Who is Afraid of CO2?

On the Rationale behind the Fear and Loathing of Carbon Dioxide

Last September, the world became witness to contemporary ideology in a nutshell. It was delivered by a 5-minute clip produced by Apple, the company responsible for the device you currently read this essay on. You have probably seen it, so I won’t go into details.[1] The whole tongue-in-cheek appeal – “look, Tim Cook might come across as an android, but he’s got a pretty funny bone!” - got lost on me, however, when one employee elder, to impress Mother Nature, announced that Apple’s aim was to “permanently eliminate carbon from the atmosphere.”

Sorry, what? For dramatic effect, Octavia Spencer’s Mother Nature stared back briefly at this grotesque announcement, only to condone it. Nobody in the room laughed or even smiled.

Let me translate this for the inexperienced consumer of propaganda: it’s all quite jovial until it isn’t. There is a moment in every piece of propaganda since the Kaiserreich in which you are no longer accepted as impartial viewer. That something so radical happens that you cannot help but be wielded into the sentimental garnish of authoritarianism. For every child knows that the permanent elimination of carbon from the atmosphere is the ultimate sacrifice. You cannot go further than that – unless spontaneous mass suicide is an option.

But it is 2023, and here we are: the fact that the complete removal of carbon or carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would result in the immediate death of every living creature is chalked up as a positive eco-balance. The irony is palpable; what is more interesting is that the manic hostility towards CO₂ in every media climate message is not a faux pas by Apple PR strategists and similar lobbyists, but deliberate. The spontaneous reflex against CO₂ must become second nature to the state subjects. The daily mafia-style climate blackmail by the UN, EU Council, WHO, WEF and other unelected bodies serves a global war against CO₂. Fossil fuel is the enemy. Overpriced solar and wind energy are allies. Anything that does not create CO₂ in the first place may be good – already a problem with solar panels, as Chinese solar panel production facilities are powered by coal – but anything that destroys and "eats" CO₂ is better. That nuclear is the dirty white trash kid from the hood that you don’t play with and avoid at any cost, just shows that the delusion has become methodical.

Everyone with a brain knows this is not about nature

There can be no doubt that the measures adopted in the spirit of these maxims are not about “protecting the planet”, or “nature”. They are about the domination of humans over other humans. As the German technology philosopher Martin Burckhardt notes, “nature” now functions as an "ideal projection apparatus":

"The revolutionaries who strived to ‘liberate’ the tortured proletariat at the end of the 1960s were told by the workers they had no interest in this kind of redemption. [...] In contrast to the “downtrodden”, nature does not respond. In this sense, it is an ideal ally for the climate policy avant-garde. You are connected to a higher power, you are practising political theology."

Nature cannot say no. It cannot protest. Unlike the proletariat, it cannot object to becoming an instrument in the hands of the powerful. And because nature has no voice, it can so neatly lend itself to any kind of power play. For today, every social problem is effectively blamed on "climate change". People dying in extreme weather events? Blame it on climate change. Rising inflation? Blame it on climate change. Covid? Blame it on climate change (all these lines of reasoning exist. Google them.)

Of course, climate change is also making horses fat:

It makes pigs produce less meat:

On a more serious note, it helps our technocratic world leaders present the cause of poverty in the global south, e.g. Africa, in changing weather, while it precisely exacerbates the conditions that lead to widespread poverty on the southern continent with its feudalist carbon offsets and certificates.

However, in a modern industrial society, with ever more developed forces of production that could hypothetically provide humans with all kinds of technological and material protections – and even comforts – against the mood swings of nature, there can no longer be a “natural problem” that cannot be solved socially. If you’ve got no working water supply system, this is not the weather’s fault. You’re poor? Not the weather’s fault. And yet, poverty is declared a natural state of things, while the natural world is declared a result of policy decisions. The topsy-turvy world of the “personification of things” and the “reification of persons” has come full circle.

Let’s not forget that the monothematic reduction of social discourse to climate change kills two birds with one stone, too: for not only is responsibility shifted to a technological abstraction that has no reality except in computer model simulations, but you can force a complete social transformation in the name of a “objective constraint” that will effectively eradicate the notion of or even the desire to live in relative prosperity, freedom, safety, health, and dignity that we once took for granted, but that the powerful never had an interest in maintaining in the first place. In the Germany’s Ahrtal catastrophe in North-Rhine Westphalia (2021), over 200 people lost their lives, hundreds of thousands their homes and sources of income due to poor infrastructure. But Germany’s first technocratic chancellor, Angela Merkel, freely blamed it on “the challenges of climate change” – a policy now imitated by political leaders globally.

Anthropogenic climate change for dummies

For this scheme to work, however, the assertion that climate change cannot have natural causes, but only man-made, “anthropogenic” ones, is essential. If the observable atmospheric and physical processes were of natural origin, it could be difficult to convey the message of the necessity to revolutionize an entire mode of production and consumption in a way that amounts to the abolition of production and consumption. However, nobody disputes that humans have a part to play in the warming of land masses: the transformation of entire areas of land into landfill sites and the concreting over of cities play a key role here. But nothing that humans do can override natural changes in the climate, e.g., an annually varying solar radiation influence on earthshine and albedo, oceanic circulation patterns, clear or cloudy sky conditions, or volcanic (underwater) eruptions. These grand-scale natural influences on the global weather are deliberately ignored in the “discourse”, sometimes even downplayed. Atmospheric science researcher Dr. Judith Curry who is no longer dependent on state funds emphasizes time and again that the atmospheric composition has “only an insignificant” influence on the weather. Instead, we are made to believe that there is no other cause for hurricanes and droughts than the burning of fossil fuels. To view CO₂ emissions as the control knob for climate is in strictu sensu idiotic. But this manic rehearsal of a factually incorrect monocausality primarily serves the purpose of declaring humans to be the cause of all climate evil.

But not even the IPCC is so very sure about that: in the AR5’s "Summary for Policy Makers" (2007) the IPCC reaffirmed its line of demarcation against the more hysterical UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and pointed out that its definition of climate change is not limited to "direct or indirect human activity", but also includes natural variability, which exhibits enormous fluctuations. In the consecutive Assessment Reports, the simple fact that there is no “yardstick” to differentiate natural from “human-caused” climate change has not made it easier even for those scientists in Working Group 1 who try to be faithful to the logic of the carbon cycle, i.e., the gigantic, mostly oceanic influences on the climate, against the activist climate convention machine and its obsession with ascribing “100%” of current weather changes to human activity.

In the official propaganda, the fear and loathing of CO₂ must be directly linked to “anthropogenic” climate change or anthropogenic global warming (AGW) – at any cost. Supported by an unprecedented collectivist self-flagellation, the thematic entity of anthropogenic climate change comes up with excesses of prohibition (next to carbon offsets/credits/taxes there are oil and gas heating bans, combustion engine bans, 15-minute cities, and now cancelled public events that include fireworks and airshows etc.[2]), at the end of which there can only be the dissolution of civic subjectivity as we know it, never mind democratic civil rights. Even more devastating than the technocratic-fascist erosion of civil society during Covid will probably be the impact of "climate change" on our immediate existence. As we all know, humans are virus carriers only at times, carbon dioxide producers, however, for a lifetime. How strong can the interest in human survival be with those who want to “eliminate” carbon dioxide, the basis of all life on earth?

As Business Insider reported recently, the “first US commercial plant has started to pull carbon dioxide from the air. It’s able to suck out 1000 tons annually and plans to expand.”[3]

Welcome to a wholly new level of insanity.

Photosynthesis as a toxic right-wing conspiracy theory

Let us briefly see how bad CO₂ really is for the planet:

Well, that does not look bad at all, quite to the contrary (the irony of course being that this 7-year-old NASA clip has now been flagged as climate disinformation).

If it is a trivial truth that CO₂-levels have been increasing for the last 100 years, then the effect this would have on photosynthesis is even more trivial. Every child knows that photosynthesis, the process by which plants, with the help of sunlight, transform carbon dioxide into oxygen, is the basis of all life on earth. Every child knows, too, that without plants, there would be no life. An increase in CO₂ is beneficial to life on earth if you like thinking along these lines. How strange it must be to live in a constant fear of rising CO₂-levels.

Nobody denies that the planet has been getting warmer in the higher latitudes in the past 100 years, at around 1C. But it is insane to suggest that an increase in CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is the sole cause for it, never mind suggesting it will destroy the planet. [4] To the contrary: an increase up to 1400 ppm on a global average would be desirable, and perhaps necessary if we want to feed the world. Our current CO₂-level – around 420 ppm – is already critical for plants. In Steven Koonin’s words: “Today’s Earth is starved for atmospheric CO₂.”[5] And not a day goes by that, for stating this simple truth, some Twitter midwit will call you a “fossil fuel shill” or “Neonazi” for it.

[Image taken from Matthew Wielicki’s Irrational Fear Substack]:

Greening Earth & Booming Crops

As is evident to anyone that has lived through continental summers and continental winters, a warmer weather would even be desirable for humans. Many people die from cold weather each year, few from the heat – Australia is the exception. Studies, for example from the American Heart Association[6], show that cold is the main cause of temperature-related deaths in most countries around the world. In a study of 384 locations in 13 countries on 5 continents, there were 20 times as many deaths due to cold compared to heat. Cold temperatures increase the risk of respiratory infections and cardiovascular diseases, while weakened defences make the body more susceptible to flu viruses and pneumonia. In addition, cold constricts the blood vessels, which can lead to increased blood pressure and, in extreme cases, to heart attacks. Rejoice and welcome the warmer weather – it has made it possible to grow potatoes in Northern Canada now.

Thankfully, NetZero is – for now – too unrealistic to be implemented. If it were, life on earth would cease to exist. But to add irrationality to idiocy, the good thing the everyone could benefit from is the one thing we are supposed to distrust, fear, and abolish. I thought that forcing the world populations – among them even babies – to violate their human rights by injecting an experimental vaccine would be ultimate evil. But I’m not so sure anymore.

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[1] For those who haven’t:

[2] The popular Zurich Fest, Switzerland’s biggest folk festival with more than 2.5 million visitors every three years, has now been cancelled due to its carbon footprint, among other things: https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/groesstes-volksfest-der-schweiz-das-zueri-faescht-steht-vor-dem-aus

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-first-commercial-carbon-capture-facility-opens-2023-11?r=US&IR=T#:~:text=The%20first%20US%20commercial%20plant,annually%20and%20plans%20to%20expand.&text=The%20first%20US%20industrial%20carbon,sends%20it%20into%20the%20ground.

[4]

The energy that flows in and out of the climate system is measured in Watts per square meter (W/m²), which is the Y-axis in this graph. CO₂ concentration in ppm (parts per million) is on the X-axis. The graph shows that temperatures do not correlate with CO₂ concentration. Source: CO₂ coalition.

[5] Koonin, Unsettled. What Climate Science Tells us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. BenBella, Dallas, 2021, p. 66.

[6] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/555515. Cardio-vascular diseases are still the number 1 cause of death in the US and Western Europe by a wide margin..