Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Climate Alarmism

By James Brodell

April 2, 2024

A scary prediction is among the best tools that can be exploited by modern prophets, ambitious politicians, newswriters and even marketeers. The scarier, the better.

Much of modern advertising, for example, incorporates fear. A list of disaster movies would fill a book.

Consider even this short list of scary topics that make the headlines: killer bees/hornets, the Mayan new year, Y2K, chupacabras, Bigfoot, GMOs, alien abductions, zombies, alien invasions, poisoned or sinister foods, plagues, and restless volcanoes.

British writer Charles Mackay treated the psychological aspects of what a reviewer called “the exotic fields of mass self-deception” as early as 1841 in his three-volume work “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” A more recent classic is the 1959 “Rumor, Fear and the Madness of Crowds” by psychologist J.P. Chaplin.

Both writers had plenty of material because humanity never ceases to amaze. There have been economic bubbles such as the Dutch tulip mania of 1634–1637 up to the very recent collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX cryptocurrency exchange. There have been religious frenzies, including hunts for witches and mass suicides. There have been other mass hysterias involving the paranormal, diseases and end-of-the-world scenarios.

None has been so potentially harmful than the mass hysteria of climate change that has infiltrated every aspect the private and political lives of western civilization. The theory that carbon dioxide is the driving force increasing world temperature has warped national budgets, promoted duplicity, sowed discontent among some and fear among many, terminated careers and even filtered down to mandates on the acceptable fuel to boil water in the millions of home kitchens.

All this even though carbon dioxide only comprises 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere, about 425 parts per million, as of February 2024, according to The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Logic should easily show the flaw in this carbon dioxide theory just as anyone who took basic biology should have realized that cloth masks do not impede the covid virus. Nevertheless, the carbon dioxide theory has reached the level of an axiom in nearly every field of science, however distant from meteorology.

Trillions of taxpayer dollars are being poured into questionable electrical projects even as hordes of people march and commit vandalism because “enough is not being done” and new electric vehicles burst into spontaneous flames. Millions hold jobs directly or indirectly to fight climate change.

Rational scientific discourse has been labeled misinformation or disinformation as climate change activists struggle to defend their turf in the face of growing erosion in the public mind. They crank up the tenor of their favorite weapon: censorship.

A classic example is the new documentary called “Climate, the Movie.” The one hour, 20-minute video encapsulates nearly all the arguments that run counter to climate alarmism. Featured are many top scientists, including a Nobel laureate, and all agree with the theme that no climate crisis exists.

Almost immediately a retired math professor urged users on the X website to mount a 10,000-person strong campaign to silence the film. He did not say objections should come only from those who actually saw the video.

The climate catastrophe website Skeptical Science, in an article March 24 written by frequent contributors John Mason and Bärbel Winkler, said of the video “Climate change denial is like a kind of flying circus. This same old carnival troupe is wheeled out time and again to spread doubt about climate science. Why? Because that’s what they are good at doing, with decades of combined experience under their belts.”

One social media video site did take down the documentary briefly, and Google and YouTube seem to have made the climate movie very hard to find in their search engine, a process known as shadow banning.

Ironically much of “Climate, the Movie” shows how the vast sums of government money allocated to solve a presumed climate crisis has subverted academic study and publication. Some of the scientists featured in the video were driven out of their profession because of their failure to support the lucrative narrative. Some featured scientists make the point that young academics would never get degrees, post obligatory journal articles or have any career advancement unless they accept the catastrophe narrative.

Climate catastrophe fans long have equated disagreement with denial, evoking images of those who would deny the Nazi Holocaust. They have become more shrilled as prediction after prediction since the early 1980s fell flat. New York City is not under water. There are no statistical evidence of more ot stronger natural disasters, and Arctic ice cover, frequently claimed to be vanishing, is now at a record level against the 21st century average. Polar bears are doing just fine.

Some countries have not accepted the computer-generated catastrophe narrative. China, for example, is building many new coal-powered electrical generating stations.

The documentary says that variations in the sun account for the bulk of the changes in earth’s temperature. The perception that world temperature is increasing may be partly due to so-called heat islands, weather stations that once were in rural areas and now have been enveloped by expanding hotter urban areas. Roy Spencer, who originated and maintains satellite monitoring since the early 1970s, estimates the global rise in temperature at 0.15 degrees C per decade.

The most recent warmer period was in the 1930s, immortalized by John Steinbeck in the novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” The documentary said that current world temperatures are cool compared to ancient proxy measurements. The El Niño/La Niña phenomenon in the Pacific shows the cyclical nature of climate. Civilization, such as the Roman’s, seems to prosper during warm periods while colder times bring famine and unrest.

There also is concern that government bureaucrats are cooking the books on climate reports because some data curiously differs from the same data published in the past. The allegation is that government workers are falsifying numbers to support the catastrophe narrative.

Advertising for “Climate, the Movie” describes it as “the film that lifts the lid on the climate alarm, and the dark forces behind the climate consensus.” The documentary is written and directed by Martin Durkin, the English producer behind the 2007 documentary film “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

The dark forces would include world government proponents who would use climate alarmism to build an authoritarian regime that would control the daily activities of all humans.

The documentary also makes the argument that restricting fossil fuels, as alarmists proposed, would have the most severe impact on Third-World citizens who are struggling their way out of poverty.

There also is the danger that radical efforts to alter temperature might have long-term negative effects. Scientists once proposed painting the Arctic black to increase temperature to counter what was considered global cooling in the 1970s.

Because climate is cyclical, temperature may again show a slight downward trend, and politicians worldwide will claim victory against heat and again insist they need more trillions to fight global cooling.

The video documentary is obligatory viewing for anyone who would discuss, write about or study the climate even if they violently disagree with what is said.

Here is the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmfRG8-RHEI