Enormous Pile of Evidence That Humans Cause Global Warming is a Monstrous Hoax

And the Green New Deal is the biggest and most heavily subsidized Ponzi scheme ever

In the Beginning….

And thus, were seen, in the space of eight months, the rise, progress, and fall of that mighty fabric, which, being wound up by mysterious springs to a wonderful height, had fixed the eyes and expectations of all Europe, but whose foundation, being fraud, illusion, credulity, and infatuation, fell to the ground as soon as the artful management of its directors was discovered….

The public mind was in a state of unwholesome fermentation. Men were no longer satisfied with the slow but sure profits of cautious industry. The hope of boundless wealth for the morrow made them heedless and extravagant today.... Nations, like individuals, cannot become desperate gamblers with impunity... From the bitter experience of that period, posterity may learn how dangerous it is to let speculation riot unrestrained, and to hope for enormous profits from inadequate causes.

— Description of The Parliamentary History of the early 18th Century British South Sea Company in Memoirs of Extraordinary Public Delusions, written by Charles Mackay in 1841 but still relevant today.

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first....

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

— Mackay’s description of the 1720s Mississippi (Louisiana) scheme. The tombstone of the perpetrator, John Law (not a policeman), bears the inscription (translated from French):

Here lies this famous Scotsman

This unrivaled calculator

Who, by the rules of algebra

Put France into the Hospital

What follows is a shameless plug for my new book Where Will We Get Our Energy?

It’s available on Amazon now.

The Hoax

Earth surface temperatures began to be measured by thermometers and semi-systematically recorded in 1722 at Uppsala University when Anders Celsius got one of Gabriel Fahrenheit’s newly-invented mercury thermometers (and re-calibrated it to his eponymous scale). By 1850 temperatures were being routinely (but not really systematically) recorded at many places in the Northern Hemisphere. But even by 1850, there was only one place in the Southern Hemisphere where temperatures were being recorded: Jakarta. By 1880, there were several more.

Earth-surface temperature records are notoriously unreliable. On land, was the temperature recorded at the same solar time (not clock time) every day? Did the same person take the measurement? Was the instrument moved? Was the instrument replaced? In the 1950s, the United States Weather Service had more than 8,000 temperature measuring stations, mostly in rural areas. Now there are about 1,700, mostly in urban areas, and many of those in airports or parking lots. The “heat island” effect is well known, but almost never mentioned.

On his many trans-Atlantic voyages, Benjamin Franklin discovered the Gulf Stream by taking daily water temperature measurements. He noticed that there were systematic differences that depended upon the sampling depth, whether the water was brought on deck using a canvas or wooden bucket, and how long it sat on deck before he measured the temperature. Today, temperatures are measured on shipping lanes by thermometers in the engine cooling water intake. It’s at a different point in every ship, and its depth depends on the ship’s loading. The measured temperature depends upon how far into the ship the pipe has extended to where the thermometer is emplaced, and that's different in every ship. Air temperatures at sea are frequently recorded on the bridge, at a different height on every ship and every different loading, and is frequently “corrected” differently in every instance for “average night-time temperature.” There’s not much in-situ coverage outside the shipping lanes.

Temperature can be measured in many other ways, extending the record back millions of years. One way is by measuring the relative abundance of oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in ice cores. Oxygen-18 is heavier than the more-abundant oxygen-16, and deuterium is heavier than the more-abundant hydrogen. Thus the relationship between evaporation rates of different weights of water molecules is exquisitely sensitive to sea-surface temperature. The atmosphere is well mixed, so arctic and antarctic ice cores are records of world-wide average sea-surface temperatures. These records show that 1880 was the coldest year in 8,700 years. What happens when you start a series of records at the minimum? All you see is increase — until about 1995, when world-wide average temperature stopped increasing.

Similar descriptions apply to different isotopes of carbon and oxygen in ocean bottom and bog sediments, extending the temperature record back hundreds of thousands of years, and stalactites, extending the record back millions of years.

Reliable world-wide records of temperature profiles, extending from the Earth’s surface up to even 100 kilometers, began to accumulate in the mid 1970s, with the launch of satellites. Before then, there were widespread, but by no means uniform, systematic, and dense measurements, using balloons and small sounding rockets. So we have a reliable history for only about fifty years.

The world-wide Ponzi scheme is aimed at eliminating CO₂ emissions. Why CO₂? Alarmists say that increasing its concentration from 400 parts per million (ppm), or 0.04%, to 500 ppm, will increase Earth’s average temperature by two degrees Celsius. Where do they get this? When the late Professor Stephen Schneider was an acolyte worshiping at the altar in the Coming Ice Age church he wrote, along with S. Ichtiaque Rasool, in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate, Science 173, 3992 (9 July 1971) pp 138-141 that the “CO₂ doubling sensitivity” of the atmosphere is 0.8 degrees Celsius. They remarked that increasing the concentration by a factor of ten, to 4,000 ppm, could increase temperature by only 2.5 degrees. Their conclusion was that no matter how much coal we burned, we could not prevent the coming ice age.

What is this “doubling sensitivity?” Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius wrote in On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature on the ground, Philosophical Magazine 45, 251 (April 1896) pp 237-276 (yes, 1896, not 1996):

Thus if the quantity of carbonic acid [CO₂] increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic proportion.

That is, temperature increases by adding the same amount, for EVERY doubling of the atmospheric concentration of CO₂. (For math nerds, this is a logarithmic relationship.)

The study of climate cannot be called a science because the scientific method requires testable and falsifiable hypotheses, the consequences of which can be compared to controlled experiments that include careful measurements. In such a brief time as we have been studying it, we cannot honestly say that climatism is a science, no matter how loudly climatists proclaim it is.

So, upon what do climatists rely? Models.

Reality isn’t optional.

— Professor Thomas Sowell

Real scientists, such as Professor John R. Christy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (also the Alabama State Climatologist), have taken it upon themselves to validate models. For fifty years, I developed mathematical methods for models, implemented software to evaluate them, and used one for twenty years to calculate stratospheric temperatures — along with concentrations of about fifteen minor atmospheric constituents such as hypochlorous acid, sulfur dioxide, and ozone — at 72 levels on 3,500 profiles from eight to eighty kilometers altitude, every 1.5 degrees along the track of the Earth Observing System Aura satellite, five million measurements, every day. Our results were validated by in-situ measurements: A NASA U-2 or WB-57 “Canberra” was flown on the satellite track many times (look up the NASA Aura Microwave Limb Sounder). Professor Christy and others obtained 102 models that are widely cited as “proof” that we’re all going to die because of heat or something. They started the models with a 1975 climate, and running them to simulate fifty years of climate, and compared the results with the fifty years of satellite, balloon, and radiosonde measurements. They observed that they all (but one) grossly predicted much larger temperature increases than actually occurred. Which model worked? The Russian INM-CM₄ model. Here is one summary of the results, presented on page 5 of Congressional testimony (which is no longer available, but I have a copy — I’ll send it if you ask for it):

The eleven-year solar sunspot cycle is clearly visible in the data, but oddly does not appear in most models’ outputs after 1995. About the models, one prominent modeler at Oxford University, named David Frame, said “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” Another one, Professor Chris Folland at the Hadley Centre for Climate Research at East Anglia University, said “The data doesn’t (sic) matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.”

Professor Schneider eventually became an apostate in the Coming Ice Age Church and joined the Global Warming cult. In an interview with Detroit News he said

We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. . . . So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts.... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest [my emphasis].

He tried to explain this away, claiming that what he said was selectively edited. His more-complete remark in the Discover Magazine interview included a remark about a “double ethical bind.” Within one paragraph he said both “we have to include all doubts” and “we have to ... make little mention of any doubts.” That proves he wasn’t a real scientist.

A few others have said or written similarly interesting things:

We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.

– Timothy Wirth, president of the UN Foundation. Former U.S. Senator.

No matter if the science of global warming is all phony... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.

– Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment.

The first chair of the IPCC, Sir John Houghton, said in 1995:

Unless we announce disasters, no-one will listen.

The IPCC is fundamentally dishonest, and apparently was intended to be from its beginning. The claim that “climate change” is harmful, and exclusively or even primarily driven by humans burning fossil fuels, is based on five decades of Lysenkoism masquerading as science. Paul Ehrlich, Amory Lovins, Michael Mann, and Al Gore have done more damage to world science than Trofim Lysenko did to Soviet genetics.

I commented on the proposition that CO₂ is a bad thing in Eliminating CO2 Emissions Will End Life on Earth, so there is no need for detail here. The conclusion was that Gaia has been slowly committing suicide for 150 million years, and she would have succeeded in about eight million years. What happened? Did dinosaurs stop burning coal and driving automobiles? No, marine plants and creatures combine CO₂ with calcium to form bones and teeth and armor. When they die, they sink to the oceans’ bottoms and become permanent limestone or chalk. Fortunately, human intervention in the form of the Industrial Age has postponed Gaia’s suicide until about eighteen million years. If we really care about the long-term prospects for life on Earth, instead of reducing CO₂ emissions, we should be burning coal and making cement as fast as we can.

The Ponzi Scheme

That the Green New Deal, or the Energiewende, is a Ponzi scheme should be obvious by observing that the “cheapest way to make electricity” is financially unsustainable without 103 dollars of direct US Federal subsidies for wind, and 262 dollars of subsidies for solar, for each dollar of subsidies (per kWh in all cases) for nuclear power. From Mercenary Audacity: How Crony Capitalists Drive The Wind & Solar ‘Transition’:

… obscene guaranteed profits are underwritten by power consumers and taxpayers; all the risk is born by the same class of suckers; and weather-obsessed politicos are falling over themselves to engineer new and exciting ways of providing a malevolent elite with opportunities to separate you and yours from their hard-earned cash….

The main game is, of course, soaking in wind and solar subsidies – it’s the place where you’ll find spivs peddling the most heavily subsidised Ponzi scheme on earth. Rent-seeker heaven, if you will, where there’s apparently no limit to their mercenary audacity.

The Problems — Well Some of Them Anyway

• In order to build the spectrum of “technology units” that the UN IEA insists are necessary to reach climate and energy nirvana, it’s necessary to find only 1.6 times more copper than is known to exist, thirteen times more nickel, thirty times more cobalt…, as explained by Professor Simon Michaux in Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuels. My calculations are less optimistic than Professor Michaux’s. Obtaining even today’s levels of quantities of the necessary materials is causing enormous environmental damage and social misery.

• Solar panels and windmills last less than 25 years. Assuming the first generation can be built, where will the second generation come from? They’re utterly un-recycleable. Those who have tried found that the cost is fifty times the value of recovered materials. Maybe subsidies can fix that too. But remember: subsidies don’t eliminate costs; they just hide them in your tax bill where politicians hope you won’t notice them mixed in with all the other fraud, waste, and abuse.

• As I wrote in Adequate Storage for Renewable Energy is Not Possible, and more recent calculations at Renewable Energy Storage Requirements Are Impossible, the cost to provide firm power from “renewables” alone could be as much as thirty times total USA GDP — every year! Forever!

• Nobody knows how to start an electricity transmission and distribution system in which the only generators are a chaotic collection of millions of occasionally-working variable-output solar panels and wind turbines, or keep it going. The problems are voltage, frequency, and phase stability. Without heavy rotating synchronous generators (i.e., coal, gas, hydro, and nuclear) putting a reference on the grid, Joe Random Windmill has no idea what phase power to provide.

• Professor Michaux included the amounts of materials needed for battery-powered electric automobiles in his calculations. In The EV transition explained, Robert Charette wrote that the transition to electric vehicles is “an intricately tangled web of technological innovation, complexity, and uncertainty, combined with equal amounts of policy optimism and dysfunction.” Ford and Porsche and Volvo and others have essentially abandoned EVs for now. But there’s another important problem: The average EV weighs 25-33% more than an equivalent ICE vehicle. Road engineers have known for seventy years that road damage increases as the fourth power of axle weight. So EVs cause 2-3 times more road damage — and they don’t pay road tax at the pump — yet another subsidy for wealthy people. An electric tractor for an 18-wheeler could weigh up to 78% more than a Diesel one, so they would cause ten times more road damage. Last summer, California’s grid almost failed, so Governor Gavin “Hairdo” Gruesome told us not to plug in our cars.

• The average 37.5 kVA distribution transformer supports 15 households. If every household plugs an EV into a charger, it will support one or two. Even now, manufacturers are having trouble keeping up with demand, not least because the Department of Energy has mandated a new kind of steel to increase efficiency from 95% to 96%, and the only supplier is in China.

• VW engineers reported that an electric Golf needs to be driven 125,000 kilometers (in the German power mix) before the CO₂ emitted in its manufacture and operation is less than that of a Diesel Golf. It would never break even in China. In The Norwegian Illusion, it is reported that Norwegian engineers calculated that an electric Volvo that lasts fifteen years needs to be driven in their 92%-hydro almost carbon-free economy for 45 years to break even on CO₂ emissions.

• The National Transmission Needs Study, a 2023 technical report by the U.S. Department of Energy, said that 48,740 gigawatt-miles of new transmission grid must be built to get the electricity from where it’s generated behind the back of nowhere to where it’s actually needed. “GW-mi” is an obscure unit, and they didn’t specify physical lengths, but it’s a 57% increase. The current U.S. high-voltage transmission grid is 240,000 miles, so about 138,000 more miles are needed. A footnote suggested maybe the requirement is actually 813,000 GW-miles, or 2.3 million miles. At today’s construction rate that will require only 1,350 years.

• An expanded transmission grid would expand electromagnetic pulse (EMP) vulnerability. The 1859 “Carrington Event” resulted in aurora as far south as Cuba. A few telegraph operators were electrocuted. A similar event in 1969 affected telegraph, telephone, and electricity transmission. Wiring was melted. Circuit breakers and switches and transformers were damaged. Recovery took more than a week in some areas. In the imagined nirvana, in the next EMP event, whether caused by the Sun or a nefarious actor, all the tiny wires in solar panels would become tiny blown fuses. The expanded transmission grid would be an enormously larger EMP antenna that would transmit damage into every nook and cranny. Computers, upon which we were not nearly as dependent as in 1969, would be destroyed. Recovery would take decades, but it’s more likely that modern civilization will collapse.

• Biofuels, biomass, ocean currents, ocean tides, ocean thermal gradients, Amory Lovins’s vigorous handwaving, Tinkerbell’s magic pixie dust, unicorn farts, and ocean waves either cannot provide more than a tiny fraction of the necessary energy, or their efficiencies are so low as to require enormous machines (which were not included in Professor Michaux’s calculations). Concentric-tube recirculating geothermal could conceivably make a bigger dent, but environists (not much mental in that crowd) complain that fracking to make geothermal work causes earthquakes. And they want to remove dams, not build newer and bigger ones. They removed the dams on the Klamath river between California and Oregon to save the salmon. The result was the destruction of salmon spawning areas. So much for environist mentalism.

• The ratio of energy return on energy invested (EROI) is about 4.8 for solar with storage, about the same for biomass, and about eleven for wind with storage. Economists estimate EROI of at least seven is necessary for economic viability. EROI for hydro or nuclear power is about 100. Every time I read an article about putting solar panels into orbit, I ask the author “what would EROI be?” None of them ever respond.

• Solar and wind require enormous amounts of land, about 7.9 acres per MWe for large-scale (>20 MWe) solar and 10 acres for concentrating solar thermal. Total area for wind projects is estimated at 84 acres per MWe. In Observation-based solar and wind power capacity factors and power densities, Environmental Research Letters 13 (April 2018), two Harvard researchers wrote “for wind, we found that the average power density – meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant – was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts.” San Onofre Nuclear Generation Station’s 2.3 GWe plant occupied 82 acres, or 0.036 acres per MWe. When it was closed, Senator Barbara Boxer almost broke her arm, patting herself on the back, for her part in closing it. Then she had a hissy fit when Southern California Edison Company asked the PUC for an 18% rate increase to buy — wait for it — wait for it — coal-fired electricity from Navajo and Hopi generators in the Four Corners region.

• Another study by the same Harvard authors concluded that if the required enormous wind facilities were to be built they would increase average surface temperatures over the continental United States by 0.25 degrees Celsius. I thought the goal was to prevent warming, not cause it.

• In Manmade: Studies suggest that wind parks cause climate change, even regional drought, Pierre Gosselin summarized a German study that their wind facilities had decreased soil moisture and reduced rainfall. A similar study in China reached the same conclusions. Yet another study (also in China) found that wind parks reduce the diversity and productivity of native plant ecosystems.

• If a wind turbine blade breaks over a farmer’s field, he can’t harvest the crop or allow his livestock to graze because of the impossible-to-remove fiberglass pollution. If it gets into surface water, neither he nor his downstream neighbors can use it. The companies that lease his land refuse to compensate him.

• Wind turbine blades are made from fiberglass bonded by epoxy. Epoxy is used because polyester resin is destroyed by sunlight. Epoxy contains up to 40% Bisphenol-A. Technical Report USWTDB_V6_0_20230531 (May 2023), from the U.S. Geological survey, estimated that ten million pounds of plastic microparticles would be emitted per year by leading edge erosion from the blades of today’s 72,731 American windmills. Bisphenol-A (and other PFAS) have been banned in packaging materials, especially food packaging, because it’s carcinogenic. But if it gets into food, say fish or livestock, by being eroded from windmills, that’s OK because the planet is being saved. PFAS also appear in hydraulic and lubricating fluids in windmills; they accumulate and are therefore concentrated in all animals’ fatty tissues.

• Rural wind turbines’ blinking lights, blade flicker, and low-frequency noise, below the frequency of conscious observation, disrupt sleep and cause other health disorders, not just in humans but also in creatures that live nearby.

• Whale, dolphin, and seal populations are being decimated by exploration, surveying, construction, and operation of offshore wind turbines. It is estimated that there remain alive only about 350 North Atlantic Right Whales, including 70 females capable of bearing young. Fifty five of them have washed up dead on New Jersey shores during the last five years. Where is Greenpeace where you need them? Cheering for offshore wind.

• Crabs and lobsters become addicted to the magnetic fields produced by cables that transmit offshore wind turbine power to shore. They just sit in one place instead of migrating and feeding and mating. The magnetic fields also cause birth defects that result in reduced ability to swim, which is especially important for lobsters, which ascend and descend to feed every night.

• In Estimates of bird collision mortality at wind facilities in the contiguous United States, Biological Conservation 168 (December 2013) pp 201-209, Scott Loss et al estimated that five birds are killed per year per MWe of wind turbine label capacity. Environists say “cats kill birds too.” But they don’t kill vultures or condors, or apex predators such as eagles or hawks or falcons or pelicans. Bats are also being killed at dangerous rates.

• Wind turbines are the least safe “renewable” way to make electricity. Since 2000, among the accidents known to Caithness Wind Farms, there were 165 fatal accidents resulting in 229 fatalities. Caithness says they are no longer in a position to collect and publish the data, so Scotland Against Spin has taken over. They both remark that, with government blessing, the wind industry is very secretive, so the numbers of non-fatal accidents they know about are almost certainly only the tip of the iceberg.

• As remarked above, solar panels and wind turbines are essentially non-recyclable. So when they reach the ends of their service lives they pile up, sometimes just dumped at random, and sometimes semi-responsibly in purpose-built landfills. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that total worldwide solar panel waste will amount to 78 million tonnes by 2050. In Wind turbine blade waste in 2050, Waste Management 62 (April 2017) pp 229-240, Liu and Barlow estimated there will be 43 million tonnes of wind turbine blade waste by 2050.

In Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger asked “must we destroy the environment to save the planet?”

Why are we doing this? To make a very small number of people very wealthy, and very powerful, at the expense of the wealth and liberty of the vast majority of us.