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Flat White

It’s the politics, stupid

6 October 2022

10:00 AM

6 October 2022

10:00 AM

When US President Joe Biden said ‘we don’t have much time’ at the UN National Assembly on September 21, 2022, it was in the context of the ‘threat of climate change’ also known as that mass delusion eating human intelligence.

He was reinforcing the (non-existent, unproven) threat of climate emergency in which planet Earth is facing imminent climate catastrophe. Funny that… 16 years ago, Al Gore said much the same thing during my interview with him at the Cannes Film Festival as he launched his film, The Inconvenient Truth. Gore called it a tipping point. It seems the tipping point keeps receding, always just a few years away…

But Biden’s latest doomsday threat underlines how the entire world has been subject to a massive sleight of hand by political operatives intent on changing the western world’s socio-economic structure. Back in the mists of time (over 30 years ago), the subject of global warming as an existential threat was launched not at an esteemed university or scientific institution like, say, a conference of geologists, but on the political platform of the US Senate. That was a bit of a giveaway but we missed it at the time.

Nor were we aware of the dishonest way the anthropogenic global warming scenario was launched. It was on June 23, 1988, in the US Senate committee with the testimony of James Hansen of NASA. To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session, Hansen’s Democrat ally, Senator Tim Wirth, scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer.

In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras would show everyone sweating in the heat. Wirth told Deborah Amos (NPR News) in April 2007, how he did it: ‘What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot…’

Had I asked Bill Clinton about it, he might have given me a sardonic smile along with a version of his famous quip about the economy: ‘It’s the politics, stupid.’


Of course it is. There is no scientific evidence to support the claims on which so much of relevant policies have been formed. That’s not to mistake what is claimed to be ‘the science’ for genuine scientific evidence. If the IPCC had evidence that carbon dioxide was a driver of catastrophic global warming, we would certainly know about it. The evidence would be repeated by all the scientific institutions and organisations, showing how the 3 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes Earth hotter while the 97 per cent naturally occurring carbon dioxide does not… And the world would not be convulsed with a debate that pits science against politics.

‘The science’ is a phrase peddled by those who have no idea about ‘the science’ or they would not keep using that hollow phrase. It’s a mantra, not evidence.

There is now a mountain of literature and many hundreds of climate scientists who have debunked the alarmist claims of a man-made catastrophe using the scientific method. They know not to conflate global warming (and cooling) cycles, known as natural climate variability, with fossil fuel emissions as the cause.

If you are shown a video or photo of a house on fire, your first question might be ‘how did that start’? If I were to tell you it was caused by the garden gnome, would you want to see some evidence? Juxtaposition is not evidence.

But logic and reason are out of place when it is the emotions that are stirred by the evangelists offering salvation with the promise of (heavily subsidised) renewables, illustrated by sun-drenched solar panels and slowly turning wind turbines. China has even overcome its irritation at Australia’s uppity insistence of a Covid investigation, continuing to supply all the solar panels we want…

The cloaking of an agenda of socio-political activism in ‘the science’ of climate change is a sleight of hand. Under this guise, all manner of behaviours and political decisions can be justified ‘to save the planet’. That’s a licence to curtail freedoms, shut down businesses and launch energy destroying policies – all pretty much without scrutiny. Worse still, this blanket of hyper-fear has gripped all sides of politics, if not completely, certainly enough to smudge any differences. (In Victoria, for example, the Liberals infamously out-bid Labour in climate hysteria with an even higher emissions reduction target (50 per cent versus 43 per cent by 2030) – evidence of the effects of a mass delusion).

The edifice of (often manipulated) scientific justification for draconian, destructive policies such as financially favouring renewables against coal and gas, and forced behavioural changes, such as forcing citizens into electric vehicles, acts as a multiplier. Like compound interest, it builds on itself, capturing not only politicians but citizens, small companies, corporates, institutions, the public service – and most reprehensibly to adults, school children.

That is how society is fragmented and changed. That is a political objective, nothing to do with climate. Little wonder that politics is immune to actual scientific evidence about the climate. World leaders, like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, and Australia’s Anthony Albanese, can safely spout absolute nonsense about climate, contradicting known data (for example, blaming extreme weather events on man-made warming) without being ridiculed. Well, not by the mass media of course, who have failed to recognise the parlour trick, along with the politicians.

It is not scientific disagreement that fuels the feral antagonism against those who challenge the ruling orthodoxy; it’s the questioning of a politically harnessed, quasi-religious belief. That belief in climate alarmism has resulted in the self-harming nature of current energy policies, depriving Americans, the Brits, and Australians of their energy-producing resources. We could say that it’s the stupid politics.

Andrew L. Urban is the author of the forthcoming book, Climate Alarm Reality Check – what you haven’t been told (Wilkinson Publishing).

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