The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  Heliocentrism, Then and Now

  On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno was brought to the Campo de’ Fiori (Field of Flowers) plaza in Rome, “his tongue in prison because of his wicked words,” and burned at the stake as an unrepentant heretic.14 Among the “dangerous” views that cost Bruno his life was his strongly stated conviction that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the Solar System. His heliocentrism was even more offensive to theological orthodoxy because Bruno was a pioneer in insisting on a high value for what is now called the Drake equation, a probabilistic formula for estimating the number of stars supporting intelligent life. Bruno declared that there was an infinite number of worlds like ours circulating around stars like our sun.

  Contemplating Bruno’s fate makes me grateful for the relatively meager progress toward freedom of thought that has been eked out over the past four centuries. It is a particular blessing that Al Gore, today’s leading proponent of the earth-centered view of climate, lacks the gravitas of Cardinal Bellarmino, the Grand Inquisitor, who sentenced Bruno to be burned at the stake and later condemned Galileo to life in prison after Galileo was referred to the Inquisition in 1615. (Galileo got off with a light sentence because he recanted his heretical view that the Earth revolves around the Sun.) Unlike Cardinal Bellarmino, Gore cannot speak Greek, and his enforcement of the consensus views of the day about the importance of the Earth over the Sun is not backed up by the fires of the Inquisition. Even for a man with the equivocal intellectual integrity of Gore, there is a limit to how hypocritical he could be. It is hard to imagine Gore supporting the open air burning of heretics, as humans are a carbon-based life form, and the auto-de-fé no doubt released a lot of CO2.

  Gore may not favor the public burning of heretics, but he is all in with the Inquisition’s mode of argument against heliocentrism. Cardinal Bellarmino, the Grand Inquisitor declared, “You will find all agreeing in the literal interpretation that the sun is in heaven and turns around the earth with great speed, and that the earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world.”15

  Gore is equally pleased to tell you that climate variation originates on Earth, not the Sun. You have no doubt heard his mantra, updated for verisimilitude, like the vote tallies in a North Korean election results: “97 percent of climate experts agree humans are causing global warming.”16 In strict logic, 97 percent of experts is a smaller majority than the 100 percent (“all”) experts Cardinal Bellarmino thought were in agreement with the geocentric consensus 400 years ago. You could say that Gore was slipping compared to the Inquisition, but given that science has progressed, and people today are at least ostensibly free to think for themselves, it is startling that manipulators like Gore have achieved the success they have in advancing an inherently implausible theory that anthropogenic global warming threatens a host of horrible consequences for the climate.

  If you listen to Gore, you might suppose that CO2 made up a big proportion of the total atmosphere and was put there recently by humans burning oil and coal to power a lavish modern standard of living. Wrong. CO2 comprises just 1/10,000th more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750 before the Industrial Revolution. It has always been unlikely that this tiny margin of increase in CO2 could have greater influence on Earth’s climate than the sun.

  About 186 billion tons of CO2 enter the atmosphere annually. Only about 6 billion tons of that amount, or 3.3 percent, is attributable to human activity apart from breathing. The breaths exhaled by humans and animals account for about 71 billion tons of CO2—more than ten times the CO2 attributable to the economic activity that Gore wants to squelch.

  There is nothing excessive or frightening about current atmospheric carbon levels. They have previously been twenty-five to one hundred times higher than now, with no evidence that this caused runaway greenhouse effects, nor any of the other horrifying hypotheticals that Gore and the remorseless liars at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the UN pretend to be so indignant about.

  Evidence that climate on earth is informed mainly by the Sun, rather than by humans releasing trivial amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere, is so compelling that even some leading ecologists have begun to defect from the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) camp. For example, Patrick Moore, the Canadian ecologist who cofounded Greenpeace, told the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on February 25, 2014, that the fact that there were higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were ten times higher than today contradicts the “certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming.”17

  People with their wits about them should be able to see that both elements of the global warming faith are misguided. First, in light of geological history, it is extremely unlikely that human-caused CO2 emissions could heat the planet to a cinder when an Ice Age occurred with CO2 concentrations ten times higher than today. Second, it is far from obvious that we should wish to make the planet colder if we could. Nor should the positive impact of higher atmospheric CO2 on plant productivity be ignored. As Matt Ridley points out, the fact that there are benefits of higher carbon dioxide emissions is not even controversial in scientific circles. Among other authorities, Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of mathematical physics and astrophysics at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, has declared that the nonclimatic effects of carbon dioxide are “enormously beneficial.”

  Unfortunately, that is an argument the world is unwilling to hear. In the coming months and years, I believe we will have an expensive and painful tutorial reminding us, as Professor Berry suggests, that each time period of declining temperatures seems to have coincided with the disintegrative phase of the Secular Cycle. This implies national bankruptcy amid a scramble for diminished supplies of food and energy resources like the world has never seen. Think of a game of musical chairs with death awaiting the losers. There will be a lot of losers. Current US Census Bureau forecasts project that the population of the earth will rise to 9.306 billion people by 2050. If Dr. Abdussamatov, John Casey, and others, including yours truly, are correct in projecting that another Little Ice Age will cool the planet for decades to come, you can be sure that the actual population of the earth in 2050 will fall well short of the Census Bureau estimate.

  Of course, there is more to be said about Secular Cycles and whether the disintegrative phase of crisis, depression, and collapse is likely to be played out in state breakdown in industrial societies as it was in the agrarian societies documented by Turchin and Nefedov. For his part, Jack Goldstone argues that the threat of collapse is still with us, as we repeat behavior patterns that have led to unwelcome consequences in the past.

  Stay tuned. How the Secular Cycle might play out under conditions of another Little Ice Age is a matter we explore further.

  Notes

  1 Mandelbrot, B. B., “Fractal Geometry: What Is It, and What Does It Do?,” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 423, no. 3–16 (1989), 4.

  2 Schumpter, Joseph A., Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical and Statistical Analysis of the Capitalist Process (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939).

  3 Olson, Mancur, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 170.

  4 http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/samcooke/wonderfulworld.html.

  5 Goldstone, Jack A., Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

  6 Dunning, Chester, “Does Jack Goldstone’s Model of Early Model State Crisis Apply to Russia?,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 3 (July 1997), 572.

  7 Turchin, Peter, and Sergey A. Nefedov, Secular Cycles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  8 Berry, Bryan J. L., Long-Wave Rhythms in Economic Development and Political Behavior (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).

  9 From the review of Secular Cycles by Bryan J. L. Berry, The American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 2(Se
ptember 2010), 708.

  10 Sinclair, Upton, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, repr. (University of California Press, 1994), 109.

  11 http://nymag.com/news/features/al-gore-2013-5/.

  12 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/6491195/Al-Gore-could-become-worlds-first-carbon-billionaire.html.

  13 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/al-gore-has-thrived-as-green-tech-investor/2012/10/10/1dfaa5b0-0b11-11e2-bd1a-b868e65d57eb_story.htmlprovides.

  14 See http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46901?msg=welcome_stranger.

  15 Cardinal Bellarmine’s letter to Paolo Antonio Foscarini, April 12, 1615, http://www.historyguide.org/earlymod/foscarini.html.

  16 http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/#3045dd467187.

  17 http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/02/25/greenpeace-co-founder-tells-u-s-senate-earths-geologic-history-fundamentally-contradicts-co2-climate-fears-we-had-both-higher-temps-and-an-ice-age-at-a-time-when-co2-emissions-were-10-times/.

  Chapter Ten

  Ecofascism and the Natural Causes of Climate Disruptions

  The “End of History” Becomes a Dead End

  One of the tantalizing themes of the last quarter of the twentieth century was the notion that history had come to an end, and the combination of capitalism and liberal democracy would allow people everywhere to enjoy the material prosperity characteristic of the American middle class. But there was a problem with this vision. The biophysical limits to resources implied dramatic increases in the prices of crucial inputs, particularly petroleum, in order for the whole world to live like the American middle class.

  Of course, it turned out that a good part of the surge in natural resource prices experienced in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century was attributable to history’s greatest artificial credit bubble in China, rather than demand from the growth of broad-based consumption among the new emerging market middle class. In any event, commodity prices surged, underscoring the natural limits to growth.

  Peter J. Taylor shrewdly noted in The Way the Modern World Works: World Hegemony to World Impasse that the invention of “ecocatastrophe” can be understood as a way for the rich to maintain their dominant status in society.1 He described the selfish interest of those wishing to reserve the good life for themselves as requiring a justification that would be seen as a logical, sensible reaction to a world in crisis.

  Hence the invention of the global warming hoax. It may be bad science, riddled with obvious shortcomings, but it offered a path forward for those among the rich and powerful who want to “conserve their acquired capital while denying capital accumulation to others.”

  The far-fetched proposition that driving your automobile threatens to destroy the planet provides a rationalization for retracting the promise of American-style middle-class prosperity for billions of people in emerging economies. There are still “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but not only has the Statue of Liberty’s welcome mat been retracted; Gore and the other climate bullies now say the huddled masses can’t be allowed to drive. Anywhere. All their billions of little cars would get in the way of the limousine traffic and pump up CO2 levels.

  What is more, global warming alarmism threatens to retract the promise of American middle-class prosperity for most of the American middle class. By mandating the use of costly low-density alternative energies, Gore and the global warming vigilantes could achieve a no-growth economy through the back door, pricing the bottom 90 percent of the American income distribution out of access to the good life.

  This amounts to what Taylor describes as “ecofascism.” It is a policy that augurs ill for independent capital accumulation, but it perfectly suits Al Gore’s world of crony capitalism. It also seems set to trigger a big reduction in consumption, not to mention famine, on a large scale.

  Don’t make the mistake of supposing that the global warming hoax is an innocent misunderstanding, merely a matter of misprogrammed computer models or a failed excursion into the thin air of theoretical physics. It is really a matter of life and death. While we have been living longer, adding an average of three months to life expectancy every year in Western countries, the agenda of ecofascism is not survival for all. To the contrary, it means death to the many with the promise of a comfortable survival for the few—Al Gore and his privileged pals.

  Taylor foresees the ecofascist world system as involving two zones: a rich zone in which capital accumulation will cease, conserving the good life, and a poor zone in which capital accumulation will be prevented through coercion. Add the end of an interstate system to this lack of capital accumulation and capitalism will be replaced by a “postmodern global apartheid,” or “neo-fascist world system” ostensibly dedicated to saving the Earth.

  Al Gore and his fellow prophets of ecofascism were shrewd enough to recognize that a simple no-growth economy would not enable them to long board the benefits of a modern standard of living. Why? Because in the modern economy, more than 99 percent of all activity is powered by exogenous energy and only 0.7 percent is powered by somatic energy, or muscle power. This means that the no-growth modern economy could not be the stationary state, as described by Adam Smith. Not for long. To the contrary, it should be thought of as a hovercraft. Without fuel, it would crash and burn. That is why the ecofascist project requires the cartelization of hydrocarbon energy. The ruling elite requires the preservation of a sufficient energy reserve to fuel a high standard of living for itself—but no one else.

  Of course, the Earth really doesn’t need saving, especially from CO2. The long paleoclimatic record correlating CO2 to temperature shows that high amounts of atmospheric CO2 are transient phenomena. Contrary to Gore and company, there is no tendency for runaway CO2 concentrations to increase and cause detrimental climate change. Far from it. Past increases in CO2 emissions due to volcanic eruptions dwarf those now attributable to human activity. Notwithstanding claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that high atmospheric CO2 persists, carbon dioxide is naturally recycled by the Earth. In fact, concentrations of atmospheric CO2 have decreased dramatically over the past 545 million years as the Earth has efficiently sequestered CO2, mainly by growing forests.

  Remember that there is compelling evidence showing that CO2 is not a pollutant but an important life-giving atmospheric component, as any greenhouse operator can confirm. CO2 is an important contributor to the organic capture of solar energy through photosynthesis. That is why an efficient greenhouse operation will triple ambient CO2 of about 400 parts per million (ppm) to 1,300 ppm during the day by pumping in extra CO2. They would not do that if CO2 were really a pollutant.

  One of the recurrent features of episodes of deep cold that increase glaciation is that they result in a reduction in CO2. It can drop below 200 ppm, perilously close to the 150 ppm level where plants can no longer grow. During the Little Ice Age, glaciation began to expand after 1550, following ninety years of the Spörer Minimum. During the colder Maunder Minimum, glaciation increased again—alpine glaciers extended over valley farmland, and Arctic sea ice extended farther to the south.

  Indisputable Natural Solar Cycles

  As a matter of logic, there is a glaring deficiency to the theory of anthropogenic global warming: it disregards a well-documented historical record showing that climate on Earth has repeatedly warmed and cooled for centuries and millennia before humans built industrial factories or drove automobiles. For example, anthropogenic global warming could not have caused the Roman Warm Period.

  For more details on the history of climate, review the Blytt-Sernander sequence, a series of climate phases identified from the study of peat bogs in Northern Europe. These divisions, defined by radiocarbon dating, show that the warmest phase of the current Holocene interglacial period, the Atlantic, happened long ago, occurring between five thousand and eight thousand years after the end of the last ice age. Obviously, if the warmest period in histor
y was thousands of years ago, long before the Industrial Revolution, that ancient episode of global warming must have been driven by something other than human emissions of greenhouse gases like CO2.

  It was.

  Like all current and past phases of climate on Earth, it was driven by natural variations in the emission and absorption of radiation from the Sun. This, in turn, raises an obvious question: What determines variations in solar irradiance? They could be almost totally random, though this is unlikely because proxy records and historical evidence strongly establish a quasi-bicentennial cycle of colder climate. Alternatively, climate cycles could be driven by imponderable fluctuations in the solar dynamo. But it is also possible that the cycles in solar output may be predictable.

  Planetary Alignments and Climate Variability

  The late Dr. Theodor Landscheide, of the Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, linked climate variability to planetary alignments, in a way that has nothing to do with astrology. This led him to predict a “New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming.”2 In 1989, Landscheide foresaw a sunspot minimum whose timing he correlated to “an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the Sun’s oscillatory motion about the center of mass of the Solar System.” Stating that the future course of this cycle could be computed, he expected that a severe cooling of the Earth, similar to the Maunder Minimum type, was inevitable at around 2030 and again around 2200. Landscheide was a pioneer. His quest to identify cycles of solar activity has been taken up and sophisticated since his death.