People who are afraid that life on Earth is coming to an end, and they are many, want to completely overturn our lives. One could say: they want to have control over all aspects of our lives, they want sky high taxes, obedience to the government.

If you like a tasty steak once in a while, if you like to travel by airplane to foreign destinations, if you enjoy making a ride with your car, then in the future you will have a problem. That’s at least so, in case climate hysteria is not quelled.

Behind this mental disease is fear for life itself. Fear to go your own way in life and not bother your fellow men. People who suffer from climate hysteria, and have power, are in essence all fascists, that want to dominate others and force their fear on the whole society.

Psychiatrists should come together and develop a therapy to cure masses of people of the fear that life on Earth is coming to an end. I’m not a psychiatrist, and my message is just a drop of water on a boiling hot metal plate.

Godfather of Global Warming Criticizes Climate Change Hysteria

 Lorrie Goldstein – June 22, 2012

Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change. The implications were extraordinary.

Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist whose Gaia theory — that the Earth operates as a single, living organism — has had a profound impact on the development of global warming theory.

Unlike many “environmentalists,” who have degrees in political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.

His inventions have been used by NASA, among many other scientific organizations. Lovelock’s invention of the electron capture detector in 1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere, leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern environmental movement.

Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the UK’s Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of this century.

Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas emissions, but says it’s now clear the doomsday predictions, including his own (and Al Gore’s) were incorrect.

He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.

Among his observations to the Guardian:

(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.

As Lovelock observes, “Gas is almost a give-away in the U.S. at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying to knock it … Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.” (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major United Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments last week at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, advocating the development of conventional and unconventional natural gas resources as a way to reduce deforestation and save millions of lives in the Third World.)

(2) Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming like a religion.

“It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion,” Lovelock observed. “I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.”

(3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered by wind turbines.

As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel … We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can’t stand windmills at any price.”

(4) Finally, about claims “the science is settled” on global warming: “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

Si vis Pacem para Bellum

©Matthys van Raalten. All rights reserved.

The new NetZero Reality Coalition scored another big win when the town of Pontiac, Illinois said NO to transforming land from natural habitat to a silicone solar desert.

Illinois town nixes solar desert

In a stunning setback for solar, the City of Pontiac, Illinois has scuttled plans to construct a solar energy project that would transform a vacant lot in town into a shiny solar desert.

At an emotional Feb. 13 hearing before the City of Pontiac Planning and Zoning Board, city official denied the application of Bundleflower Solar LLC to rezone the property so that as many as 5,568 photovoltaic solar panels could be installed there. A few days later, Bundleflower Solar withdrew its application altogether, putting an end to a project that had garnered fierce opposition from the city’s residents.

To add insult to injury, the owner of the 49-acre property, where the thousands of solar panels were to be installed, changed his mind and came out in opposition to the project.

The dramatic turnaround shows what can happen when citizens are well informed about how harmful solar (and wind) projects are, and then mobilize to stop deep-pocketed renewable-energy developers from ruining their communities.

CFACT Informs the Citizenry

CFACT was glad to be of assistance in this David v. Goliath confrontation. Two weeks before the decisive hearing, we posted an article about the project, outlining how Pontiacs residents would in no way benefit from have the solar project in their town. The article also appeared in Real Clear Energy, giving it greater coverage. Concerned residents emailed the article to their allies, and passed out hard copies to one and all. CFACT also advised the project’s opponents to pack the hearing, where – armed with the information contained in the article – they made compelling arguments to the zoning board against the project.

Zoning board hearings are usually won by people who show up, and the solar project’s few local supporters were steamrolled by Bundleflower Solar’s well-informed opponents.

Based on information supplied by CFACT, residents pointed out that solar power is intermittent and cannot supply electricity 24/7. They knew that the thousands of solar panels would produce zero power at night, zero power on cloudy and rainy days, and zero power when covered with snow during northern Illinois’s long, cold winters. As a sign of how unserious the project was, the developer didn’t even plan to install backup batteries to provide electricity when the sun was absent. Those batteries, of course, have their own environmental problems and are another reason communities should avoid solar and wind projects that include them.

Pontiac’s residents could also note that the developer was primarily interested in pocketing generous federal and state subsidies and, absent those taxpayer subsidies, the developer would never have considered putting the project in their town.

Pontiac Provides a Template

In the end, Pontiac – a city of 11,000 people, located about 60 miles southwest of Chicago – dodged a bullet. It will not be hosting a white elephant whose sole purpose is to serve narrow corporate interests as part of the ever-expanding Climate Industrial Complex.

The resistance the people of Pontiac showed should serves as a template for other communities across the nation that shows how these wasteful projects can be stopped dead in their tracts.

Neil Winton worked at Reuters for 32 years, including as global science and technology correspondent.

Winton recently admitted he “was wrong” for going along and not putting in the journalistic effort to question the media’s prevailing climate narrative.

Marc Morano posted details at CFACT’s Climate Depot.

Winton said:

When I became Reuters global Science and Technology Correspondent in the mid-1990s, the global warming story was top of my agenda. Already by then the BBC was scaring us saying we would all die unless humankind mended its selfish ways. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) was the culprit and had to be tamed, then eliminated. I had no reason to think this wasn’t established fact. I was wrong.

My Reuters credentials meant that I had easy access to the world’s finest climate scientists. To my amazement, none of these would say categorically that the link between CO₂ and global warming, now known as climate change, was a proven scientific fact. Some said human production of CO₂ was a probable cause, others that it might make some contribution; some said CO₂ had no role at all. Everybody agreed that the climate had warmed over the last 10,000 years as the ice age retreated, but most weren’t really sure why.

The sun’s radiation, which changes over time, was a favoured culprit.

My reporting reflected the wide range of views, with Reuters typical “on the one hand this, on the other, that” style. But even then, the mainstream media seem to have run out of the energy required, and often lazily went along with the BBC’s faulty, opinionated thesis. It was too much trouble to make the point that the BBC’s conclusion was challenged by many impressive scientists.

Winton went on to make an essential point about the threat Green radicalism poses to freedom that has been essential to CFACT’s mission since our founding:

The Left had lost all of the economic arguments by the 1990s, and its activists eagerly grabbed the chance to say free markets and small government couldn’t save us from climate change; only government intervention could do that.

Thank you Neil Winton for this important peek inside the world of media groupthink and your insight as to how Reuters, and so many others, lost the plot on climate.

At the dawn of the 20th century, the humorist Finley Peter Dunne wrote about newspapers that “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

No one has grown more fat and comfortable, and no one more deserving of a little journalistic affliction, than those accumulating vast power and fortunes by cashing in on climate.  Just ask Reuters.

Reporters, do your job.  Ask the tough questions and fully vet the climate narrative and the myriad conflicts that flow from it.

The public deserves to know.

RELATED TWEET:

One of the best headlines of the year so far… ‘Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end’ https://t.co/ANI24c3lLq

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) March 12, 2023

EDITORS NOTE: This CFACT column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.