Climate Change and the Backson

How bad ideas produce horrific results

In the world of Winnie the Pooh, this is a Backson:

The Backson doesn’t exist. It’s a figment of Owl’s imagination. This may be the most important video on climate change you will ever see, please watch:

The story of the Backson is identical to the story of climate change. As Don Corleone says in The Godfather, “How did it get so far?” How did we go from this:

In case you can’t read it, Walter Sullivan of the New York Times reported in 1978:

An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

To this, ten years later:

Part of the answer is a guy named Maurice Strong. Here he is in 1972. You don’t have to listen to all of it, but try a few minutes. He has convinced himself, and he manages to convince others, that a bogeyman called CO2 is on the loose, ravaging the earth, causing all kinds of mayhem. Note the parallels with Owl from the Backson video:

The UNFCCC

Before Al Gore, before James Hansen, before Klaus Schwab, there was Maurice Strong. Maurice got the money moving from rich countries to poor countries, and he wasn’t ashamed to create a “climate crisis” to do it.

Maurice was the founding Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which begat the UN FCCC — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the UN body that oversees the IPCC. This is the first sentence of their charter, from 1992:

The UNFCCC secretariat (UN Climate Change) is the United Nations entity tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change.

The UNFCCC was not created to explore or understand the science of how earth’s climate works. It was created to hunt Backsons. It is now a $2 trillion industry.

Maurice Strong wrote:

What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?… In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?

Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class…involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, ownership of motor vehicles, golf courses, small electric appliances, home and work place air-conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable…

The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.

Either we reduce the world’s population voluntarily or nature will do this for us, but brutally.

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.

I am convinced the prophets of doom have to be taken seriously.

Strengthening the role the United Nations can play…will require serious examination of the need to extend into the international arena the rule of law and the principle of taxation to finance agreed actions which provide the basis for governance at the national level. But this will not come about easily. Resistance to such changes is deeply entrenched.

Now, perhaps, you can start to understand why Jordan Peterson and I are against the global elite telling everyone what to do.

In the face of conflicting evidence, what do you do?

I recently tweeted:

Here’s the problem: we can’t talk about #energy without talking about CO2 “emissions” and #climate. This is the equivalent of saying we can’t talk about space travel without talking about ice cream and wagon wheels.

In 1991, I wrote a book on climate change, saying CO2 was going to destroy the earth and society. In 2015, I started digging deeper. After a year of research, I realized I had been duped by people trying to hide the evidence against their political agenda. The PR campaign of the last 40 years has produced a “consensus” among the public that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is having an effect on the climate, even if thermometers don’t show any actual warming.

In the face of conflicting evidence, I had to change my view. Unfortunately, until his death earlier this year, Strong never questioned the scientific integrity or the legitimacy of his quest. He just kept soldiering on, in the face of evidence that continued to falsify his views.

Robert Greene has a message for people who are certain that what they know is true.