“After the collapse of central planning in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, the only place in the world where Marxist were still thriving was the Harvard political science department.”
—Peter G. Klein (b. 1966), American economist [i]
Part 4 of this timeline of climatism ended with Fritz Haber’s contribution to food production in the early 20th century.
1912
Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), the German geophysicist and meteorologist, suggested that Africa and South America were once joined, something every school kid sees when looking at a world map. The consensus at the time considered it as nonsense. It took around 50 years to reach a consensus on Wegener’s theory. Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Pasteur, etc., were all alone for a long time until the consensus caught up.
“Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough.”
—Michael Crichton (1942-2008), American author [1]
The practical relevance in relation to climatism is that consensus has no meaning in science. It’s a political tool. Science is about evidence, not popularity. History is full of scientific revolutions driven by outliers who challenged the status quo. Furthermore, scientific understanding evolves.
1920s
Carl-Gustaf Rossby (1898-1957), the Swedish-born American meteorologist, found that atmospheric waves on Earth are giant meanders in high-altitude winds that have a major influence on weather. Thus, climate forecasting is more complicated.
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson (b. 1958), American astrophysicist [2]
Milutin Milanković (1879-1958), the Serbian geophysicist and astronomer, found that the Earth’s eclipse around the sun and the Earth’s axis tilt vary, making climate forecasting even more complicated. The Milankovitch cycles explain ice ages. Based on our current understanding of the Milankovitch cycles, Earth is not presently headed towards a major glaciation or extreme warming period solely due to these orbital variations.
Malthusians say millions need to die. Eugenicists say who.
Both are misanthropic and anti-humanist.
1925
Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), the Austria-born German dictator, wrote in Mein Kampf that, among other things, one of the “problems” was limits to available land for food production and population growth. Some historians argue that Hitler was inspired by the work of Thomas Malthus. The Reich Nature Protection Law, passed in 1935, was ahead of its time. It was about control.
In 2019, Drieu Godefridi (b. 1972), the Belgian essayist and author, published The Green Reich, drawing a parallel between (national) socialists trying to control the means of production in the 1930s and (millennial) socialists trying the same now. Both use “science” as a means for political aims: “Environmentalism does not intend to seize the means of production to increase and distribute the fruits in an equal manner. Environmentalism plans to seize the means of production to stop it… It should be emphasized that contemporary environmentalism does not derive its totalitarian impulse from morality, but from science.” [3]
In 2022, I wrote:
Ayn Rand (1905-82), the Russian-American novelist and philosopher, put it well in 1944: “Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.” [5]
The cartoon below depicts AOC. Claudine Gay, Al Gore, or John Kerry, all from Harvard, would work just as well.
1934
Karl Popper (1902-94), the Austrian–British philosopher, published Logik der Forschung, which was republished in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959. This early work laid the groundwork for his philosophy of science, including falsificationism, i.e., the idea that a theory is scientific only if it can be proven wrong, not necessarily proven right. In Conjectures and Refutations, published in 1963, he introduced the concept of critical rationalism, the idea of science being driven by criticism and refutation. Critical rationalism encourages the rigorous testing of theories through experimentation and observation. Theories that consistently survive attempts at falsification gain credibility, not because they are proven true, but because they haven't been proven false. We move closer to the truth not by finding ultimate answers but by continually eliminating the demonstrably wrong.
Simplifying a bit, critical rationalism is related to one of my favourite one-liners: “Wisdom is what works.” (I spent some time on the topic of “wisdom” when writing my third book, Applied Wisdom.) For the social sciences, this means it is not about right and left but right and wrong. It’s not about “right-wing” vs. “left-wing” but about science and truth vs. fiction and utopia. All collectivist ideas have failed. According to this line of thought, environmentalism, which seeks to plan the economy centrally and control the means of production, is destined to fail. It was true for the Soviet Union that, like the national socialists before them, tried to control everything. And it might become true for its namesake, the European Union.
“['E]urope' is the result of plans. It is, in fact, a classic utopian project, a monument to the vanity of intellectuals, a program whose inevitable destiny is failure: only the scale of the final damage done is in doubt.” [12]
—Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)
The counterargument to the above is that environmentalism is not about central planning and control but about global cooperation when solving problems that impact all mankind.
1938
Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964), the English steam engineer and inventor, sometimes dubbed the grandfather of the theory of man-made global warming, was the first to demonstrate that the Earth’s land temperature had increased over the previous 50 years. Callendar thought this warming would be beneficial, delaying the next ice age. Callendar claimed humans had increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels and had thereby changed the atmosphere from 274 ppm to 325 ppm by 1935, resulting in an increase which had caused the global surface temperature to rise 0.33 °C.[6] However, the CO2 data available at the time showed concentrations between 250 ppm and 550 ppm. Calendar has been accused of cherry-picking data from a sampling of 19th-century averages. To some, therefore, he is an early example of climate fraud, as he ignored all data above 350 ppm to prove his point. Today, the "Callendar effect" is widely dismissed by meteorologists.[7]
Until 1985, the published CO2 readings from air bubbles in pre-industrial ice ranged from 160 to about 700 ppm and occasionally even up to 2,450 ppm. According to one source, high readings disappeared from the publications after 1985.[8] The higher-than-today CO2 levels are inconsistent with IPCC’s assessment reports and Al Gore et al.'s fearmongering.
Excursion: On the correlation between temperature and CO2
The notion that CO2 drives temperature is far from clear. Research based on the ice core record shows that temperatures rise first, and CO2 follows later. Furthermore, different ice core data vary greatly regarding CO2 concentration in the past. The confidence intervals of historic CO2 data are so wide you could drive a truck through them.
During the Jurassic Period, average CO2 concentrations were about 1,800 ppm. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Cambrian Period, nearly 7,000 ppm. The Late Ordovician Period was an Ice Age with CO2 concentrations at 4,400 ppm.
While CO2 has risen steadily over the last decades, global surface temperatures have been oscillating. This means the causality between CO2 and temperature is spurious on a geological time scale and a much shorter time scale. Over the long term, both oscillate, and both the causality and correlation between the two are debated.
On a geological time scale, both temperature as well as CO2 concentration in the atmosphere are currently abnormally low:
1940s
Frank W. Notestein (1902-83), the American demographer, made early strides in the demographic transition model, i.e., the idea of a negative correlation between fertility and industrial development. The demographic transition model is a framework in demography that describes the shift in a country's population growth patterns through various stages of economic development. In a nutshell, population growth rates decline as economic development and affluence rise.
In many high-HDI economies, the fertility rate has fallen below replacement levels. This means that with no immigration of perma-in-the-mood people from lower HDI countries, the size of the population falls as the grownups are not replaced.
The practical relevance to risk is that “people who think central planning is a good idea” have, over time, come up with some horrid crazy weird ideas to meddle with population growth and size. In 2015, for example, Angela Merkel thought it was a good idea to let more than one million people into the country because it could help offset Germany's demographic challenges. (One side effect was the continuous rise of the AfD. The law of unintended consequences applied. Stop press: Holland is now run by Wilders, and Le Pen is back.)
Sweden did something similar to Germany. The difference from other countries was that immigrants were isolated rather than integrated. One side effect of Sweden's immigration policies is “car burning,” i.e., the youth there torch cars for recreational purposes. Sweden is 87th out of 146 countries in Numbeo’s crime index. This compares to Norway at 36th and both Denmark and Finland at 21st.
In 2020, I wrote:
1941
Amin al-Husseini (c1897-1974), the Palestinian Arab nationalist, met with Benito Mussolini in Rome and Adolf Hitler in Berlin. He offered his help. Al-Husseini had submitted a draft declaration of German-Arab cooperation to the Nazi German Government. There was an overlap of interests between European national socialists and Palestinian Arab nationalists concerning the Jewish question.
“Of all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous. Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.”
—Thomas Sowell (b. 1930), American economist [13]
The connection between millennial socialism and 20th-century national socialism became apparent in the aftermath of the 7 October 2023 terrorist attack on Israel. The term “eco-fascism” became clearer. The stance of academia became clearer as well. Niall Ferguson (b. 1964), the Scotland-born American historian, discussed the parallels between the elite German universities of the 1930s and today's Ivy League institutions in the US in an essay titled The Treason of the Intellectuals, published in December 2023. In this essay, Ferguson draws comparisons between the intellectual environments and political leanings of the prestigious German universities of the early 20th century and the current state of American elite universities. Ferguson argues that German universities such as Heidelberg and Tübingen were the most prestigious globally before World War II, much like today's Harvard and Yale. He points out that German academics and students were disproportionately represented in the Nazi Party, reflecting a dangerous blend of intellectual elitism and political extremism. He suggests that today's Ivy League institutions have similarly become breeding grounds for a dominant ideological stance, which he views as "woke," and highlights instances where contemporary academic environments have endorsed politically charged and sometimes anti-Semitic positions.
1944
F.A. Hayek (1899-1992), the Austrian school economist, published The Road to Serfdom, which some investors claim is a blueprint for the UN/WEF Agenda 2030. (Others claim 1984 is the blueprint.) Hayek contended that pursuing economic equality through central planning and collective ownership inevitably leads to totalitarianism. The suppression of individual liberties becomes necessary to enforce centralized economic control.
Hayek argued that economic planning and excessive government control lead to the loss of individual freedom and, ultimately, to serfdom. Hayek contended that decentralized decision-making and free markets are essential for preserving liberty and prosperity. Hayek wrote: “It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. The French writers who laid the foundations of modern socialism had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government.”
Abraham Maslow (1908-70), the American psychologist of Maslow-pyramid fame, famously said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” This refers to a concept commonly known as the law of instrument or Maslow's Hammer. It refers to an over-reliance on a familiar or favourite tool. Analogously, for someone in the government, every problem is solvable by the government. However, for Hayekians, every problem is caused by too much government. More government nourishes a negative feedback loop as the government tries to solve the problems with even more government.
“The way to end highway congestion is to have the government build the cars and private industry build the highways.”
—Will Rogers
Taking the hammer argument from above one step further, some argue that the government has an incentive to keep its citizens stupid. If they were to smarten up, so the argument goes, they would see that the government is the problem and fight it. Early signs might be that citizens in some Western countries are moving away from state-sponsored media, healthcare, and education towards the equivalent institutions in the private sector.
A slightly modified version of the hammer argument is that the welfare state made many citizens dependent on the government. These “dependables” now have a disincentive to fight the hand that feeds them.
Henry Junior Taylor (1902-84), the American author and journalist, interviewed Hermann Göring, Reichsminister of Economics, among other things, during the Nuremberg Processes. Göring recommended America not take the road to serfdom, i.e., not make the same mistakes as the national socialists did:
“Your America is doing many things in the economic field which we found out caused us so much trouble. You are trying to control people’s wages and prices—people’s work. If you do that, you must control people’s lives. And no country can do that part way. I tried and it failed.
No country can do it all the way, either. I tried that too, and it failed. You are no better planners than we. I should think your economists would read what happened here.
Germany has been beaten, eliminated, but it will be interesting to watch the development of the remaining great powers, the stupidities they practice within their homelands, their internal strife, and their battles of wits abroad.
Will it be as it always has been that countries will not learn from the mistakes of others and will continue to make the mistakes of others all over again and again?” [9]
1948
Paul Hermann Müller (1899-1965), the Swiss chemist, was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discovery of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) in the 1930s that allowed to control diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. DDT saved millions of lives from the 1940s to the early 1970s until it was banned after pressure from environmental groups.
In a 2021 report, I wrote that the DDT ban killed 100m people. It might have only killed 50m:
Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. (1887-1969), the American conservationist, published Our Plundered Planet. The book was a Malthusian-like population scare and an early call for “worldwide planning.”
William Vogt (1902-68), the American ecologist, published Road to Survival. The book was a Malthusian-like population scare and an early call for worldwide planning.
In 1967, William and Paul Paddock published Famine 1975! The book was a Malthusian-like population scare and an early call for, you know the spiel by now: worldwide planning. Books like these are still being published today.
“A man is likely to mind is own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902-83), American philosopher [10]
The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines the rights and freedoms of all human beings. It describes the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society. (In 1967, it added that the size of the family must irrevocably rest with the family itself and cannot be made by anyone else.) Article 17 recognises the right to property, but it is not recognised everywhere. Many environmentalists fight property rights because they mean the property owner has power over nature. Environmentalists don’t like that. They want that power for themselves; after all, they are the ones who occupy the moral high ground. They know best.
1950s
Simon Kuznets (1901-85), the Russian-born American economist and Nobel laureate, expressed a hypothesis that, as an economy develops, market forces first increase and then decrease economic inequality. (The Kuznets curve looks like a Laffer curve that states that tax income first increases when the tax rate is hiked but then falls, or the Armey curve that states that GDP first increases when public spending is hiked but then falls.)
Today, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) is a hypothesized relationship between environmental quality and GDP growth. This is quite relevant for worldwide environmental policy discussions, as, for example, the economies of emerging nations are in a different stage of their development from the economies of the already-service-oriented West. The EKC is entirely lost, not just on teenagers and four horsemen of apocalypse promoters, but on all those who use up all their energy to slow the economy by promoting big government in one form or another: the most prosperous economies are also the cleanest.
Socialist Germany (GDR) vs. capitalist Germany (FRG), when they were split, is a good example for the EKC. The former was much dirtier than the latter. It had to be: the GDR got less GDP bang for its CO2 buck. (The GDR was the largest emitter of CO2 in Europe at the time.) “A drag on a cigarette cleanses the lungs,” said P.J. O’Rourke in relation to the air quality in the communist East.
The EKC is also a counterargument to the precautionary principle (discussed in Part 6) often applied by environmentalists.
To be continued…
[i] Peter G. Klein, Why Intellectuals Still Support Socialism, Mises Institute, 2006.
[1] Michael Crichton, "Aliens Cause Global Warming," speech at the California Institute of Technology, 17 January 2003.
[2] Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017), 13.
[3] Drieu Godefridi, The Green Reich (Texquis, 2019).
[5] Ayn Rand, in a letter written on 19 March 1944.
[6] Zbigniew Jaworowski, “Another Global Warming Fraud Exposed: Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase,” 21st Century, Spring 1997, 42-52.
[7] Richard Black, “A brief history of climate change,” BBC, 20 September 2013.
[8] Zbigniew Jaworowski, “Another Global Warming Fraud Exposed: Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase,” 21st Century, Spring 1997, 42-52.
[9] Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of the 82nd Congress, Second Session, Volume 98—Part 7, US Congress, 28 June to 7 July 1952. Written by F.A. Harper, the Foundation of Economic Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.
[10] Eric Hoffer, The True Believer – Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: HarperPerennial, 2010), 11. First published 1951 by Harper & Row Publishers.
[11] Ronald Bailey, The End of Doom – Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 90.
[12] Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft—Strategies for a changing world (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 359. Emphasis in the original.
[13] Thomas Sowell, Random thoughts, townhall.com, 12 August 2004.