The Climate Frenzy Began On A Single Scientist’s Say-So
SPOTLIGHT: June 23rd was the 30th anniversary of James Hansen‘s historic climate testimony to a US Senate committee.
BIG PICTURE: Nine years after the 1988 event that triggered decades of climate change media coverage, the person who orchestrated the event was interviewed by PBS’s Frontline.
Timothy Wirth, a prominent Democratic congressman, and one-term senator told PBS:
We knew there was this scientist at NASA, you know, who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hadn’t even been established. It hadn’t yet written any of its reports describing an alleged climate consensus. Yet Wirth already believed there was a crisis.
That belief rested on a single scientist. Who was making claims no one else had yet made. Who was “very certain” his ideas were correct.
Wirth neglected to mention that the wider scientific community hadn’t yet examined Hansen’s ideas. At the beginning of his testimony, Hansen said his assertions were “based largely on recent studies” carried out with a team of seven others (my italics).
The paper describing those studies was submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research in January 1988 and was accepted in May. But it wasn’t published until the 20th of August – two months after Hansen delivered his testimony.
TOP TAKEAWAY: Journalists considered Hansen’s 1988 remarks credible. Even though he was an outlier. Even though the broader scientific community had had no opportunity to evaluate his work.
Read more at Big Pic News
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Not so.
Hansen may have added fuel to the fire, but that fire was lit many years earlier by Maurice Strong and Bert Bolin.
These two scheming socialists dreamt of a New World Order, where the bounty of the developed nations would be spread among the underdeveloped ones. realising that their socialist ideals would never gain wide acceptance in the west, they picked the environment as a vehicle.
Secretary-General of the UN U Thant invited Strong to be the secretary-general of the UN Conference on the Human Environment to be held in Stockholm under the chairmanship of the prime minister of Norway, Geo Harlem Brundtland. The purpose of the conference was to consider the future of the environment into the twenty-first century. For the conference to be a success with international impact and not just a talking shop, Strong realised that the attendees at the conference would need to include a significant number of the underdeveloped countries. The problem was that most of those countries viewed pollution and environmental concerns as a fad of developed countries, a problem for the rich. Their main concerns were with poverty and underdevelopment, not the environment.
Later, writing in his 2000 book ‘Where on Earth Are We Going?’ Strong admits:
“If I was [sic] to get anywhere, I’d have to radically re-make the agenda……I called the members [of the organising committee] together for a special meeting. I laid out for them my revised agenda. The key concept called for a redefinition of the concept of environment to link it directly to the economic development process and the concerns of the developing countries. The basic thesis, I said, is simple: environmental and economic priorities are intrinsically two sides of the same coin. The key was to insist that the needs of the developing countries would best be met by treating the environment as an integral part of development”.
As we know, the conference was a huge success, attended by thousands. Hansen was a johnny-come-lately. (Oh, and wrong about just everything).
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