprint. Pushing “green” energy is contradictory to scaring us into recycling because “we are running out of land”. To demonstrate: Israel’s environmental ministry estimates that there will be a need for 2.5-4 sq km to increase the capacity of landfills over the next 20 years. In contrast, getting to 30% solar energy by 2030 requires installation of 64 million solar panels, which is about 160 sq km. Let’s not forget that 20 years after that, you need to dispose of those panels and can’t recycle them. Climate benefit is zero but the damage to the environment is massive (also solar panels create “heat islands” and get the temperature up in their vicinity).

Some of that energy can be replaced by nuclear power, if it’s cheap enough. A lot of “green activists” are against it for very odd reasons, which beg the question about how much the climate concerns them, or maybe something else. Either way, planes, ships and some of the industry can’t be switched to nuclear (or to any other type for that matter) – which is a large percentage of global carbon emissions.

Safer than ever – due to fossil fuels

Back to climate. Are climate catastrophes increasing due to our usage of fossil fuels? Quite the contrary. Bjorn Lomborg published a famous graph illustrating how safe we are today:

As the population grew 300% in the last 100 years, the death toll of climate related deaths dropped 10-fold. In the world of Alex Epstein (author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and Fossil Future books) – fossil fuels didn’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they did the EXACT OPPOSITE. They took a dangerous climate and made it safe for mankind. The ability to build shelters, move people from place to place, send rescue and alert incoming storms increased because of progress, based on fossil fuels and their byproducts.

True, the world is getting warmer due to that activity. True, everything we do has consequences. If we can reduce the consequences without harming ourselves – let’s go for it. But if one wants to “cut down on fossil fuels” and enjoy the progress, while claiming we can do it without hurting ourselves too much – he is welcome to go ahead and show us how it is done. The history of climate panic shows the opposite: the actions cause damage with no benefit.

Here’s a Solution: Stop Putting Sticks in Our Wheels

Let’s recall the UN dinosaur’s words and understand that they ARE true, IF we make a small change: “Every year governments spend billions of public funds subsidising unreliable energies. Imagine if we spent hundreds of billions every year on supporting giant meteors. That is exactly what you are doing right now! Think of all the other things you could have done with this money. People everywhere are living in poverty. Don’t you think helping would make more sense than, I don’t know, paying out of pocket to create energy poverty and costly electricity which harms the environment and stops you from dealing with the foreseen challenges? Here is my wild idea. Dear governments, don’t choose to hurt your people. It’s time you humans stop following your baseless panics, and start thinking rationally. Thank you”.

Didact’s Take

It goes without saying that I agree with every single thing that the original author of the post wrote (well, except that bit of muckery about Pascal’s Wager, which is transparently wrong, since Christianity IS true) – translated very nicely from Hebrew into English by our good friend, Dawn Pine.

The entire “climate change” swindle is precisely that – a giant boondoggle designed to spend vast amounts of taxpayer money on enriching an elite few. The “solutions” proposed by the “Extinction Rebellion” crowd are nothing short of BUGSHIT NUTS, and they won’t do ONE SINGLE DAMNED THING to stop global warming.

Here’s the reality:

• The causal mechanism upon which “global warming” so-called “science” is based, is COMPLETELY BASSACKWARDS – temperature changes CAUSE increases in CO2, NOT the other way around, with a lag of anywhere between 200 and 1,400 years, and with a pretty weak correlation coefficient;
• The total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased from roughly 300 parts per million (ppm) in around 1900, to about 430ppm today – that’s 0.043% of the atmosphere – and humans are responsible for about 3% of global CO2 emissions;
• Wind turbines are basically “bird-chomping eco-crucifixes” that slaughter birds by the thousands and annoy the shit out of humans who are unfortunate enough to live near them, due to the high-frequency vibrations emitted by their motors – and they are totally useless as a reliable source of power, as Texas found out in February;
• “Energy poverty” is becoming a very real fact of life in Europe – I actually managed to piss off representatives from both Shell AND BP, who gave virtual talks earlier this year about how their companies are transforming into hippy-dippy eco-friendly kumbayah-singing derpfests, so I doubt I’ll be working with them anytime soon;
• There has NEVER been one single climate prediction made by a model that was actually accurate to within 10% of observed temperature increases, WITHOUT ADJUSTMENT – every single one has failed, completely and totally, to predict accurately, and that is because those models are complete and total GARBAGE;

All of that is before we get to the reality that getting rid of fossil fuels is an exercise in complete futility. As the graph up above of the change in human living standards tells us, in order to go to a net-zero-CO2 future, you would essentially have to enforce a COLOSSAL drop in global living standards.

And to eliminate fossil fuels completely, from every stage of the production process, you’d have to bomb the entire world back to the beginning of the 19th Century.

The bottom line is that we don’t need to listen to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, the UN IPCC, university professors, climate “scientists”, whorenalists and presstitutes, or anyone else, running around telling us that the world is going to end unless we give up fossil fuels and SUVs and fun. They’re all full of shit and always have been. Not ONE of them understands the realities of economic cost versus benefit.

So next time an Extinction Rebellion halfwit blocks you on the motorway while you’re trying to get to work – run him or her over, GENTLY, with the bumper, and push the idiot out of the way, and go about your business. A broken bone or two in their foot will serve them bloody right, for being such utter nitwits – their antics aren’t going to do one single damned thing to save the planet.

We aren’t going to go extinct anytime soon. In fact, if you are an ecomentalist, you’re a moron, because you’re wasting your time. The only thing that will destroy this world is God, and He is VERY clear about exactly how He plans to go about it. If you’re still trying to hug a polar bear while attempting to stop it from biting your head off, you’re going to feel awfully stupid when the Tribulation starts and the world burns in fire – caused by GOD, not the SUV you’re trying to picket.