Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims.
My coming-to-Jesus journey on global warming, spurned by an email from Henrik Wahren, then his follow-on reply.
Email from Henrik Wahren,
Hello Jeff,
Sorry to pester you again, but I wonder if you or anyone you know could help answer some questions that have troubled me for a couple of years. The questions concern the opinions that reasonably well known independent geopolitical analysts have regarding earth’s climate. I’ve noticed that many commentators, especially on the conservative side, such as Alexander Mercouris (of the Duran), Larry Johnson (ex-CIA analyst at https://sonar21.com), David Oualaalou (https://rumble.com/c/geopoliticsinconflict), but also some progressives, such as Pepe Escobar (independent journalist) and Matthew Ehret (Rising Tide Foundation), implicitly or explicitly dismiss anthropogenic global warming and attack something they call “the green agenda” (interestingly, I have found no Marxist who dismisses anthropogenic warming).
The questions: First, what is this “green agenda”? Second, how do these analysts understand earth’s climate, particularly how and why it changes? Third, how do they think the first law of thermodynamics operates on earth? Fourth, in the science of earth’s climate, what specifically is flawed or wrong with the data (or data-sets) that have been used, the analyses, interpretations or all of them?
The reason I’m asking you is that you seem to know many of these analysts, whereas my attempts at contacting them have failed or, in the case of David Oualaalou, resulted in no response.
Why the interest you may ask? I’ve studied the effects of a warming climate on ecosystems for several decades. It’s a field I know intimately, so when journalists and political commentators assert something about earth’s climate, I often hold my breath in the hope of an informed and judicious opinion; largely in vain. These people are excellent geopolitical analysts because they (mainly) stick to verifiable facts and through logical reasoning reach convincing conclusions that match reality. In contrast, when it comes to the science of earth’s climate, relevant facts, coherence and logical reasoning all seem to go out the window (a good example is the Rising Tide Foundation’s recent video series titled ‘Escaping Calypso’s Island’), to be replaced by Ptolemaic arguments in defence of a particular belief. Why the disparity? This is what I find so enthralling and disturbing. Enthralling because I think it reflects the contradiction between idealism and materialism. Disturbing for the damage that false consciousness can do in the real world. With my questions I only seek to better understand the epistemic foundations of these opinions on earth’s climate, not debate. Debates with the faithful lead nowhere.
Cheers, Henrik
My reply,
Hi, Henrik. I hope you saw the letter from Joan Roelofs on Substack and Seek Truth From Facts. She replied to your letter that you sent to me, which I thought was a really virtuous circle. I’ll leave the links just in case you missed it (https://seektruthfromfacts.org/guess-submissions/joan-roelofs-ponders-life-after-reading-henrik-wahrens-fan-letter-to-jeff-j-brown-a-web-of-hope-and-humanity-in-a-world-on-fire/).
Global warming. What I am about to tell you is going to upset some friends and loved ones. Nonetheless, my arc of awareness has spanned many years, countless hours of research and study, so it is not something I arrived at in a lark. My search for the truth is never-ending, even when the conclusions are not going to win me any friends, or worse, when I lose friends who are ideologically principled.
I was a true believer. I’m a US certified science teacher, teaching it for several years. I can teach everything from chemistry to physics to botany to biology to microbiology. My specialties are evolutionary biology and astronomy. I actually used Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to teach about the environment. I created my own syllabus, outlines, questions, quizzes and tests, breaking the movie down into ten-minute segments. It would last two to four weeks, depending on the school. I was really a true believer.
Back then, the thought of questioning the fact that we were belching hydrocarbons that had been sequestered in the earth for hundreds of millions of years, causing excess carbon dioxide and global warming was incontrovertible. As the years went by, I started noticing that there were Russian scientists and climatologists who were saying it was a hoax. I started thinking, what’s the difference between the Russians and the Westerners? I said, bingo. Money. They’re not being bought off.
When you go back to the Club of Rome, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and all these others who have been talking about using environmental policy for eugenics and to control people, I started thinking that more than likely, Western scientists are being bought off by these ultra-wealthy. Then later, along came the World Economic Forum, UN Agenda 2023 and eco-extremism to kill off all the livestock, control the food supply, et cetera.
Then, I started studying geoengineering (www.geoengineeringwatch.org). If you take a few hours to study their videos and articles, it’s pretty obvious that scientists have harnessed the ability to change the weather and even cause earthquakes. The earthquake on the border of Syria and Turkey early last year was hundreds of kilometers from any tectonic plate fault. And the seismic laboratories counted something like 50 miniature atom bombs that went off underground. Just a boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, which is very untypical of a natural earthquake. And people were reporting seeing almost like flares, flares coming down out of the sky, six or seven of them minutes before the earthquake was triggered. It killed what, like 70, 80,000 people.
An enemy of Western Empire and a member of NATO who is pissing off Washington and London. How convenient. Right after, Turkey even said it was manmade, but then dropped it.
Later in the year, Morocco had an earthquake. Again, it was hundreds of kilometers from any seismic fault. And again, I saw film footage of people showing these six or seven lights kind of spiraling down right before where the earthquake happened. Another unnatural earthquake, far from any tectonic fault, which killed about 3,000. It also happened to create hundreds of square kilometers of potential fracking extraction, since it destroyed the Earth’s mantle, which is quite suspicious. ExxonMobil must be smiling.
Thus, the more research and work I did, I concluded that it’s possible the carbon dioxide we’re pumping into the air for the last 300 years, the seven trillion or eight trillion tons, whatever it is now, may or may not be having some effect. As the Russian scientists pointed out, over the course of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, the carbon dioxide levels and the temperature levels that are changing right now are quite within the norms over time. I also have noticed that there’s been a lot of fraud, cherry picking information by these Western scientists, leaving out entire chunks of earth temperatures and other data to pad their case.
Therefore, I’m more inclined right now to believe that Western scientists are bought and paid for by the WEF, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, all of these in the diabolical, satanic deep state; also, the global banksters, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Morgans, the Schiffs, et cetera. Of course, they can use the environment as a cudgel to create a totalitarian state, control the food supply and commit population democide.
As a result, I’m agnostic right now. It’s possible that all this carbon dioxide that we’re pumping into the air is having an effect. But I think that global geoengineering is having a much, much greater effect. Like the floods in Beijing last year, and all these “natural” disasters happening that are way beyond normal.
Lyndon Johnson said in a speech back when he was president – James Bradley and I did a show and talked about it (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2023/09/09/the-cancer-within-jb-west-and-jb-east-present-see-you-in-the-hague-63/) – LBJ said that they were working on controlling the weather. He made the comment that whichever country controls the weather will control the world. That’s 60 years ago and technology has increased by magnitudes since. I think the United States is doing that and using it as a way to punish its enemies and use it even as extortion. I’m even thinking about Fukushima. Was Japan punished for not pleasing Uncle Slaughter in the West Pacific? Was that a natural earthquake? I don’t know now.
That’s where I’m today. I’m humbled as a certified science teacher to have gone through this arc of awareness over so many years. Thank you.
Best, Jeff
Follow-on reply from Henrik,
Hello Jeff,
thanks for such a juicy response to my queries, although I wasn’t expecting you to answer and would still love to hear from others, such as Alexander Mercouris or Pepe Escobar. Anyway, I hope you don’t mind my responding and doing so in a little more detail. I think it necessary, partly because it is a serious topic and partly because you limited your answer to the question about the “green agenda”. That was interesting, but for the ruling elite of the West, the US in particular, to use whatever means they can to control resources, people and nation-states goes without saying. The worst, most dangerous and insane response is, as you rightly point out, the trend toward using Geoengineering, which seems to be part of this “green agenda”, the purpose of which is, as with everything else under this grotesque system, to retain power, while maximising profits and accumulating capital. ‘Controlling’ climate and people is a nice byproduct; perhaps necessary in the minds of the kakistocracy, but just a byproduct. The politics and government responses to global warming, especially in the west, has been and continues to be deranged. The prime example here is probably Germany since the Russian special military operation began in February 2022 (with France a close second), although the Green party had done a lot of damage prior to Russia’s intervention. All this is important to understand, but none of it addresses the science. The science has been so distorted, misinterpreted, misunderstood and misused, it’s hardly surprising that there is so much confusion. This is why I asked about thermodynamics and earth’s climate. Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and his presentations may have been compelling to watch but they did not constitute science. Neither do green parties, green NGOs, green think tanks, green food or green corporations.
The science begins with how molecules, such as methane and carbon dioxide, are affected by different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, especially infrared radiation. The basic understanding of this began with the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 paper in The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin ‘Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science’ titled ‘On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground’. Since the publication of Svante’s paper, the science relating to earth’s climate has come a long way. We now understand why Mars is so damn cold and Venus is an inferno, but Svante’s inital discovery remains true: increase carbon dioxide and earth’s atmospheric temperatures will rise. How something so uncontroversial and widely understood in the West over 40 to 50 years ago, has today become contested in the public and political spheres is both a fascinating and deeply depressing story. Many of the conspiracies are sure to be true, but none of the smoke and mirrors seriously address the science. There is great danger in confusing science and scientific data with government policies and corporate interests. It is true that scientists can be corrupt and science can be distorted. This shouldn’t be surprising. Think about cigarette smoking, seat belts, led in petrol, DDT or, more recently, the science surrounding pharmaceuticals and viruses.
It is the science that interests me and peoples’ understanding of this science. Specifically, how do public commentators think earth’s climate functions? For example, do they comprehend the relevance of a carbon dioxide mass-balance equation in understanding current levels of atmospheric heat? Why is it relevant? How does the concept of the black-body-effect help? If one believes it is of no use, on what scientific evidence and data is such a conclusion based? By what process does a white surface reflect heat, whereas a dark body absorb heat? Does the proportion of dark surfaces on earth affect earth’s global climate or is the effect only local? Why? Why is earth’s mean annual surface temperature currently about 15C rather than -20C? Why do surface temperatures at the moon’s equater fluctuate so greatly (roughly 120C to -130C), whereas at the poles temperatures remain less than -200C? Why are temperatures on earth so different? As to longer term changes, what are direct and proxy data? Why are they relevant or, if not, why not? Why is there so much water under the Sahara? Why was much of Europe covered in a large ice sheet 20,000 years ago? Why have these cold periods, with expanded ice sheets and glaciers, occurred regularly (about every 100,000 years) for the past one million years? Why did earth’s climate begin to cool from about 34 million years ago? All of these irritating Why-questions and countless more relate to earth’s climate. Where we judge the scientific answers to be wrong, we have a responsibility to explain why and posit alternative scientific explanations that can be tested or verified.
You say that “it’s possible that the carbon dioxide that we’re pumping into the air since the last 300 years…may be having some effect. But as the Russian scientists pointed out, over the course of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years, the carbon dioxide levels and the temperature levels that are changing right now are quite negligible”. Context and history is everything here. Superficially, the Russians’ pithy statement is true, but it is also unhelpful. The question is not about amount, but effect. Take a tiny amount of cyanide and you would briefly know what I mean. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is less than 0.1% at present, so what’s the big deal with it increasing from a trifling 0.028% prior to the industrial revolution to a smidge over 0.04% now? Consider earth’s last ‘cold snap’, from its maximum 20,000 years ago to the start of the Holocene (about 11,700 years ago). During this 8,300-year period the levels of carbon dioxide increased from about 0.018% to 0.028% (180 to 280 parts per million or ppm) and much of Europe, North America and even here in Tasmania went from having extensive glaciation and frigid temperatures to the liveable conditions we enjoy today. The annual increase in carbon dioxide over the period was about 0.0000012% or 0.012ppm. And yet it had enormous consequences for earth’s climate. Over the past couple of decades, the annual increase in carbon dioxide has been around 2ppm or more. Think about that for a minute. It’s a rate over two orders of magnitude greater than what occurred during the transition from the last glacial period to the present.
Has this happened before? Not really at such an extraordinary rate. For instance, the annual release of carbon dioxide during a ‘warm snap’ at the end of the Eocene about 56 million years ago (an event known as the Palaeocene Eocene Thermal Maximum), occurred over a period of at least 4,000 years and was ten times lower than today. What consequences can we expect with today’s increases in carbon dioxide? In broad terms, much the same as has happened in the past: earth’s atmospheric and surface temperatures will rise, but at rates far greater than during previous times and to levels that haven’t occurred for millions of years. I’ll leave alone the debate over the consequences of such heating and what to do about it, but in the West too many commentators tend to think that nothing much is happening or will happen, so why worry. Some have even concluded that all the scientific predictions are wrong or wildly overstated. It’s all a nefarious conspiracy. Several reasons explains such wishful thinking, ignorance and complacency. For example, over 90% of the heat has been going into the oceans; we’re dealing with an enormous system, so inertia plays a highly significant role. Perhaps one of the more important and undervalued reasons is that too many scientists are atrocious communicators. Also, individual human lives are only about 80 years or so, which means that climatic changes that take several decades to hundreds of years to emerge can seem insignificant. Then there is the quite reasonable lack of understanding of the science and I do not mean popular interpretations or summaries of the science, but the actual data and how the data have been analysed. There is the added difficulty of being able to interpret the data and place them in the wider context of earth’s biosphere. In other words, what the data mean across various ecosystems and at different spatial and temporal scales. A final reason is what Shuchen Xiang, in her wonderful book ‘Chinese Cosmopolitanism’, describes as a metaphysical trait central to the West, where “A psychological fear of the embodied nature of human existence – that is, fear of mortality and the fact of change — is central.”
Cheers,
Henrik
No comments:
Post a Comment