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This past weekend I wrote two posts about a recent two-part German ZDF Television documentary on climate change and its impact on the development of human history: here and here.

Image Mark Maslin, cropped from ZDF

At the very end of Part 2, the otherwise excellent German public television documentary abruptly descends into sheer lunacy in claiming that the globe has “strongly heated up” recently and that it is now wresting with “global warming” – and to drive the point home, it inserts an amazing comment by University College London Climatology Professor Mark Maslin at the 42:27 mark (translated from the German voice-over):

We are now at the point where we can decide how the climate of the future will look. When we as a collective world community, all nations working together, are able to really prevent global warming, that would be fantastic. That would be the first time that the climate doesn’t control us, but rather us controlling it. We could make sure that all future generations will have a stable climate.”

Maslin clearly suggests humans collectively have the power to override the global natural climate factors and to tame and steer the world’s climate in any desired direction, and to do so for “all future generations”.

Throughout previous 88 minutes the documentary looked at earlier climate changes that were greater than those experienced today and attributed them to natural factors such as solar activity, volcanoes and ocean dynamics. These natural climate change events included the “very rapid changes in climate” during the last ice age, the end of the last ice age, the 8.2 kiloyear event, the green Sahara, ancient Egyptian warm period, the Roman warm period, and the Little Ice Age.

Strangely, according to the documentary, the sun as a climate driver in the past seem to have just disappeared since 1250 AD. Now we are supposed to believe that humans took control of the climate some 100 years ago.

Physicist: “blatant silliness”

Luxemburg physicist Francis Massen also reacts sharply to Maslin’s bold claim at his website:

This is blatant silliness, probably forced upon the professor to include at least a sentence seen to be politically correct and Zeitgeist aware. This last conclusion is the more silly, as all previous examples clearly have shown that the changes of the climate were not caused by human activity. And today, never mind our technological achievements, we are still unable to change the tilt of the axis of the globe, modify solar activity or put a lid on volcanoes to avoid their eruptions.”

Indeed. In fact governments aren’t even able to control their runaway spending and deficits, let alone the world’s temperature and climate.