Introduction: Sacrificing for the health of the planet
1. Sacrifices
Germany takes the fight against climate change seriously. Over the last 20 to 25 years it invested a fortune into wind energy, photovoltaics, the adaptation of the grid, maintenance of reserve capacity and other measures. Since there is no transparency about the money spent, we are depending on estimations. They go up to 1 trillion USD.
The results of these huge investments are not impressive. The cost of electricity in Germany is now the highest in the EU.
The supply of electric energy is depending on the weather and a short “Dunkelflaute” as in November or December 2024 can lead to supply shortages, high electricity imports and skyrocketing electricity prices. All this has dramatic consequences for the living costs of the people and for the German economy. The former production powerhouse is in a serious crisis.
Also other countries sacrificed a lot to “save the world” from a climate collapse. Great Britain moved since 2000 from 30% coal and < 1% wind and solar electricity production to about 1% from coal and 30% from solar and wind today. Unfortunately, also in GB there is no transparency about the cost of the transition. Everything included, it is likely in the hundreds of billions USD. The results are also not great. Behind Germany, GB is competing for the second place in electricity costs with counties like Ireland and Denmark (both of which have a very high proportion of their electricity generated from wind too). In addition, the country is in constant danger to experience a blackout.
Another story of a seemingly needed sacrifice for the climate is agriculture. After all, food is even before energy the most basic resource people need. Take control of its production and you control the people.
For the last 100 years agriculture has been a story of an awesome success mainly due to synthetic fertilizers. Nobody would have predicted that the earth would be able to feed 8 billion people. However, synthetic fertilizers have now been declared a danger to the climate. Not surprisingly, the UN and EU are pushing for measures to reduce their use. The Netherlands, a major food producer, wants to close down thousands of farms. Who cares that less food means higher prices, though. Just look at the most drastic example of regulating agriculture in the name of a healthy planet: Sri Lanka. After an ill-advised restriction of synthetic fertilizers, the country experienced a severe food crisis.
These are just a few examples. Many more countries are making major sacrifices to save the climate. And other countries have the sacrifices forced on them. The obvious question then is, of course: does it at least help the climate?
2. Return on the sacrifices
Example Germany:
The specific CO2 emissions for the electric energy production is still the 5th highest in the EU. The CO2 emission reduction since 2000 amounts to about 400 Mio tons or 36%. However, the energy consumption in Germany decreased in the same period by 26%. This means that for the investment of up to 1 trillion USD Germany achieved about 115 Mio tons annual CO2 reduction. Not included in this numbers are the changes in imported CO2 emissions which might offset a major part of the reduction. Thus, we talk about maximal 1/3 of a percent of the global emissions. The effect on the global temperature is too small to be measured.
Example Great Britain:
From 2000 to 2023 GB lowered the CO2 emissions by 264 Mio tons. This is a reduction of 46%. In the same time the total energy consumption fell by 35%. This in parallel with a reduction of the industrial output as share of the GDP by 50%. A result of the deindustrialization is the increased import of energy intensive products resp. CO2. Thus, the huge investments and the deterioration of the reliability of the electrical energy supply resulted in less than 65 Mio tons net reduction of the CO2 emissions or 1/5 of a percent of the global emissions. The effect on the world temperature is so minuscule that it cannot be measured.
An even lower effect can be expected from the sacrifices of Sri Lanka and the European farmers: Absolutely negligible.
Compare these pointless sacrifices to the actions of the major economic competitors of the western nations:
China is heavily investing into coal fired power plants which provide it with cheap electrical energy and allows it to outcompete the western industry. Alone in 2023 about 48 GW new coal capacity came online and about 70 GW new construction got underway. This represents an estimated total of an additional 115 Mio tons of CO2 emissions per year. Moreover, the increasing sale of CO2 intensive goods made in China to western nations cancels out a high percentage of their reduction efforts and makes those even more meaningless.
The conclusion: Western nations like Germany, UK and many others spend trillions on climate initiatives without any discernible effect on the global temperature. The negative effects on their economy and, mainly, on their poorer population, on the other hand, is considerable. The electricity markets are in turmoil, poor people have problems paying their heating bills, energy intensive industries move to countries with cheaper (and more CO2 intensive) energy.
3. Follow the money
This raises a most important question: Who in their right mind would continue to invest based on such an absurd return on investment? There must be strong benefits somewhere which still drive this kind of climate policies. Who are then the beneficiaries?
As in most human endeavours, power and money as drivers might be a good bet. Obviously, the trillions spent on saving the climate are going somewhere. Such huge sums of money will inevitably attract people which try to profit from the “climate emergency”. Starting from the researchers offering solutions, to the companies and their investors producing the renewables value chain – a whole economy has grown out of the climate change narrative. Last but not least, the prophets of doom in the media and the many NGOs making money from scared citizens make sure that the story stays in the news.
The media, in addition, refer to the powers which support their activist reporting. The major ones being the UN with the ICCP, the EU and their Net Zero strategy as well as many governments. They drive a policy in the west which obviously has been doing more harm than it did save the climate. Why? The best answer is obvious: power. As seen with COVID these kinds of declared emergencies tend to move a lot of power and influence upwards. As soon as some high up bureaucrat in the UN or the EU opens his mouth to reveal the next climate catastrophe, he gets the attention of all the media. Governments fall in line whenever the UN proposes the next treaty, the next rule to fight climate doom. The unelected EU bureaucracy keeps writing regulations and sends the courts after those which do not comply.
It is an old game these institutions are playing. Claiming or even creating major dangers have always been one of the strongest tools in the toolbox to strengthen top-down powers and, even, fully suspend freedom and democracy. We just experienced COVID as a prime example. Even wars have been started to force the country behind the government.
Accordingly, in the last decades of a more and more globally connected society a relentless drumbeat of real or imagined dangers led to an increasing demand for so called experts and supranational institutions to face these severe global threats.
Examples are the danger of a nuclear war, a Malthusian collapse as expressed in P. Ehrlichs “The Population Bomb”, the takeover by AI and, as experienced by all of us, a pandemic.
However, while we are easily manipulated to look for a strong person or institution when we are feeling helpless and scared, the experience should show us that they, once they have the power, are much more likely to try to add to it than to release it when the danger has passed. The worst part is, that if they are “experts”, bureaucrats or supranational institutions they are not under democratic control. The victim of such an upward shift of power, therefore, have always been freedom and democracy.
COVID was a clear warning sign how “experts” like Fauci in the USA, international institutions like the WHO or the UN and many others use scare tactics and allied government power to expand their control over us to their own benefit.
Thus, whenever a government or the UN resp. other unelected bureaucrats are crying wolf about a major danger and ask for more power to fight it, we better check carefully whether the danger is real and their proposed “medicine” helps us or them.
In the following the focus will be on climate change. It is presently the prime example of how institutions like the UN and the EU, “experts” and their associations as well as government bureaucrats, supported by a relentless onslaught of media reports, try to push a narrative of global danger onto all of us and ask for the power to fight this “danger”.
Background to the climate change narrative
The narrative started in 1896. 
Svante Arrhenius published his work “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground”. In this paper he predicted a temperature rise of 3-4 °C upon doubling the CO2 content of the air.
For a long time, nobody seemed to care. Then, almost 100 years later at the World Climate Conference 1979 the assembled scientists concluded that “it appears plausible that an increased amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can contribute to a gradual warming of the lower atmosphere, especially at higher latitudes.”
Already then there was no shortage of “Club of Rome”- inspired activists convinced of the doomed future of our western societies. They were looking for a way to reverse the developments of the industrial revolution to avoid the Armageddon they saw as imminent. CO2 is the basic molecule for life and a major result of the human drive to escape the abysmal conditions of poverty through the use of fossil energy. Accordingly, it looks like the ideal handle to change the trajectory of human development. Prof. P. Ehrlich, author of “The population bomb”, put it in words 1978: “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Another 10 years later politics realized the opportunity and took over. The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) and UNEP (UN Environmental Program) created the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) as an intergovernmental body in 1988. Contrary to what is being claimed by many media “the IPCC is not a scientific organization; it is an administrative entity consisting of delegates from governments of its member states. It allows interested government parties to control every aspect of the process by which the IPCC assesses and reports on climate science.
This is blatantly obvious in the creation of the summaries for the policy makers. 
Their content is determined in every single detail not by the contributing scientists but by IPCC government representatives.
The political takeover of the climate change issue is already obvious at the climate conference 1988 in Toronto. It “brought together 341 delegates, including 20 politicians and ambassadors, 118 policy and legal advisors and senior government officials; 73 physical scientists, 50 industry representatives and energy specialists; 30 social scientists and 50 environmental activists.”
With the establishment of the IPCC an unstoppable process was started. When in the human history did a political committee designed to deal with a problem decide that the problem did exist no more and dissolved itself. Moreover, wouldn’t it be crazy to expect that the scientists contributing to the IPCC reports try to prove that the problem was not serious or did not exist? And thereby risk the grants spoken by the political entities which support the idea of human generated global warming?
Not surprisingly the media – always in love with wars, disasters and catastrophes – jumped on this opportunity with great abandon. Catastrophic global warming was soon the simpleminded explanation for any “irregular” weather pattern.
In the following I will describe how this politicization led to the corruption of science in order to support the political agenda. In turn, the results of a corrupted science are used by the political instances for dramatically expending their power.
The establishment of the IPCC
It is important to understand the circumstances at the time of the establishment of the IPCC.
In 1988 it was already widely assumed that there was a real danger of excessive global warming due to the increasing production of CO2 by the burning of fossil fuels. NASA scientist James Hansen delivered testimony and presented models to congress in June of 1988, saying he was “99 percent sure” that (human induced) global warming was upon us. The composition of the delegations at the above-mentioned Toronto conference was decided based on this assumption and that corrective actions needed to be prepared. The United States Environmental Protection Agency was a leading player and sought already then an international convention to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.
The establishment of the IPCC happened against this background. Its role was defined as to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.
Details of the role of the IPCC in climate research
- The IPCC is based on one major assumption: The human-induced climate change is real and potentially dangerous for the planet and thus will require corrective actions
- Accordingly, one of the major roles of the IPCC is to define the direction of the research needed to further understand human-induced climate change and its consequences. (Not “understand climate change and the human contribution therein”!!!)
- The funding of the research of human-induced climate change and its consequence comes essentially from the political institutions in the participating (in the IPCC) countries.
- The research results are assembled by the IPCC (remember: intergovernmental panel, not a scientific body).
- The IPCC does not present alternative potential theories for the scientific observations. Its mission is to establish a consensus about the major conclusions and to publish this consensus as the assessment report.
- A “summary for policymakers” is then composed line by line in coordination with the representatives of the participating governments and published. It is the most important piece of information about climate change for the media and government bodies to decide about their actions
It is clear – the IPCC was never about understanding the major drivers of the climate (including the natural ones) and therein the contribution of the human activities. It was from the beginning about looking at the climate from the perspective of an already postulated negative human impact on the climate. As Maurice Strong, one of the initiators of the IPCC said: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
The UN together with the major governments (e.g. USA) in the driver seat was looking for further confirmation of the human threat to the climate to support major interventions in their countries. What a dream coming true – a major expansion of the power of governments and their bureaucracies in order to save the planet!
Accordingly, the more the climate scientists offer proof for the negative impact of human generated CO2 the easier they get funded by the governments. This way, however, science around climate change is corrupted to deliver the preferred results while scientists who, based on their research results, question the publicly supported narrative lose funding (examples see below).
IPCC and the corruption of science
Since the IPCC is dominated by political interests, it was clear from the beginning that scientists who provided the “right” results would be rewarded and the others would slowly but surely be pushed aside. The “correct” consensus has to be reached. Thus, over time the whole process lost all resemblance to an open scientific discovery which meets the stringent criteria of Karl Popper. It mutated into an undertaking where “science” is paid to deliver a never-ending string of “data” supporting the theory of a dangerous human induced climate change. To make it clear, few of the results look like outright cheating. Most are simply selective interpretation of data in order to “prove” the wished for result. This, however, is not science.
1. Forcing of the one narrative by attacking the scientists who offer an alternative one
The most effective weapon of the political interests turned out to be the selective support of one kind of “scientific” results and simultaneous suppression of the alternative ones. Almost all scientific institutions were aligned in this goal. First of all, the major climate research institutions which feared for their ample money supplies flowing in from the governments. For similar reasons (money) also the major scientific associations and many publishers. All were united in this push for the one and only correct narrative which would assure the need for more research, more investments, more subsidies.
Shocking evidence of this situation became public in 2009 with the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. 
They showed that leading climate researchers did not shy back from gaslighting the public about the facts of climate change. A famous quote by Phil Jones to Michael Mann: “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!” It is important to know that Prof. Jones was director of the climate research unit at the university and lead author for the IPCC. Michael Mann was director of the Earth System Science Center at the Pennsylvania State University, one of the lead authors for the IPCC and the source of the famous hockey stick graph.
There were more similarly revealing e-mails among those published by the hackers, which confirm the above sadly corrupt attitude of these two leading climate researchers.
The institutions resp. ”climate experts” did not only try to suppress “incorrect” results. Also “incorrect” conclusions have to be addressed. For example those which confirm the human influence on the climate but do not agree that the consequences are that dramatic that we need to reset the whole western societies and destroy their prosperity. Obviously, they are as much a threat for the fear mongers as the full-fledged “deniers”. The honey pot of the ever-flowing money to save the earth might dry out.
No surprise then that they try, often successfully, to cancel the researchers which came up with these “incorrect” results. Here just a few examples to showcase the issue.
- In 2019 zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford lost her position at the University of Victoria (UVic).
She had publicly presented her research results that the polar bears were thriving and at no risk of extinction from climate change. - In 2022 Alimomnti et al. published a paper in the European Physical Journal Plus (EPJP) that “reviewed recent bibliography on time series of some extreme weather events and related response indicators in order to understand whether an increase in intensity and/or frequency is detectable.” It was a review of published literature. Unfortunately, the authors concluded that “on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet”. Instead of engaging in a scientific discourse the corrupt “climatologists” – among them Michael Mann – started to pressure the journal to retract the paper. They found willing supporter among the climate warriors at Covering Climate Now, The Guardian and Agence France-Presse. In 2023 the publisher yielded and retracted the paper.
- In 2023 “Nobel Laureate (Physics 2022) Dr. John Clauser was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF. Shortly before, during a speech in Seoul at Quantum Korea 2023 he said “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis“. Shortly after, the presentation was cancelled.
- In 2021 the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Bjorn Lomborg – who is not a climate sceptic but just a “climate change is the greatest risk ever to the earth” sceptic – planned to give a lecture at the Duke University in the US. Immediately, a group of professors at Duke – some of them contributors to IPCC – requested cancelling of the talk. Thankfully this university did not follow their requests.
If it is not possible to prevent the publication of “incorrect” results then the publisher must be punished for it.
- One of the most hated “climate sceptics” is Richard Lindzen. He is an atmospheric physicist and was for 30 years professor for meteorology at the MIT.
He questions the validity of the computer models used for predicting the warming of the atmosphere through CO2 emissions. His name as a scientist (>200 publications) makes him a real danger to the climate change profiteers and he is attacked accordingly.
In a 1990 paper he recommended “Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming” and not to jump into heavy handed political actions. In another paper 2001 he proposed the “iris effect” which could compensate the water vapour feedback in the climate models. Both editors which were responsible for the publications were fired.
- In a 2011 paper Roy Spencer et al from the University of Alabama in Huntsville discussed “what they believed to be the primary difficulty in diagnosing feedback from variations in the Earth’s radiative energy balance” based on satellite data (not models). Unfortunately, Roy Spencer,
known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, has been an outspoken critic of the climate models. Thus, publishing his work is deemed wrong. As a consequence, the chief-editor of the publishing paper was pushed into resignation .
Another, often favored, approach to cancelling researchers which do not agree with the “the earth is dying” story is to accuse them being in the pay of fossil fuel companies. This strategy usually proves to be successful by letting the warrior journalists and academics from the leash. I present two examples which demonstrate to what extremes the climate activists in politics, academia and media will go to protect their narrative.
- Roger Pielke Jr. is an environmental scientist and served for 20 years as professor at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences(CIRES). In 2024 he became a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
In 2006 at the Roger Revelle annual lecture he said that ‘human influence on the climate system has been well established’. And that the reduction of global carbon dioxide emissions would be essential. So what went wrong?
He dared to carefully analyse the available data and conclude that contrary to the overly loud fearmongering there was no evidence that climate change led to more frequent and more intense natural disasters. He is not the only one having come to this conclusion. Even the IPCC’s AR6 (p. 1854-56) arrives at the same results. His willingness to publicly present his conclusions in a highly visible way, however, seemed to enrage the activists. There was obviously a danger that the truth would pull the rug under the shrill and breathless alarms about climate change which were to make sure that power and money would be funnelled to the right places.
This could not be allowed and, thus, the hounding began.
As usual, climate activists supported by the media were the first to publicly react. 2009 one of them put him on a list of “Most Heinous Climate Criminals”. In 2014 he published a paper in FiveThirtyEight.com with the title: ‘Disasters cost more than ever – but not because of climate change’ where he presented again the data. The resulting firestorm supported e.g. by Slate, Paul Krugman, The American Geophysical Union led to his departure from FiveThirtyEight.com. Then in 2015, a member of Congress, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) initiated a public investigation based on the suggestion that he might have been taking money from Exxon or other fossil fuel companies. He was cleared of all allegations.
However, the investigation proved to be a career-altering experience. He cites Anne Applebaum to describe his experience: “Here is the first thing that happens once you have been accused of breaking a social code, when you find yourself at the center of a social-media storm because of something you said or purportedly said. The phone stops ringing. People stop talking to you. You become toxic.”
Four academic programs Pielke developed and led were shut down by the university. When he returned to the university in 2019 he was given a ridiculously small office without any infrastructure for working. He is still teaching at the university. But by all means, for the university he is a pariah.
It is an almost unfathomable story but, unfortunately, true.
- Not too different is the story of Willie Soon. He has been one of the few scientists who focused their work on natural causes of climate change and not on the IPCC mandated human influence. What happened to him is a another showcase of how research outside the mainstream climate alarmism is impeded.
Most of the public funding is controlled by organisations which long since have been brought into line with the climate scare. Accordingly, known “climate deniers” have a hard time to get public funding. If they then look for other support of their research, they are accused of working for the fossil fuel industry.
This is exactly what happened to Dr. Soon. His research into the connection between the sun and the earth climate is not poplar with those who are interested in depicting CO2 as the main or even only driver of the warming climate. When he realized that he would not get additional public grants for his projects he started to look for private sources.
For most of his career he was a scientist working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. His project proposals to a range of different trusts/foundations were vetted and submitted by the Smithsonian. The grant money was paid to the Smithsonian.
Of course, companies like Exxon and others who are active in the energy sector have long been aware of the political pressure and financial incentives to generate alarmist science results. However, contrary to the politicians who can spend trillions of our money without any accountability the companies are accountable to their shareholders. They want to understand the real facts before making important decisions. Reality does not follow the whims and wishes of power hungry politicians. Sadly, these companies cannot rely on the official climatology to get an objective and balanced view of the relative contribution of the human activities on the climate. Thus, naturally, they are happy to support scientists who help them understand better that part of climate change which is neglected/suppressed by the main stream climatology: the natural variations.
Being shut off from public funding Dr. Soon received grants from Exxon Mobil, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the Electric Power Research Institute. Greenpeace and other activist organizations looking for dirt about this bothersome scientist discovered this fact around 2011. The attacks began then and reached a peak 2015 when more info about the sources of his grants came out and resulted in the publication of articles in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and others. The major accusation was that he violated ethical guidelines because he did not disclose his “conflict of interests”. An investigation by the Smithsonian following these accusations did not find that Soon broke any rules.
The assumption that taking money from an organization which has a political interest in the results is creating a conflict of interest, however, goes both ways.
It is no secret that fossil fuel funding of climate research is also going to the main stream climate science. Has anybody ever declared a conflict of interest on that side? Money from activist organizations like Greenpeace, billionaire foundations and alternative energy companies certainly create a conflict of interest too. The most obvious, however, is the public funding which has a strong political skew and goes primarily to scientists supporting the climate alarmist agenda. Doesn’t this produce conflict of interests for the researchers looking for grant money if they have to deliver a preferred result from their work? Not surprisingly, a new publication sheds a light on the incredible lack of disclosures of potential conflicts of interest on the side of mainstream climatology. Many of the published results could be predicted based on the interests of the sponsors.
It is very obvious that all this discussion about the ethics of the “climate sceptics” has only one goal: to silence researchers which do not support the enforced political and “scientific consensus”. And prevent them from doing research into other, mainly natural, causes of climate change.
A further very often used way of disparaging the critical scientists is to declare them a marginal minority, outsiders at the fringe of real science. While this lane of attack often seems to be resonating well with the public it is absurd in the field of science. Certainly, Darwin and Einstein were at the time outsiders in the main stream science. Nevertheless, a lot of emphasis is given to “creating a consensus” within climate science. It seems not to matter whether it is real or just claimed. The bureaucrats behind the IPCC set this goal to give them the pretence for their accumulation of power to save the world.
Accordingly, a lot of claims are out there like:
- 97 percent of climate scientists agree: Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous (Obama 2016). This is one form of the mostly cited claim. It originates from a paper by John Cook in 2013. It is a posterchild of “lying by statistics” as demonstrated repeatedly. The results of the paper are summarized below:
Another much used and rather effective form of the argument is: “The majority of the experts / publications agree that CO2 is the major driver of climate change”. It is, however, a very hypocritical one. The interests who want to have a climate emergency because it offers them power and money are the ones who define the narrative. They make sure via their grant policy and control over the journals that the vast majority of publications promote the “right” results. The more successful they are the more they can use the argument. At the end it is obvious that this argument is only a measure of the corruption of science and not a reflection of the real facts in climate science.