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VIII

Wonderful Copenhagen

What I discovered to be the true motivations behind the snowbound UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

What this leads to is a world where actual ideals and even truth are beside the point. People are either in or out of the game. It’s a conspiracy for fun and profit. I was reminded of this while covering the 2009 UN Copenhagen Climate Change Conference at which Obama appeared briefly and gave a speech. Nothing much really occurred there that was substantive other than delegates and press spending a few days in one of Western Europe’s most beautiful cities, schmoozing and drinking aquavit. (Climate conferences tend not to happen in Dubuque.) Half the US Congress seemed to be there on a taxpayer-funded junket. When I ran into Rep. Charlie Rangel in the gift shop of the Marriott where most of the delegation was staying and asked the New York congressman whether he believed in anthropogenic global warming, he looked at me as if I were joking. When he realized I might be serious, he waved me away as some kind of crank and returned to the important business of examining the expensive Danish jewelry on display.

More interesting (and telling) was an encounter I had the next day with the delegate from the island of Tuvalu—a tiny place in the Pacific said to be about to disappear under water from the predicted ocean rise due to global warming. We were sitting next to each other waiting for one of these lectures that never seemed to get started, so I commiserated with the poor fellow about the sad fate of his country. He started laughing and tapped me on the arm in a friendly way very unlike Rangel. I suddenly got suspicious and asked hesitantly “You don’t believe it’s happening?” The man grinned and nodded affirmatively. “Then why are you here?” I continued.

“For the money,” he said, as if it were the most evident thing in the world.

You couldn’t but like him for his honesty. Half a decade later nothing much has happened to Tuvalu but that hasn’t stopped its prime minister, Enele Sopoaga, from warning the world at yet another conference in New York in 2014 that climate change was “like a weapon of mass destruction.”¹ Sopoaga, who is seeking cash for the repatriation of his sinking citizens to other countries, further said of his island nation, “We are very, very worried—we are already suffering.” How, he doesn’t specify, but he did provide a few photos of a few sandbags stacked along the oceanfront. Actual climate data for the island is sparse but records from nearby American Samoa indicate virtually no change for decades.²

Tuvalu, of course, is not alone in working the climate change side of the street from a developing world perspective. But the amount of money involved here is the proverbial peanuts compared to the big league game going on in the background at Copenhagen. A new market had recently been formed to trade so-called credits for the use of the supposedly evil carbon, the cap-and-trade strategy. And as with most markets, the numbers of zeros involved boggled the mind and brought out the 3.0 reading glasses—for good reason. According to a December 10, 2009, report in the Telegraph,

Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some Europeans countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated five billion Euros mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency. The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalize heavy emitters of carbon dioxide. Rob Wainwright, the director of the Interpol serious crime squad, said large-scale organized criminal activity has “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.³

These “embarrassing” carbon exchanges have, not surprisingly, largely disappeared. And if you mention them at a cocktail party to your average climate change true believer—most of whom would be likely to have heard, at most, only vaguely of these exchanges—it is almost certain they will dismiss them with a laugh. After all, bad people can take advantage of all manner of good things. But what if those same people were actually the initiators of those good things in the first place? Here’s Maurice Strong—Canadian oil and mining businessman, former undersecretary general of the United Nations, unanimously-elected head of UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), secretary general of the 1992 Earth Summit, winner of the U Thant Peace Award and the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, and the so-called “godfather of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol”: “Climate change is the biggest single challenge humans have ever faced. Unlike other problems, which can be solved regionally or sectorally, climate change affects the very future of life on earth. It is the greatest security problem we have ever faced.”

What a man! Have more righteous words ever been spoken? Has a more impressive vitae ever been written? Maybe so, but the reality of this environmental godfather is rather different. Strong has been linked to virtually every scandal coming out of the UN for decades, including the notorious Oil-for-Food debacle—in which unprecedented sums of money were siphoned off from a program that was designed to help the starving in Iraq—to cash being funneled through UN agencies into North Korea. One of the more bizarre of these was a little known UN Strong-directed offshoot in Costa Rica called the University of Peace that gives degrees in “peaceology” as well as foundation grants to the North Koreans. For what is undetermined.⁴ Strong is currently living in Beijing with his ties to the UN more or less severed after a controversy concerning his relationship to Tongsun Park—the so-called “Asian Great Gatsby” convicted on federal conspiracy charges over Oil-for-Food—and a mysterious million-dollar check made out to “M. Strong.”

But the existence of Strong and other dodgy characters like Northwestern University business professor Richard L. Sandor—father of the Chicago Climate Exchange (whose panicked investors bailed out for $600 million in 2010⁵ and who had been named a Time Hero of the Environment in 2007) do not themselves mean climate change isn’t occurring. Indeed, on January 16, 2015, NOAA and NASA jointly announced that 2014 had been the hottest year on record, with several scientists simultaneously concluding that serious man-made global warming was now a certifiable crisis. One of them came to the extreme conclusion that 2014 was the hottest year in five thousand years.⁶ Less than an hour later, the gang at Climate Depot—a skeptics blog—had launched a counterassault by another group of respected scientists who quickly pointed out that the supposedly monumental warming of 2014 was in the low hundredths of one percent, an immeasurable difference, and that the pause in warming had continued. And so it went—tit for tat—and will go on into the foreseeable future, one would imagine.⁷

James Delingpole in his book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors posits the entire environmental movement is like that large melon, green on the outside but red (communist) on the inside. It is a mask adopted to disguise overtly political purposes. There’s undoubtedly some truth to that but an argument can also be made that it is instead the ultimate crony capitalism—making up a market that doesn’t exist, making a fortune from it, and then closing it down, leaving a gaggle of losers in the lurch. Moral narcissism provides the necessary underpinning either way. People think they’re doing either socialist utopian good (money to the poor of Tuvalu) or proving how free markets (via carbon exchanges) are the answers to all the world’s problems.

Since most people have nowhere near the scientific expertise to have an educated opinion on global warming/climate change, their opinions on the subject are closer to rooting for a sports team then they are to science. They simply pick a team—in this case, of scientists (or politicians who approve certain scientists)—to believe in, actually root for, and almost always stick with them for the duration, just as most do with their sports teams through the team’s ups and downs. Only a few people know the actual names of the scientists on their team the way they do a quarterback in football, but it comes to the same thing. They’re with them anyway, largely because the scientists are expressing what the group in question wanted to believe in the first place. Almost all are prey to this. I know I am. I have picked my scientists, admittedly without anywhere close to a full understanding of their work.

One of them is Richard Lindzen, the atmospheric physicist and retired MIT meteorology professor known for his work on the dynamics of the middle atmosphere and ozone chemistry. He was also one of the lead authors of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. In other words, he comes from the belly of the beast—the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the UN sponsored body that shares the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. What seduced me about Lindzen was his ability to write well in plain layman’s English, making clear that whatever warming may or may not be going on does not merit the terrified alarm bells being rung by politicians. He has also detailed, from the inside of the academy, the interlocking structures of teaching appointments and research funding that have turned climate change into an industry with a vested interest in its own preservation. This didn’t win him any popularity contests on campus. Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric research scientist at the University of Washington, told the New York Times Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science. I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”⁸

Projection or just an academic pissing contest? I’ll see your University of Washington and raise you an MIT. It’s easy to understand scientists being passionate about their viewpoints—although, interestingly, many of the most esteemed are more measured. It’s their field of endeavor and a few, anyway, have a sense of decorum. But the ferocity of opinion on the part of the rest of us often borders on the comical. At the first Democratic Party debate for the 2016 election, candidate Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont and self-acknowledged democratic socialist, in an answer to a question on what was the greatest foreign policy threat to the United States, declared emphatically that it was “climate change.” He received a rousing ovation from the audience that seemed to agree. This was in October 2015, when the Middle East was in flames and a revived Russia was making inroads into Syria and Eastern Europe. Sanders, however, was worried about “climate change.” He didn’t specify whether, in this case, he meant global warming or cooling. Only a few months before (June 2015) the British MET office had warned of a new “ice age” with temperatures possibly the lowest they have been since the seventeenth century,⁹ though I’m almost certain that would have been news to Sanders. Not surprisingly, the Vermont senator had almost no background in science, unless you count a BA from the University of Chicago in political science and a few months on an Israeli kibbutz in the late sixties. (Perhaps he learned something about agriculture.) Sanders has spent virtually his entire work life in politics.

Sometimes, however, although rarely, opposing viewpoints do seep through to politicians. At one point, John Kerry acknowledged that a handful of people of intelligence might have their reasons for being skeptical about the apocalyptic danger of anthropogenic global warming, but said that the risk of not addressing warming was greater than that of ignoring it—and therefore money should be spent. Of course, the secretary of state was referring to gigantic quantities of money in an already highly stressed global financial system. But even this ambivalent acknowledgement of his adversaries proved to be temporary because Kerry, like Sanders, has since asserted the primacy of climate change as our most important national security concern.

Similarly, and more significantly, Barack Obama cemented his position as Moral Narcissist in Chief by arguing vehemently for climate change as our number one security threat during his State of the Union address in January 2015—this only days after the mass Islamic terror murders in Paris that shook the Western world and brought four million people into the streets in France. “No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Obama, receiving one of his few standing ovations of the evening. He continued:

I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act. Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what—I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. The best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security. We should act like it.

Again not surprisingly, Obama also repeated the claim that 2014 was the hottest year on record, although just the day before, that claim had been walked back by one of its key claimants—Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies—who admitted there was a margin of error in NASA’s data, making the likelihood of 2014 being the “warmest year” a far less onerous 38 percent. Moreover, records begin only in 1880, before which year there were many warm periods, some of great length, with temperatures radically in excess of the present day (and during a time there were many fewer carbon polluting humans on the planet, if any). And then there is the question of how temperatures were measured outside the modern era, when most measuring devices were in grassy fields, not on hot tarmacs as they were later.

But never mind. I am breaking my pledge and beginning to argue the science. What was important about Obama’s SOTU was that vehement standing ovation he received even from many Republicans. The warmth (excuse the expression) of this response was a manifestation of moral narcissism, not of science, just as were the pronouncements of the president himself. But wait, as they say in late-night television commercials, there’s more. And, as in those commercials, the devil is in the details of that hidden more, the unseen payments for postage and handling that often double the cost. In this case, as it is frequently, it is the use of moral narcissism as a motivator for distraction. Obama and also Kerry—not to mention the majority of progressives—seek to use climate change to keep the discussion away from other more important and, to them, uncomfortable subjects, most specifically the danger of radical Islam. Naming radical Islam or Islamism is against their—again, morally narcissistic—entrenched beliefs in political correctness and cultural relativism. (Although the cultural relativism is occasionally tempered for the public with a suddenly remembered obeisance to American Exceptionalism . . . of a carefully diminished sort.) So by invoking a general feeling that we all want to save the world above all things—that climate change is truly the greatest of all dangers—the true danger before our eyes, the danger actually killing people in the immediate sense, diminishes in comparison. Questions about Islam are not asked and don’t have to be answered. The war is not a war but just isolated crimes committed by random misunderstood extremists from impoverished backgrounds, themselves the unfortunate victims of Western imperialism. A thirteen-hundred-year-old ideology adhered to in various manners by an estimated 1.7 billion people has nothing to do with it.

Moral narcissism changes the subject. It elicits simple answers that the self-regarding want to hear and keeps them from asking, or even of thinking of, questions they should really be asking. That is its method, structurally and emotionally. And that self-regard is something to be manipulated and used by those who understand how to do it, and many do at this point, repeating the same pattern over and over. Enough about me. How do you feel about me? And by the way, if you’re unsure of your opinion of me, if you’re ambivalent in the slightest, I am absolutely certain the world is warming and it is our fault, humanity’s fault, like everything else is, and we better do something about it or we’re all going to die in a tidal wave brought on by the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, not to mention the Himalayan glaciers. And don’t give me any evidence to the contrary, because that means you’re a Republican or maybe a fascist. You agree? Good. Now I can friend you on Facebook.

Well, not quite. Not yet. The dang weather keeps getting in the way, giving the idiots in the public, even some on Facebook, pause. As I was working on this chapter in January of 2015, an almost comic example of this discontinuity occurred. New York City was predicted to have a record-breaking blizzard of the sort never seen in modern times. The city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio—the kind of moral narcissist who never found a left-wing cause he didn’t believe in and saw fit to have his honeymoon on Cuba (more of him in the subsequent chapter)—urged citizens of his metropolis to batten down the hatches; the equivalent of the Battle of Britain was coming. Roads and the public transportation system were closed as never before in history. Everyone was urged to stay indoors for who knew how long, and to look in on their sick and aged neighbors who would undoubtedly be on death’s door. A panicked citizenry cleaned out grocery stores. Well, it turned out to be a routine snowstorm of the type that happens every year or two, sometimes more often. Gary Szatowski, meteorologist for the National Weather Service, tweeted out in embarrassment: “My deepest apologies to many key decision makers and so many of the general public.”¹⁰ He promised to examine their computer models. Never dealt with was why we are supposed to believe in climate change, which is also based on computer models, when the weather can’t be predicted a day in advance based on similar models. Oh, yes, climate is not weather. But then what is climate other than weather over time? No one has explained.

Elites have to fight hard to convince the benighted hoi polloi of the importance of global warming and, for now at least, it’s a losing battle. (Who do you believe—Al Gore or your lying eyes?) Although, as I noted, a scandalous amount of black money has been made, the massive wealth transfer desired by climate change adherents has not happened, and people are still driving around in their retrograde gas-guzzlers, most of which, these days, don’t pollute that much anyway. Progress continues in the way it normally does, largely initiated by the profit motive. The future is still in the hands of people like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs—the ones more likely to bring into being and inspire true advances, despite the best efforts of a swollen bureaucracy. One has the sense that many still adhere to the climate change narrative because to question it would open the door to questioning too many other things. It’s the tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon. Better not to go there or the whole morally narcissistic construct will start to unravel. The most rational approach to climate science I have read comes from Reason magazine’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey, a climate agnostic: “Whenever you encounter information that confirms what you already believe, be especially skeptical of it.” Excellent advice, but few heed it.¹¹

The most narcissistic aspect of the climate debate, however, is the odd notion that we humans are more, or at the very least equal to, the sun, moon, and the stars, not to mention the various galaxies, in the effect on our weather. Call this extreme “homocentrism.” This viewpoint was made to seem particularly ridiculous in the freezing temperatures of the winter of 2015. At the same period, the center of our solar system, aka the sun, had reached a low point in activity measured in x-ray output, which was flatlining. The sun was also virtually devoid of spots to a degree not seen since 1906. According to Vencore Weather for February 17, 2015,

. . . it is safe to say that weak solar activity for a prolonged period of time can have a negative impact on global temperatures in the troposphere which is the bottom-most layer of Earth’s atmosphere—and where we all live. There have been two notable historical periods with decades-long episodes of low solar activity. The first period is known as the “Maunder Minimum,” named after the solar astronomer Edward Maunder, and it lasted from around 1645 to 1715. The second one is referred to as the “Dalton Minimum,” named for the English meteorologist John Dalton, and it lasted from about 1790 to 1830. Both of these historical periods coincided with below-normal global temperatures in an era now referred to by many as the “Little Ice Age.”¹²

Brrr . . . Are we headed for another ice age? Although New York City just experienced its coldest temperature in eighty-one years, I have no idea. But neither does most anybody, if they’re honest about it. Nevertheless, talk about the real climate denial, the homocentrist view of the cosmos inherent in the climate alarmist’s Weltanschauung, seems bizarrely primitive, like ancient man staring up in wonder at the sun in some Stanley Kubrick movie and then thumping his chest in superiority. Moral narcissism indeed—and in extremis.

When Rajendra Pachauri, the longtime chairman of the UN IPCC and symbolic Nobel Prizewinner with Al Gore, resigned at the beginning of 2015 in the wake of sexual harassment allegations (some say he should have resigned in 2009 in the wake of the “Climategate” scandal), he wrote in his farewell letter “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.” This confusion of religion and “dharma” with science is the essence of what is wrong and the reason we all have to suffer through that endless parade of English majors at cocktail parties lecturing us on climate Armageddon. It is the Lysenkoism of the trendy.

And yet, other manifestations of moral narcissism in our culture are far more treacherous in the long run than the vicissitudes of climate and far more destructive than the mere economic profligacy cum superstition this belief might engender. These manifestations have the capacity to break our nation apart as never since the Civil War, perhaps more permanently, both at home and from abroad. “A Republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin is reputed to have said when emerging from the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Those words—often considered more of an apocryphal tribute to Franklin’s wit than an accurate quote—have suddenly taken on more relevance in today’s America, because moral narcissism has helped create that most reactionary of results . . .