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
