Climate Panic: Cui Bono?

Who profits

Cui bono is a Latin phrase that means “who benefits?”, and is used to suggest that there’s a high probability that those responsible for a certain event are the ones who stand to gain from it. For example, if a certain crime has been committed, ‘cui bono’ suggests that the person who committed that crime is likely someone who benefited from it. (Source)

The “Cui bono” approach goes back to Marcus Tullius Cicero, a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, writer and Academic sceptic who lived in Rome more than 2,000 years ago.

Was he onto something? You decide:

There is a difference between caring for our planet and climate panic. Most rational people favour reducing pollution and waste and finding a better balance between unchecked consumerism and sustainability on the planet. 8.5 Billion people create a lot of waste and use a lot of energy.

This is not new. This has been going on for decades, especially in the richer nations. Nations moved to cleaner energy and created stricter laws to protect the environment. This graph shows Australia:

But it wasn’t going fast enough for some people. The “Greta Thurnberg Movement” culminated in her dramatic UN speech in 2019. I trim it down to the essentials below:

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood […]

What a dramatic opening. She was 16 at the time. How did the UN steal her dreams and childhood exactly? She lived in one of the richest, greenest and cleanest countries in the world (Sweden): a privileged nation, a privileged child.

This movement doesn’t originate from a personal experience of extreme pollution. It is 100% intellectual and political.

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

I am no expert in climate science, but I can say that the science is not crystal clear at all. Common sense tells me so. Science is never settled. Climate is a complex problem with many cause-and-effect relationships that must be debated. This debate is not happening. Anyone critical is cancelled as a “climate change denier.”

This The Guardian article is a great example of climate panic propaganda. It belittles environmental expert Michael Schellenberger despite just having published a best-selling book. Despite Schellenberger being named “a hero of the environment by Time magazine in 2008”. This is not an Exxon executive. This is not a shifty politician changing with the wind. This man always cared deeply about the environment. Definitely longer than Greta.

But he had the audacity to have an opinion diverging from the script and wanted to debate the topic. I repeat: I don’t know much about climate. I don’t even know what Schellenberger has to say about the topic. I can’t be an expert in everything.

That’s why it is so important to me, that the process is proper. Let the best minds debate it out and present their evidence, and have wise leaders conclude what works best for most people and incorporate all aspects of life. I know; I ask for way too much.

Instead, the article states:

And this is why all those who deny the reality or danger of the climate emergency should be ignored.

That attitude makes me totally mistrust and disbelieve that we have a “climate emergency”.

But Greta knows:

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years […]

You nailed it, Greta: “The popular idea”. That’s all it is: A popular idea. I don’t know how this idea became so “popular”. Was it because a robust, independent, uncorrupted debate came to that conclusion? Was it because of “computer modelling”? Or was it because some greedy masterminds saw an “opportunity” and used poor Great and the stupid panic-prone people of the world?

Ah ja - ze modelling.

All the life-changing and damaging COVID policies were initially based on modelling. The Covid panic was created mostly through modelling.

The article above was published only a year after the first modelling in April 2021 and expertly points out how exaggerated and wrong they were.

And yet, most of the Covid measures were based on it. And even after it was obvious that they were false, the massive Covid interventions continued. I guess the gravy train was steaming ahead, dishing out trillions, and it was an inconvenient time to stop.

That’s another reason why I simply can’t get into the climate panic mode. I try, I consider it, but it just doesn’t add up and reeks of propaganda and manipulation.

But Greta knows:

[…] only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5°C, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

I hope she studies drama after school. She is really talented. If you haven’t seen it, it is worth watching simply for her dramatic performance

I do not know if the world's climate really has a built-in trigger switch at plus 1.5 degrees that jolt it into “irreversible chain reactions”. How could I know? There is no independent, uncorrupted debate that I can follow. Either I believe it and panic accordingly, or I am a “climate denier”.

Therefore, as with Covid, I trust my instinct and common sense and have my eyes on the ground in the here and now. And what do I see around me? The climate and weather look “business as usual” where I am.

By “business as usual”, I mean the most intense wildfires in living memory in 2019/20 in NSW; it was massive, with forests burning all around me for a long time. But this wasn’t due to any climate change. The Australian climate has produced massive wildfires since living memory going back 50,000 years or more. The Aboriginal people reported it. That’s just how the climate works here.

Sadly, we lost 26 people due to the fires in two years.

One-in-a-generation floods followed in my home area in 2022. Forty-three thousand people were forced from their homes. Five people died, tragically. Old people and archived news confirmed that it was almost as big as in the 1950ties. And another big one early that century.

In a combined period of three years, we lost about 30 people to two of the biggest natural disasters in NSW history. During the same period, about 800 people died in car accidents in NSW. Where is “traffic panic”? (Not that I want one)

These climate events are made look very dramatic and horrible in the global news and peddled as proof of global “boiling”, and people believe it. The reality for probably more than 95% of the population here was: “Life goes on”, “We have been here before and will be again”, and “that’s just how it is”.

Of course, that stuff looks so scary if you are a young city dweller. But I really struggle to panic over this.

“But 1.5 Degrees more and it will be “irreversible”; the climate will go crazy, and we are doomed”, Greta panics.

Once again, I don’t know how they came up with that number, but the fact is, that no one really knows what actually will be happening if - and that is a big if - we reach it. We have never been there before in modern scientific times.

Records of temperature only go back for about 170 years. This is less than a blink in the history of the planet.

The above graph shows these 170 years. The y-axis shows “Global Temperature Anomaly”, so Zero is defined as normal. While the temperatures have been 0.8 under normal, they only went above normal in 2000 and are currently 0.4 above normal. I try very hard - but I just can’t get scared. It looks totally normal to me that temperatures fluctuate in a certain bandwidth over time. But who am I? I don’t have Greta’s qualifications.

But what I do know for a fact is that everything in life moves. Nothing stands still. Some things move really slowly - like the Teutonic plates and some things move relatively fast, like the tides.

And, if we observe long enough, most events behave in a cyclic way. That’s why the earth is still livable and didn’t go off “irreversible” in one direction. It had plenty of time to do so. But it is kept in balance by many opposing forces. Somehow I trust this more than Greta and the “latest” science she regurgiates.

On top of that, graphs are very deceptive. Below is a real data graph from the ASX Stock exchange

This graph seems to demonstrate an increase. It is the one-day trading graph. It looks similar to the temperature graph above. Conclusion: Temperature is rising. Get ready to panic—irreversible damage is coming.

This is the same graph but for the past five years. That little upward kink at the very end is our one-day graph from above. It is still rising, of course, but is it still irreversible damage when we look at the bigger picture? Five years are 1820 days. I expanded the time scale by a factor of 1820.

When I expand the 170 years of temperature measurements by the same factor of 1820, the result is 309,400 years. So that 170-year temperature graph is just a tiny little blip as well, signifying not much at all.

Our ancestors have been around for about 6 million years, and the temperatures fluctuated hugely in that time period. We don’t know what exactly happened, but we do know that at least some of them (together with millions of other mammals) must have survived past global boiling and rising sea levels because we are still here, aren’t we?

This science article reports that about 125,000 years ago, the planet was at a similar temperature as now, and the oceans were six to nine meters higher than now. They actually use this to predict how much the oceans will rise again if it gets warmer. So, it is out of the question that these last 170 years “blink-of-an-eye-in-human-history” temperature graph above means nothing. And yet, it is one of the main pieces of evidence used. Apart from Greta, of course.

This also puts a big hole in the claim that this current small temperature rise is man-made. No human interventions affected the climate 125,000 years ago, and it still got hot. This tells us that there are natural big forces - be it the sun, comets, volcanoes, or whales farting excessively - that caused major changes in temperatures on the globe.

So we might do all these measures, costing trillions of dollars, and the temperature still rises. Reminds me, once again, of Covid. All these measures and Covid is still around everywhere after three years. Past pandemics without human interventions lasted one to two years at the most.

But what about the oceans rising?

Well, what about it? If they rise, we deal with it like we always did. It's not so different to bushfires and floods. It isn’t like a sudden tsunami floods us. Conservative, very likely exaggerated “modelling” predicts a foot rise by 2050. If you believe that and are scared of it, don’t live near the coast then. If it happens, we will adjust accordingly, like we always did.

Scientists have too much money and too much time. They are paid to constantly imagine scenarios and then select their data to fit their imagination. For millennia, humans adjusted to the climate. Now, they demand that we adjust the climate. Do you want to stop the oceans from rising? Good luck with that.

All this climate panic makes no sense. Therefore, we have to ask: Cui bono? Who profits?

Even the pro-climate change scientists admit that the temperatures always fluctuated. Therefore, there is no problem. That’s just how the climate works. But a few actors make it a big problem.

And when there is a perceived problem, people look for solutions. And those who sell the solutions profit greatly.

ABC News posted this today:

Big power suppliers in Australia are not happy. Australians have put so many solar panels on their private homes that on a sunny day, more power is available than needed. Bizarre, isn’t it? We have been encouraged to invest in green private solar for two decades, and now this is suddenly a bad thing.

What happens is that the commercial power plants, whether green or not, have to stay online the whole day because they are needed in the evening. Duh? And none of you clever scientists saw that coming? Of course, you did, but you never said so because it was part of the plan to make people buy storage now.

The power price goes by demand. Apparently, it goes negative for them during the day. It means that they have the costs to keep the plant running all day but can’t sell any energy anymore during the day. Isn’t that what the “climate deniers” were saying all along? If you push too much solar - what will you do in bad weather and at night?

So, despite having all this free power, the coal and gas-fired CO2-emitting plants can’t be turned off. They still have to be kept and run at a loss now, and the operators want money from someone to provide evening and night power. Guess, who that will be?

Interestingly, despite having solar, my power bill doubled in the past two years.

The solution: Buy power storage - everyone.

Cui bono?

Tesla is the biggest producer of power storage in the world. Clever Elon. Most would say - he saw it all coming. And - right on cue - the ABC article casually slides this photo into the article:

More storage and demand in the day is needed to soak up excess solar output.(Telsa Motors: Timothy Artman)

More sceptic people would say - he created it all. I don’t know if he did, but according to the Cui bono principle, it is the first place to look.

Solar is just one part of the new climate panic industry. Electric cars are another one.

Dire distress about climate change and CO2 emissions seems to have been in the air for decades, yet the idea of banning the sale of fossil fuel-consuming still sounds radical to the point of being unimaginable.

And yet, today, no fewer than 51 countries around the world have announced plans to implement a ban on the sale of new gas guzzlers, with various dates for those rules kicking in (the earliest, just a few years away now, is 2025, which is when Norway will bid farewell to internal combustion, at least in new-car sales). (Source)

Electric cars are more expensive.

And the choice will be less and less yours. There are currently over 1.4 billion cars on the planet. The vast majority will be combustion engines. They are force-replaced over the next decades. And we pay for it.

Cui bono?

So, we get nudged to install solar panels with our money. And yet, power prices go up because of big-scale investments in solar and wind farms. Now, we are nudged to buy storage. Then we are more than nudged to buy electric cars.

All this is made urgent and fast-paced. Apparently, there is no time. We have to act now. The planet can’t wait - the damage will be irreversible.

All this creates a sudden spike in demand. Remember the demand for vaccines and the billions we paid for them? A spike in demand means higher prices. Once again, trillions upon trillions will be up-transferred from the taxpayers to the billionaires.

All this is based on one assumption: CO2 emissions are solely responsible for an (apparent) rise in temperature, and we have to act now.

I am all for the gradual, sustainable move to more energy diversity and electric cars, as it has already happened for decades. Nothing wrong with that.

However, the artificially created climate panic has nothing to do with saving the planet. It has all to do with making the rich richer - quicker and quicker. And our elected MPs are either ideologically naive idiots or corrupt - or both.