From the Fraser Insitute

By Kenneth P. Green

Contrary to claims by many climate activists and politicians, extreme weather events—including forest fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes—are not increasing in frequency or intensity, finds a new study published today by the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan Canadian public policy think-tank.

“Earth Day has become a time when extraordinary claims are made about extreme weather events, but before policymakers act on those extreme claims—often with harmful regulations—it’s important to study the actual evidence,” said Kenneth Green, a senior fellow with the Fraser Institute and author of Extreme Weather and Climate Change.

The study finds that global temperatures have increased moderately since 1950 but there is no evidence that extreme weather events are on the rise, including:

• Drought: Data from the World Meteorological Organization Standardized Precipitation Index showed no statistically significant trends in drought duration or magnitude—with the exception of some small regions in Africa and South America—from 1900 to 2020.

• Flooding: Research in the Journal of Hydrology in 2017, analyzing 9,213 recording stations around the world, found there were more stations exhibiting significant decreasing trends (in flood risk) than increasing trends.

• Hurricanes: Research conducted for the World Meteorological Organization in 2019 (updated in 2023) found no long-term trends in hurricanes or major hurricanes recorded globally going back to 1980.

• Forest Fires: The Royal Society in London, in 2020, found that when considering the total area burned at the global level, there is no overall increase, but rather a decline over the last decades. In Canada, data from Canada’s Wildland Fire Information System show that the number of fires and the area burned in Canada have both been declining over the past 30 years.

“The evidence is clear—many of the claims that extreme weather events are increasing are simply not empirically true,” Green said.

“Before governments impose new regulations or enact new programs, they need to study the actual data and base their actions on facts, not unsubstantiated claims.”

Author:

Kenneth P. Green

Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute

The Fraser Institute is an independent Canadian public policy research and educational
organization with offices in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal and ties to a global
network of think-tanks in 87 countries. Its mission is to improve the quality of life for Canadians,
their families and future generations by studying, measuring and broadly communicating the
effects of government policies, entrepreneurship and choice on their well-being. To protect the
Institute’s independence, it does not accept grants from governments or contracts for research.
Visit www.fraserinstitute.org

From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Martin Durkin’s new film ‘Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth)’ shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping their alarmist narrative alive – despite the facts.

Martin Durkin’s new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) opens a hot topic with some very spicy takes.

“This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry” – so says Durkin’s voice-over, following a reprise of Greta Thunberg’s infamous “How dare you!” speech. The imagery of those deathly pale women in their blood-red costumes cat-walking doom for the cameras fades into whirling wind farms, followed by some striking claims.

One, from the co-founder of Greenpeace, sets the tone: “There’s no such thing as a climate emergency on this planet.”

Climate scam: Global control?

The film directly challenges the claim that CO2 levels from human activity are causing runaway climate change and shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping this narrative alive – despite the facts. Professor Steven Koonin of NYU asks on behalf of the climate science industry: “If CO2 is not having this impact – how are we going to stay in business?”

Precisely what that business is, and how it is maintained, is also the subject of a film whose central premise is that the world is in fact entering a period of cooling. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of environmental campaign group Greenpeace, says the presence of the polar ice caps shows that “this is an ice age. We’re at the tail end of a 50-million-year cooling period, and they’re saying it’s too hot.”

READ: Texas pulls $8.5 billion from BlackRock over DEI rules, left-wing climate agenda

It is an opinion shared by noted scientists featured in the film, such as Professor Koonin.

This is an inconvenient truth, Durkin argues, which explains the rising alarmism from the green lobby.

“The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax” – so says William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton. “I think ‘scam’ is a better word – but I am willing to live with ‘hoax.’”

So why is it being pursued? According to Happer, “it’s a wonderful way to increase government power. If there’s an existential threat out there that’s worldwide. Well, you need a powerful worldwide government.”

Alongside other claims in the film that “activists are calling for the criminalization of climate skepticism,” Happer observes that “we see all these kinds of authoritarian measures being adopted, in the name of saving the planet. You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world.”

Yet power is not the only motive – there is also profit – for some. Professor John Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, warns of how “there are not only billions but trillions of dollars at stake.”

Fear, power, and profit

Durkin is no stranger to climate controversy, with his 2007 film The Great Global Warming Swindle being praised in the British Parliament for showing how “anyone not agreeing with the orthodoxy of how climate change levy comes about sees their public funding drying up.”

The motion, supported by seven Conservative MPs, also noted “that one of the contributors [to the film] received a death threat.”

The climate of fear looks set to intensify, with Durkin’s new film showing how the science we are told to follow is made by an inhuman agenda of mandated poverty, food shortages, and depopulation – as this 2023 piece from Spiked makes clear.

READ: Trudeau gov’t paid WEF nearly $500k for report justifying its climate agenda, documents show

Man-made climate of opinion

Yet the tide outside the climate skeptical movement may also be turning.

Durkin gave a pre-release interview on March 14 to the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He told the hosts that the climate science we are told to follow is another example of a locked-down discourse presented as a debate.

“We have such an enormously powerful, publicly funded establishment that is able to control, directly or indirectly, what we hear, what we read, what we’re taught, what is okay to think, and what’s not okay to think,” he said.

The exclusion of dissent has manufactured the scientific “consensus” for the climate agenda.

“The frustrating thing for scientists in this area is you’re not really allowed to point to scientific data or observations published in mainstream journals carried out by scientists from very respected universities and so on, even cited by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body] … if it doesn’t fit the narrative,” Durkin said.

“And the pressure on them to shut up is extreme.”

This is the man-made climate of opinion in which fear has become the latest currency of choice.

Within days of the release of the film, German physicist and science vlogger Sabine Hossenfelder asked her YouTube audience whether “we should be terrified of climate change.” Her answer?

“I am indeed terrified, terrified that scientists support manipulating people.”

She cites several recent sources in mainstream and academic media which advocate “evoking fear” to “spur climate action.”

Instead of fearmongering, she suggests we might best look at what can reasonably done to help preserve natural habitats for wild animals. This seems a reasonable position, and she cites a lack of clarity arising from climate modeling which may conflate natural fluctuations in climate with man-made changes.

Fact-checked

The film is intended to reveal that man-made climate change is a fraudulent operation which can only succeed by censorship and propaganda. It claims this vastly profitable industry – which one Swiss bank estimates will require $270 trillion to realist its goals – reduces to a campaign to enforce global authoritarian control by manufacturing an emergency that is not supported by the evidence.

These are bold claims, and we have heard them before. In this case, however, we can check the record for ourselves with ease.

One climate skeptic has taken the trouble to produce a detailed fact-check of the claims made in the film.

Describing his efforts as an “annotated bibliography.” retired petrophysicist Andy May has supplied information supporting “70 key statements” made in the movie, ranging from natural climate variation through unreliable models to data manipulation – and the existence of a multi-trillion dollar climate lobby which ensures that “skepticism is career suicide.”

May has published four books – most recently The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, which “documents biases and errors in the International Panel for Climate Change assessment.”

May’s book challenges the fearmongering such as that of the UN head Antonio Guterres that “we are on the road to climate hell,” saying instead that the IPCC “seeks to rewrite climate history” to frame a narrative of doom unsupported by the facts.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change,” says the summary for his book, available via May’s website. 

Fact-checker responds

May had this to say about the film whose facts he checked: “From the very beginning of this very well edited and produced movie we learn about the man-made climate change hoax or scam.”

He argues that this agenda is secured by the familiar tactic of demonizing and deplatforming skeptics.

“We learn that anyone skeptical that humans are causing dangerous climate change are to be shunned, or censored, or worse!” he says.

Finally, he shows the method in this madness. The alarmism is all about control.

“We also discover the ugly truth that all this government insistence that we are about to die due to global climate change is not true, and is all about money and power,” he explains. “The logic is that if it is truly a global problem, then it requires a global government, and all nations must submit to global domination by those who know what is good for us.”

Criminalizing dissent?

In one note, not included in the film, May cites evidence of “the U.S. Senate attempting to legislate scientific research outcomes,” saying “it doesn’t get worse than this.”

He directs readers to page 202 of a 2021 book by S.E. Koonin, which documents the attempt led by Senator Chuck Schumer in 2019 to pass bill S.729, which aimed “to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”

As May notes, “Fortunately, the bill failed to pass, but the political pressure to find humans caused recent climate changes is overwhelming.”

This is an agenda which holds much of government, media, business, and even the scientific community captive. With trillions of dollars and the lives and liberty of humanity at stake, it is a welcome development that Durkin’s film, and the facts behind it, are now reaching a global audience.

You can see Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) here for free.