The Power of Terrible Ideas

 American Thinker

The notion that our planet is in imminent danger of becoming uninhabitable because of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is more recent, dating to the late 1980s.  In The Age of Global Warming Rupert Darwall also traces Its roots to two men, Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius who, in 1896, wrote a paper predicting that a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase temperatures by 5 to 6 degrees centigrade, and Guy Callendar, who, over forty years later attributed a global temperature rise from 1934 to 1938 to a rise in C02.  Unlike Szasz or Laing, neither have been celebrated in global warming circles, probably because, as Darwall writes, both men thought rising C02 levels were a happy development, contributing to plant growth and staving off a rapid return to an ice age and “deadly glaciers.”   ......No one points up the absurdity of the entire enterprise as well as MIT emeritus professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen.  “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21^st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

The Strategic Threat from Net-zero Emissions

 American Thinker

In any event, net-zero emissions are unnecessary. Climatologists perpetrated a grave error of physics in 1984 when they borrowed feedback method from control theory in engineering physics without understanding it. They forgot the Sun was shining. They added the large solar feedback response to, and miscounted it as part of, the actually minuscule feedback response to the small direct warming by greenhouse gases. Thus, they overstated CO₂-driven warming fourfold. After correction, global warming will continue to be, as it has long been, small, slow, harmless, and net-beneficial. Not a cent need or should be spent on attempts – futile in any event – to abate it.

Had it not been for the West’s capitulation to Communist propagandists paid by Russia and China to peddle the official global warming narrative and profiteering by the ineffable strategic immaturity, scientific illiteracy and economic innumeracy of our current generation of politicians, trembling in fear of being unpersoned, the West would never have given Putin the means to rebuild his forces. But it is we who elect the politicians. Irresponsibly, we chose a close-to-Communist administration led by a fumbling geriatric in the United States and an etiolated, clapped-out, effete, no-longer-Conservative administration led by a notorious and all-too-exploitable sexual incontinent in Britain."