(LifeSiteNews) – As climate-alarmist “experts” continue to insist that carbon emissions have set the planet Earth on a course for environmental destruction, dissident scientists are disputing the premise that higher carbon dioxide levels are anything to worry about at all.
Last fall, Oxford University Press published a representative sample of alarmist “scholarship,” which argued that humanity’s “time is up” for preventing a “future marked by extreme climatic conditions because of escalating global temperatures caused by ongoing human activities that release harmful greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere,” and that the world is now “entering an unfamiliar domain regarding our climate crisis, a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity,” and the only way to mitigate the disaster is to aggressively phase out traditional energy sources such as fossil fuels and coal.
But the Epoch Times reports that such dire warnings are contradicted by some counter-intuitive authorities, including a co-founder of the longtime environmental group Greenpeace.
Patrick Moore, who is now chairman and chief scientist of the group Ecosense Environmental, says there is “actually no scientific evidence that CO2 is responsible for climate change over the eons,” and the campaign to convince people otherwise is a “total scam.” He noted that the modern day’s CO2 levels are “historically low” compared to those 150 million years ago, long before humanity, let alone the internal combustion engine.
“They’re saying all the tornadoes, all the hurricanes, all the floods, and all the heat waves are all caused by CO2. That is a lie,” Moore explained. “We don’t need CO2. For us, it’s a waste product—we need oxygen. But plants are the ones who made the oxygen for us, and we’re making the CO2 back for them.” In fact, he argued, burning fossil fuels “replenish[es] the atmosphere with CO2 up to a level that is much more conducive to life and growth of plants, in particular.”
John Christy, director of The University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center, adds that, contrary to alarmists’ warnings, climate-related fatalities have actually dropped significantly over the past century, from a global average of 484,880 in 1925 to just 14,893 in 2020. “CO2 cannot be the cause of something not occurring,” he said simply.
“CO2 has been unfairly demonized because it is actually plant food in its atmospheric form, and it is the consequence of generating carbon-based energy, which unquestionably improves lives around the world,” Christy added, and that CO2 is better thought of as the “currency of life.”
“It is ironic that the very same carbon emissions responsible for harmful changes to climate are also fertilizing plant growth, which in turn is somewhat moderating global warming,” pointed out Jarle Bjerke of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, co-author of a 2018 NASA report on the continuation of the trend “that the world is greener than it was in the early 1980s,” one of numerous pieces of evidence to that effect.
Activists have long claimed there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – the view that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate – but that number comes from a distortion of an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.
AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, East Anglia Climate Research Unit, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings.