by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Why we should fear and hate carbon dioxide – A guest article by Elena Louisa Lange about the sense and folly of worrying about “man-made climate change.
In September, the world witnessed five minutes of climate ideology at its finest. Apple, the world’s most capitalized company, produced a promotional film designed to suggest, tongue-in-cheek, that “completely removing carbon from the atmosphere” was not only Apple’s ambitious climate goal but desirable for humanity as a whole.
I’m sorry, what?
Let me translate that for the inexperienced consumer of propaganda: it’s all pretty funny until it’s not funny anymore. In every piece of propaganda since the Empire, at some point, simply watching is no longer enough. You have to enter the sentimental world of authoritarianism and give in to the jovial chatter, which can quickly turn into brutal self-denial. Because every child knows that permanently removing carbon from the atmosphere is the ultimate sacrifice. You can’t go any further – unless you directly call for spontaneous mass suicide.
But the year is 2023, and the fact that the complete removal of carbon or carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would result in the immediate death of all living things is counted as a positive environmental impact. The irony is palpable. What is more interesting, however, is that the manic hostility to CO2 in every climate message in the media is not a faux pas by Apple PR strategists and similar lobbyists but rather intentional. The Pavlovian reflex against CO2 must become second nature for state subjects. It has to be practiced, trained, and called upon. Think of the “two minutes of hatred” against Goldstein, which Orwell so aptly describes in 1984; in reality, it has now been replaced by a neutral chemical compound. The daily mafia-like climate blackmail by the UN, EU Council, WHO, WEF, and other unelected bodies serves a global war against CO2. Fossil fuels are the enemy. Overpriced solar and wind energy are allies. Anything that doesn’t produce CO2 in the first place may be good – which is already a problem with solar cells since Chinese solar cell production facilities run on coal – but anything that destroys, even “eats” CO2 is better. The fact that nuclear power is the dirty kid from the ghetto that you don’t talk about don’t play with, and avoid at all costs just shows that there is a method to the madness.
Anyone who has any sense realizes that this is not about nature.
There can be no doubt that the measures taken in accordance with these maxims are not about “protecting the planet” or “nature.” It’s about the domination of people over other people. As the German philosopher of technology Martin Burckhardt states, “nature” now functions as an “ideal projection apparatus”:
“The revolutionaries who wanted to liberate the tormented proletariat at the end of the 1960s had to be told by the workers that they had no interest in this kind of salvation, which is why the aggressive remark often followed: ‘Then go over there.’ Contrary to the lower class, nature does not respond. In this sense, it is an ideal ally for the climate policy avant-garde. You are connected to a higher power, and you practice political theology.” (1)
Of course, climate change is also making horses fat (2) and causing pigs to produce less meat:
Climate change has other, albeit very practical, consequences for our unelected world bodies – the cause of poverty in the global south can be blamed on the weather, while the same technocrats, with their feudalistic carbon offsets and certificates, are exacerbating the very conditions that give rise to poverty contribute to the southern continent.
However, in a modern industrial society with highly developed productive forces that could hypothetically provide people with all sorts of technological protections – and even conveniences – against the whims of nature, there is no “natural problem” that cannot be solved socially. If you don’t have a working water system or your house is blown away in a hurricane, it’s not the weather’s fault. Are they poor? Not the weather’s fault. And yet poverty is declared to be a natural condition, and nature is said to be the result of political decisions. The upside-down world of the “personification of things” and the “reification of people” has come into its own through the climate narrative.
Let’s not forget that the monothematic reduction of the social discourse to climate change also kills two birds with one stone: not only is responsibility shifted to a technological abstraction that has no reality except in computer model simulations, but one can in the name of one “objective compulsion” to force a complete social change that undermines the idea or even the desire for a life of relative prosperity, freedom, security, health, and dignity, which we once took for granted but which the powerful have never had an interest in maintaining actually destroyed. In the Ahr Valley flood disaster in North Rhine-Westphalia (2021), more than 200 people lost their lives, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes and sources of income due to poor infrastructure. However, Germany’s first technocratic chancellor, Angela Merkel, blamed it on “the challenges of climate change” – a policy that is now considered “good form.”
Anthropogenic climate change for dummies
However, for this scheme to work, the assertion that climate change cannot have natural causes but only man-made, “anthropogenic” causes is essential. If the observable atmospheric and physical processes were of natural origin, it might be challenging to convey the message that an entire mode of production and consumption needs to be revolutionized so that it amounts to the abolition of production and consumption. However, no one denies that humans play a part in the warming of the land masses: the conversion of entire areas of land into landfills and the covering of cities with concrete play an important role. But nothing humans do can override the natural changes in the climate, e.g., B., the annually varying influence of solar radiation, oceanic circulation patterns, clear or cloudy skies, or volcanic eruptions (many of them underwater). These global natural influences on the weather are deliberately ignored in the “discourse” and sometimes even downplayed. The US atmospheric researcher Dr. Judith Curry repeatedly emphasizes that the atmosphere’s composition has “only an insignificant” influence on the weather. Instead, we are led to believe that there is no other cause of hurricanes and droughts than the burning of fossil fuels. Viewing CO2 emissions as a “knob” for the climate is, even in the strictest sense, idiotic – and dangerous. But it’s not about the “climate.” It’s about declaring humans to be the cause of all climate ills through society’s rehearsal of an objectively false mono-causality.
But not even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is so sure: in the “Summary for Political Decision Makers” (SPM) of Climate Report Number 5 (AR5, 2007), the IPCC reaffirmed its distinction from the far more hysterical UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ) and pointed out that his definition of climate change is not limited to “direct or indirect human activities” but also includes natural variability, which has enormous fluctuations. The simple fact that there is no standard for distinguishing between natural and man-made climate change has not made things any easier in successive climate reports, even for those scientists in Working Group 1 who are trying to follow the logic of the carbon cycle, i.e., gigantic, mostly oceanic influences on the climate, against the activist climate convention machine and its obsession with attributing “100%” of current weather changes to human activity.
According to official propaganda, the fear of CO2 must be directly linked to “man-made” climate change – whatever the cost. Supported by an unprecedented collectivist self-flagellation, this comes up with prohibitive excesses – in addition to CO2 certificates and taxes, people are now struggling with oil and gas heating bans, combustion engine bans, 15-minute cities, and now also canceled folk festivals like in Zurich, whose “CO2 »-Footprint is too large for the municipal requirements. (3) At the end, there is the dissolution of civil subjectivity as we know it, not to mention democratic civil rights. The effects of “climate change” on our immediate existence will probably be even more devastating than the technocratic-fascist hollowing out of civil society during the Corona years. As we all know, people are only temporary virus carriers but carbon dioxide producers for life. How strong can the interest in human survival be among those who want to “eliminate” carbon dioxide, the basis of all life on Earth?
As the online portal, Business Insider recently reported, the “first commercial plant in the USA has started sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. It is capable of sucking out 1,000 tons per year and is planning to expand.” (4)
Welcome to a new level of madness.
Photosynthesis as a right-wing conspiracy theory
So, how bad can CO2 be for the planet?
Well, that doesn’t look bad at all, quite the opposite – although the irony is that this 7-year-old NASA clip on YouTube has now been labeled as climate disinformation.
If it is a trivial truth that CO2 levels have increased over the last 100 years, then the impact on photosynthesis is even more trivial. Every child knows that photosynthesis, the process by which plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, is the basis of all life on Earth. Every child also knows that without plants, there would be no life. One might be tempted to think that an increase in CO2 is beneficial for life on Earth. How strange it must be to live in constant fear of rising CO2 concentrations.
No one disputes that the planet has warmed at higher latitudes by about 1°C in the last 100 years. However, it is nonsensical to claim that an increase in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the only cause. And it is even more nonsensical to claim that the increase in CO2 would destroy the earth. (5) On the contrary, an increase of up to 1200 ppm in the global average would perhaps even be necessary to feed a growing world population.
Relationship between CO2 concentration and the growth rate of plants: (6)
Physicist and former energy adviser to the Obama administration, Steven Koonin, says in his book Unsettled (7): “Today’s Earth is hungry for atmospheric CO2.” However, if you make this fact known publicly, some Twitter troll will insult you as an “oil lobbyist,” “enemy of science,” or even as a “neo-Nazi.” The script is now known.
As anyone who has experienced continental summers and winters knows, warmer weather would be desirable for people. Many people die every year from the cold, only a few from the heat – Australia is the exception. Studies, for example, by the American Heart Association (8), show that cold is the leading cause of temperature-related deaths in most countries around the world. In a study that examined 384 locations in 13 countries on five continents, there were 20 times as many deaths from cold as from heat. Cold temperatures increase the risk of respiratory infections and cardiovascular disease, while weakened immune systems make the body more susceptible to flu viruses and pneumonia. In addition, cold causes blood vessels to constrict, leading to increased blood pressure and, in extreme cases, heart attacks. Rejoice and welcome the warmer weather, making potato farming possible in Northern Canada.
Fortunately, NetZero is – for now at least – too unrealistic to be implemented. If this were the case, life on Earth would cease to exist. But to add irrationality to idiocy, the good thing that could benefit everyone becomes the thing we distrust, fear, and are told to abolish.
I always thought it was the ultimate evil to force the world’s population – including babies and small children – to violate their bodies, their human dignity, and their human rights by injecting them with an experimental vaccine. But I’m not so sure anymore.
(Elena Louisa Lange)
A slightly abridged English version of this essay appeared on Elena Lange’s Substack blog here: https://elenalouisalange.substack.com/p/who-is-afraid-of-co2/comments
Elena Louisa Lange is a philosopher and political commentator. She teaches as a private lecturer at the University of Zurich. Her most recent book, The Conformist Rebellion: Marxist Critiques of the Contemporary Left, was published in 2022. A year earlier, she published Value Without Fetish: Uno Kozo’s Theory of ‘Pure Capitalism’ in Light of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (Historical Materialism, 227, Volume 227). In addition, Elena Lange is a co-editor of two books on modern Asian philosophy. She has published numerous works on the criticism of political economy, particularly value and monetary theory, critical theory, method, modern Japanese intellectual history, digitalization, and the political culture of the left, including handbook and encyclopedia articles.
Remarks
Editors note The Underappreciated Role of Carbon Dioxide in Health
Editors note: Gregg Braden – Climate Hysteria: the 1.5-degrees Celsius
1 Im Interview mit Axel Bojanowski, unter: https://martinburckhardt.substack.com/p/im-gesprach-mit-axel-bojanowski
2 Anm.d.Red.: As one eagle-eyed reader of Elisa Lange’s blog noticed, an underprivileged photo editor at the Telegraph had obviously amateurishly sculpted the “fat horse” using Photoshop – at whose behest it was.
3 The popular Zurich Festival, the largest folk festival in Switzerland with more than 2.5 million visitors every three years, has now been canceled due, among other things, to its ecological footprint: https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/groesstes-volksfest-der-schweiz-das-zueri-faescht-steht-vor-dem-aus
5 The energy flowing into and out of the climate system is measured in watts per square meter (W/m2), which is the Y-axis on this graph. The CO2 concentration in ppm (parts per million) is on the x-axis. The graphic shows that temperatures do not correlate with CO2 concentrations. Source: CO2-Koalition.
6 Source: Roger H. Thayer, Eco Enterprises, hydrofarm.com. Courtesy of Matthew Wielicki’s Irrational Fear: https://irrationalfear.substack.com/p/greening-earth-and-booming-crops
Anm.d.Red.: Over the last 140 million years, CO2 levels have fallen rapidly and steadily until they were only about 30 ppm away from the “death limit” of 150 ppm, below which plants cannot survive. Both the relatively short-term data from ice cores and the much longer-term data going back 140 million years (Berner 2001) show an alarming downward trend toward CO2 starvation. “The release of carbon dioxide through the use of fossil fuels has allowed humanity to increase concentrations of this useful molecule and perhaps avert a CO2-related climate apocalypse,” the info portal states firmly. CO2Coalition.
7 Steven Koonin: Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, https://www.amazon.de/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesn%C2%92t-Matters/dp/1950665798 Dallas, 2021, S. 66.
8 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/555515. Cardiovascular diseases are still by far the number 1 cause of death in the USA and Western Europe.
Cover photo: Collage of 3 photos on Freepik (bedneyimages, wayhomestudio)