Climate alarmism is an all too typical scientific scam replete with failure to follow the scientific method and many of the common illogical fallacies going back to Aristotle. The difference is that its proponents have had almost infinite resources to sell their scam, especially taking into account the “free” media support supplied by the mainstream media. But scam it nevertheless is since the scammers are benefitting from their efforts.

The consequences of successfully selling the scam in the US, as has occurred in Western Europe, are so large that the US economy would probably never recover its former growth and resilience. There will always be more decarbonization that can be “achieved.” Household income would grow little if any. Workers would be condemned to current real income or less for the indefinite future. Electricity would become increasingly unreliable and expensive, as in South Australia. And without substantial economic growth real estate values and pension liabilities would become even more unsupportable than they already are.

We can now say that all these sacrifices in convenience and economic welfare would have no significant effects on the weather or climate. The scammers claim that continued human-caused carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions will result in a wide variety of adverse outcomes if the US does not meet their demands. Storms will be more destructive. Sea level will rise more rapidly. Global temperatures will rise catastrophically. But all this can be avoided if only humans will cause much less CO 2 to be emitted into the atmosphere. They claim that such reductions are inexpensive and will cause few complications or inconveniences on the one hand but that human-caused CO 2 emissions must be prevented on the other. To date none of these alleged effects have occurred. A more accurate analysis would show just the opposite. CO 2 is a necessity of life itself since it makes possible green plants, the basis for animal life on Earth, and improves plant growth at current atmospheric levels

The Necessity to Keep the Scam Going

One of the main requirements of such scams is that the scammers keep it going. Any major slip-up or failure to take precautionary action can result in disaster for the scam. This is apparently what happened a few weeks ago when some prominent alarmist modelers decided to scale back their temperature forecasts, probably because the forecasts were continuing to be much higher than actual temperatures. They accomplished this by means of an article in a prestigious journal that the public very rarely reads. John Christy and other climate skeptics have been emphasizing this disparity for some time, and the climate alarmists may have decided that retreat was needed before more damage was done to their cause.

The main justifications offered for climate alarmism are expensive general circulation models, which cost taxpayers many billions of dollars but prove nothing except that garbage in results in garbage out. Even the United Nations, which is responsible for developing the scientific justification for the scam, has stated that climate cannot be usefully modeled. Instead what is needed is an entirely different approach so far used by only a few researchers that does not attempt to build models of coupled, non-linear chaotic systems such as climate. This appears possible based on available research but has never been undertaken by the climate alarmists, perhaps because they know what the conclusions would be.

The scammers have never offered any valid scientific evidence that any reductions are needed or that there would be any benefits at all. There is significant evidence that their ultimate goal of zero human-caused CO 2 emissions cannot be achieved no matter how much is spent and at the cost of reducing other needed expenditures that would actually benefit humans and their environment. In other words it is a worthless scam that only benefits a few at great cost to the many. It helps sell newspapers and television news. It allows politicians to claim they are environmentalists. One of my professors, Richard Feynman, would have called it cargo cult science. And he would have been correct.