Along with it, says the firm’s meteorologist and chief forecaster Joe Bastardi, will come the climate change blame game, which he calls a false narrative. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana, killing an estimated 1,833 people and causing approximately $161 billion in damages. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, Irma hit the Caribbean, and Maria hit the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, resulting in at least 3,364 fatalities and a combined cost of over $294 billion in damages.

In 2020, six major hurricanes landed, resulting in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) dubbing 2020 the “most active season in recorded history.”

Following each season, government officials, committees, and scientists were quick to blame climate change.

“There is perhaps no better example of the potential for devastating global warming impacts than the Gulf Coast and Hurricane Katrina,” the U.S. Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming stated after Katrina. “While the contribution of human-caused warming to Hurricane Katrina is difficult to quantify, scientists have unearthed a trend towards larger, more intense storms as oceans around the world warm.”

After Irma, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called the 2017 season “the most violent on record.”

“Changes to our climate are making extreme weather events more severe and frequent, pushing communities into a vicious cycle of shock and recovery,” he stated.

After the 2020 season, Jim Kossin, an atmospheric research scientist at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, blamed “warmer-than-average ocean temperatures” for the hurricane “hyper-activity.”

He said an increase in more ferocious hurricanes over the past 40 years was linked to climate change. Mr. Bastardi said he expects to hear similar messaging this year if it pans out like he’s predicting.

“If you hang around people constantly spouting negative stuff and how bad it is, guess what you’re going to believe? … It’s a great strategy for pushing this thing—if I wanted to argue the CO2 [carbon dioxide] argument, I’d do exactly what they’re doing,” Mr. Bastardi told The Epoch Times. “But there’s been no increase. And the size of the storms is getting smaller. That’s the other thing: hurricanes are smaller and more compact.”

Oceanographer and certified consulting meteorologist Bob Cohen concurred. He said there’s currently a transition from El Niño patterns to La Niña, which is “correlated with higher-than-normal hurricane activity.”

“Right now, the subsurface temperatures are much cooler than during El Niño,” he told The Epoch Times. “The immediate near-surface temperatures are still warmer, but the subsurface water pool and the warm water pool have dissipated, and so once that pops to the surface, it becomes La Niña,” Mr. Cohen said.

He said he expects “we’ll hear a lot more alarmist messaging” if 2024 is a busy hurricane season, as predicted. But, like Mr. Bastardi, Mr. Cohen said hurricanes aren’t getting bigger or more intense. He said that as temperatures naturally warm coming out of the Little Ice Age, hurricanes and weather events will get less intense—not exponentially worse.

Basic Physics and Temperature

The Earth endeavors to exist in a state of equilibrium; it tries to equalize the temperature between the equator and the poles, which drives weather, according to Mr. Cohen.

“When you look at the 50,000-foot big picture, the Earth is a heat engine,” he said. “The tropics remain fairly constant in temperatures, and it’s the poles that have the greatest change.

“The gradient drives the storms. … If the poles warm, the temperature gradient decreases, which would mean less of a requirement for more intense storms from Mother Nature. It’s basic physics.”

Mr. Bastardi agreed.

“Look at Ida versus Betsy,” he said. “Betsy’s hurricane-force winds extended out 150 miles to the west and 250 miles east. Ida 50 miles to the west, and 75 miles to the east. They’re both category 4. They both had similar pressures. Which was the worst storm? The bigger storm. But they don’t tell you that.”

NOAA’s hurricane division shows Hurricane Betsy hitting Florida and Louisiana in 1965 with a central pressure of 946 millibars and a maximum wind speed of 132 miles per hour. Hurricane Ida hit Louisiana in 2021 with a central pressure of 931 mb and a maximum wind speed of 149 miles per hour. However, NOAA data doesn’t include the overall size of a hurricane.

“Hurricanes now are like fists of furry rather than giant bulldozers that come in and plow the coast,” Mr. Bastardi said. “But [NOAA] won’t show the entire picture. Because if they did, people would say, ‘What the heck!’”

He said the reason hurricanes are more costly now is because of increased infrastructure along the coasts, not because of increased severity. NOAA’s historical hurricane data dating back to 1851 supports the premise that hurricanes aren’t getting worse.

It adds as a caveat to its data that “because of the sparseness of towns and cities before 1900,” hurricanes may have been missed or their intensity underestimated. NOAA’s data also shows hurricanes are getting less severe in terms of central pressure.

Even with possible missing data, the NOAA data show an average central pressure decline of 0.00013mb per year between 1851 and 2022 (2023 data isn’t included yet), and max wind had a marginal average increase of 0.00011mph per year for that same period. The agency uses the Saffir-Simpson scale to categorize hurricanes from 1 to 5 based on maximum sustained wind speed.

Fear Before Reality

Government agencies, such as NOAA, often lead with an alarming statement about increased weather severity, but beyond the headlines, the data show a different story, Mr. Cohen said.

For example, in its 2023 State of the Science fact sheet titled “Atlantic Hurricanes and Climate Change,” NOAA asks the questions: “Has human-caused climate change had any detectable influence on hurricanes and their impacts?” and “What changes do we expect going forward with continued global warming?”

It answers itself by stating that “Several Atlantic hurricane activity metrics show pronounced increases since 1980.”

A few paragraphs later, NOAA states that if the data from the 1900s to the present is considered, “There has been no significant trend in annual numbers of U.S. landfalling tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes.”

Instead, there’s a “decreasing trend since 1900 in the propagation speed of tropical storms and hurricanes over the continental U.S.”

Mr. Cohen said NOAA’s approach is problematic. Its initial statements are “scary” and then “it discounts these same statements.”

“It’s very confusing because it goes back and forth between blaming climate change and blaming natural variability,” he said.

The reliance on climate modeling instead of observed reality is one of the problems with government reports, Mr. Cohen said.

In its fact sheet, NOAA says it hasn’t found clear evidence of a “greenhouse gas-induced change in historical observed Atlantic hurricane behavior.”

“Since a highly confident attribution has not yet been established for Atlantic hurricanes, future projections rely mostly on climate models alone.”

Mr. Cohen said the real observations don’t agree with the models.

“Some will say, ‘Well, if the observations don’t agree, then the observations are wrong.’ But it’s the opposite. It’s the models that are wrong,” he said.

Mr. Bastardi concurred and added that much of what’s being presented to the public is propaganda, not science, intended to facilitate a specific outcome.

“The climate agenda is the nail in freedom’s coffin. We’re more prosperous, we have five times the number of people, and we have one-fiftieth the number of climate disasters than we did in the 1900s,” he said. “But we’ve got this mass brainwashing going on, and it’s all over incremental nonsense—very, very small things that are just amplified to make people think that things are really bad.”

CO2 Impact

When asked if human-caused CO2 has an impact on hurricanes, Mr. Bastardi was quick to say “no.”

Mr. Cohen agreed. “Greenhouse gas doesn’t warm the ocean, except in the top millimeter. The deep warming is caused by the sun. The greenhouse gas theory, which is effect, irradiates heat that tries to escape back down to the Earth in a wavelength that only goes into the oceans at the top—the ocean’s skin or the top few millimeters. So, you don’t get changes in ocean heat content because of greenhouse gasses,” he said.

“You get that because of solar insulation, the direct sunlight, which is a different wavelength. And so, changes in thermal heat content are not due to greenhouse gasses.”

Mr. Bastardi agreed and said there are still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the climate and what causes warming or cooling, particularly in the oceans.

“We’re woefully short of knowing what’s going on in the oceans,” he said. “We have one data point for every 112,000 square miles. It does not do anything except faintly estimate what’s going on.”

He said the increase in geothermal activity in the oceans since 1990 has been warming the oceans. But he’s also seeing a predicted cooling.

“What’s more startling to me is how cold the Indian Ocean is forecast to get over the next six months. I mean, I’ve never seen a drop like this forecasted,” he said.

During the incoming change to the La Niña pattern, upwelling in the oceans brings cold, nutrient-rich water to the surface, pushing the Pacific jet stream northward. That can result in droughts in the southern United States, increased rain and flooding in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, and an increased risk of hurricanes, according to NOAA.

“The warming of the oceans is a big deal,” Mr. Bastardi said. “But there may be a countering going on. As far as La Niña goes, the planet is warming. And it’s warming in a way that creates stronger than average easterly winds across the Pacific, which means upwelling, and upwelling means cooler water.

“All a La Niña is is a resistance to the warming that’s taking place. And unless there is a shutdown of whatever input that is—if you’re a CO2 guy, you think it’s manmade, and if you’re me, you believe it’s natural—until that shutdown occurs, the oceans will continue to warm.

“Now, here’s a dirty little secret: We don’t have the data to know exactly what’s happening.”

Mr. Bastardi predicts this hurricane season “will turn into a real political football” over the climate change narrative.

Mr. Cohen added, “You never see it asked: ‘For humans, what is the optimal temperature?’

“Nine times more people die from cold than heat. The yields in Africa now because of the CO2 are huge, feeding millions of people. So many articles, particularly in the mainstream media, are written to scare people. And that leads to the general public thinking we’re heading into a bad situation. And that’s not the case.

“Warmer weather is better.”

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“The world is passing through the 1.5°C ceiling and is headed much higher unless steps are taken to affect Earth’s energy imbalance,” James Hansen, previous director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in January.

Thus, to buy more time, on Feb. 28, scientists from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report detailing a solution called “intentional stratospheric dehydration,” or in layman’s terms, flying planeloads of ice to 58,000 feet and spraying ice particles into the upper atmosphere.

“It’s a very small effect,” said lead author Joshua Schwarz, a research physicist at NOAA’s chemical sciences laboratory. “Pure water vapor doesn’t readily form ice crystals. It helps to have a seed, a dust particle, for example, for ice to form around.”

The researchers report that by dispersing small particles, or what it calls ice nuclei, into areas of the atmosphere that are both “very cold and super-saturated with water vapor,” water vapor in the atmosphere will “freeze-dry” and rain out of the atmosphere as ice crystals, cooling the planet.

The proposal is known as geoengineering—and NASA and NOAA’s joint plan is far from the only idea that’s jumped from the pages of science fiction, à la the 2013 Hollywood film “Snowpiercer,” to mainstream science.

István Szapudi, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, has turned to essentially geoengineering a giant parasol, or what he calls, a “tethered solar shield” to shield the Earth from a portion of the sun’s energy.

“Any sunshield works by blocking a small fraction, circa 1 percent to 2 percent, of sunlight reaching Earth,” Mr. Szapudi told The Epoch Times. “This is an almost undetectable amount by looking at the sun, but it would still cool the atmosphere to pre-industrial temperatures according to climate models. Specifically, the tethered sun shield is a solution that is lighter, thus cheaper, by many orders than traditional designs.”

Technology entrepreneurs Luke Iseman and Andrew Song of Make Sunsets have already taken action and have been creating reflective, high-altitude clouds by releasing balloons full of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere, what they call stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI).

“With climate change rapidly transforming our world, it’s crucial that we prioritize action over words,” Make Sunsets stated on its website. “We believe that SAI is the immediate, necessary solution to cool the planet and buy us time to transition to a more sustainable future.”

But scientists such as Christopher Essex, emeritus professor of applied mathematics and physics at the University of Western Ontario and former director of its theoretical physics program, said carbon dioxide (CO2) isn’t the driver of Earth’s warmer temperature and that such geoengineering measures are “extraordinarily dangerous.”

“I used to run a climate panel for the World Federation of Scientists,” he told The Epoch Times. “And we had one session where we presented on exactly why geoengineering is extraordinarily dangerous. It’s a crazy idea.”

Ian Clark, emeritus professor for the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, echoed Mr. Essex.

“Geoengineering the climate is a very scary prospect,” he told The Epoch Times. “It’s something that should be relegated to the fantasy realm and science fiction.”

The Oxford Geoengineering Programme defines geoengineering as “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change.”

Solar Shield

According to Mr. Szapudi, climate change is a looming threat, and greenhouse gases, such as CO2, are a driving cause of that threat.

He published a report on July 31, 2023, outlining his proposal for a tethered sun shield, what he calls solar radiation management.

“Solar radiation management (SRM) is a geoengineering approach that aims to reduce the amount of solar radiation absorbed by the Earth to mitigate the effects of climate change,” Mr. Szapudi wrote in his report.

“Two strategies proposed for SRM involve adding dust or chemicals to the Earth’s atmosphere to increase the reflected fraction of sunlight or reduce the incoming radiation from space with solar shades or dust.”

He’s advocating for a sun shield because he believes it is less risky.

When asked to comment on Mr. Essex’s claim that geoengineering is “extraordinarily dangerous,” Mr. Szapudi said: “Space-based geoengineering, especially if it is modular and reversible in design, carries less risk than Earth-based SRM injecting dust or chemicals into the atmosphere, and [it is] vastly less risky than doing nothing.

“Given what we know today and the known risks of climate change, a tethered sun shield near the L1 Lagrange point at 1.5 million kilometers from us would not present an obvious risk to Earth. The benefit is preventing and even reversing negative effects of climate change.”

NASA defines Lagrange points as “positions in space where objects sent there tend to stay put” because of oppositional gravitational forces. The agency has identified five such points.

Mr. Szapudi acknowledged that there could be unknown risks and said his proposal would need to undergo a more detailed scientific study, followed by a preliminary engineering study.

“Such a study would specify the location, the design, the materials, etc., that are most suitable. At that point, a quantitative and thorough risk assessment can be done, and a decision can be made [on] whether to go ahead with the implementation,” he said. “In general, any big project would go through many layers of risk, cost, and benefit analyses as the design shapes up, and any showstoppers identified would halt the project. Ultimately, only the most cost-effective and safest design, if any, will be implemented.”

But Mr. Essex, who built his first computer climate model in the 1970s and was chairman of The Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Academic Advisory Council, said part of the problem with a sun shield is that it looks at the climate from an engineering perspective instead of a scientific one.

“You might be able to generate some plausible argument for defining the actual parasol and getting into space,” he said. “But the part you don’t understand is how climate will respond to it.

“Because we’ve been pushing this propaganda as being able to solve a problem, it starts to appear like an engineering problem where you can do trial and error and see if it works or doesn’t work. But the climate problem is not an engineering problem; it’s a fundamental scientific problem. … It’s much more subtle and complex.”

Mr. Essex explained that solar radiation travels through the atmosphere, and while some believe that radiation causes warming at that point, that’s not what’s happening. Instead, the shortwave radiation hits the Earth, which heats the surface, and then the ground radiates that energy as longwave radiation into the atmosphere, increasing temperature.

“With the parasol, they’re trying to control shortwave radiation,” Mr. Essex said. “And it’s an indirect way of controlling what goes on with the longwave, the infrared.

“People like to think the Earth is like a brick, and it’s getting too hot, so we need to cool it down—global boiling, that’s the slogan—well, that’s ridiculous. It’s just about hyping up anxiety and fear so the people will go along with things and not question what’s going on.

“There’s so much going on in the atmosphere. It’s complex, conductive, and turbulent.”

Balloons of Sulfur

Like a sun shield, reflective aerosols fall under the definition of solar radiation management. But unlike a sun shield, reflective aerosols aren’t modular or immediately reversible.

Make Sunsets fills balloons with SO2, releases them, and then pops them once they reach the stratosphere to release the gaseous contents. The effect, Make Sunsets claims, is similar to volcanic eruptions.

“Emissions from volcanic eruptions have been cooling the Earth for millions of years, like Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. We are simply mimicking Mother Nature. … In 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a stratovolcano, cooled the Earth by 0.9F or 0.5C for over a year,” it stated on its website.

So far, the group has released 49 balloons since April 2022 and claims that it has “neutralized 13,791 ton-years of warming.” It says its “clouds” of sulfur stay in the sky for between six months and three years, “depending on the altitude and latitude at which we release them.”

A group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists reported in 2020 that releasing reflective aerosols into the stratosphere “could have other long-lasting effects on the climate.”

“Solar geoengineering would significantly change extratropical storm tracks—the zones in the middle and high latitudes where storms form year-round and are steered by the jet stream across the oceans and land,” their report reads. “Our results show that solar geoengineering will not simply reverse climate change. Instead, it has the potential itself to induce novel changes in climate.”

But, Make Sunsets claimed that, without mitigation such as reflective aerosols, “10s of millions of people will die, and 20 percent of species may go extinct.”

“We believe the best time to field test and scale SAI is now,” the group stated.

The group says it has been in contact with the FBI, the Federal Aviation Authority, and the NOAA.

“They are aware of our business and activities,” its website reads.

Mr. Essex said the problem with adding reflective aerosols is even more complicated than most realize.

“If you put more stuff in the sky, you don’t just absorb and scatter [radiation]. You get stuff sent back to you,” he said. “Depending on what kind of stuff and where it is—how high up it is—will affect whether it warms or cools. It could do both.”

Mr. Essex explained that if clouds are high enough, they help cool the atmosphere by emitting radiation into space instead of reflecting it back to Earth. Similarly, high enough CO2 cools the atmosphere instead of heating it because there’s less absorption between it and space.

“It depends on where it is in the atmosphere,” he said. “You have to do the whole radiative transfer problem to get this right. And a few groups are doing that, but they have a lot of trouble publishing because sometimes, they come up with answers that don’t agree with the narrative.”

Mr. Essex said simple adjustments can also change how water moves in and out of the atmosphere.

“All it requires is a little tweak of the right thing, and you can get completely different weather patterns. And then maybe you won’t be able to grow things you used to, and there’ll be problems with daily life that you never had to deal with before,” he said. “It can go both ways—cold can become warm, wet can become dry, and dry can become wet, and those changes can occur over the whole Earth.”

Make Sunsets acknowledged the risks associated with injecting the atmosphere with reflective aerosols, including ozone depletion, but stated that “science and math back us up.”

“Modeling shows a slight but meaningful depletion in ozone. While we’ll closely monitor this, it’s important to note that worst-case scenarios for ozone depletion amount to 5–10 percent on average,” its website reads. “This is less than half of what CFCs caused and may be at least partially offset by reduced global warming’s positive impact on ozone.”

In the late 1970s, scientists warned that manmade chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), were depleting the ozone. Then, in 1985, a hole was confirmed over Antarctica, leading to increased fear of skin cancers, damaged ecosystems, and the loss of plants and crops. In 1989, governments adopted the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, providing the framework for the Montreal Protocol, which eventually resulted in the phase-out of substances such as CFCs.

“Around 99 percent of ozone-depleting substances have been phased out and the protective layer above Earth is being replenished. The Antarctic ozone hole is expected to close by the 2060s,” the U.N. Environment Programme stated regarding the effort.

“Every year, an estimated two million people are saved from skin cancer and there are broader benefits too, as many of the ozone-depleting gases also drive up global temperatures.”

Mr. Clark said injecting aerosols into the stratosphere is dangerous, and not just because of the effect on storm tracks.

“We did a lot of work to try [to] clean up the atmosphere,” he said. “The Clean Air Act addressed things like nitrous oxide and sulfur fuels and diesel and stuff like that. And then they want to undo all that work? It seems pretty reckless to me.

“And we don’t want a cooler planet! I mean, history tells us that European civilization flourished under a warmer climate. And you know what we’re seeing—with precipitation, setting records and all the rest, and consequences of a warmer planet—is far better conditions to have than what happens when things freeze earlier and for longer. Agriculture is compromised. Transportation is compromised. Everything is compromised when it’s colder.”

Neither Mr. Iseman nor Mr. Song responded to The Epoch Times’ request for comment. Solar radiation management isn’t new, nor is it the only way some have looked to control the climate.

Indeed, Mr. Essex said he’s seen geoengineering ideas posited by scientists since the 1990s, and other possible “solutions” have included generating iron filing to cause algae blooms in the ocean, burning sulfur dioxide from ships to generate marine clouds, and using U.S. Navy artillery to fire dust into the stratosphere.

“The imagination of them all is quite extensive,” he said.

Mr. Essex believes that governments will eventually want to “control the weather with tax policy.”

“That’s basically what we have as the end game. Geoengineering is just another effort to try to control the weather,” he said.

The authors of the report say the catalyst behind the dire warnings is escalating concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2).

To salvage what remains, the authors say a much faster phase-out of oil, coal, and other fossil fuels is necessary. Failure could cause water and food shortages, plus extreme heat, for a third to half of the world’s population.

The message is similar to that of the United Nations (U.N.), President Joe Biden, the World Economic Forum, and countless government leaders: CO2 concentrations are too high, and the continued burning of fossil fuels, which release CO2, will cause people to die.

Thus, the U.N. states it’s necessary to spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on “climate friendly initiatives” such as wind and solar energy and eat less meat, while the Biden administration has called for a full transition to electric vehicles. However, not all scientists share the same view.

According to Patrick Moore, chairman and chief scientist of Ecosense Environmental and co-founder of Greenpeace, the climate change messaging isn’t based in fact.

“The whole thing is a total scam,” said Mr. Moore. “There is actually no scientific evidence that CO2 is responsible for climate change over the eons.”

Mr. Moore said that over the past few decades, the climate message has continually changed; first, it was global cooling, then global warming, then climate change, and now it’s disastrous weather.

“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. … We’re part of the cycle,” he said.

“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.”

He said the burning of fossil fuels—which emit CO2—is a good thing for plant life.

“We are replenishing the atmosphere with CO2 up to a level that is much more conducive to life and growth of plants, in particular.”

Weather-related deaths and climate disasters have in fact declined “precipitously” over the years, according to John Christy, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the director of the Earth System Science Center.

In 1925, there was an average of 484,880 climate-related deaths worldwide, according to Human Progress. Since then, it’s steadily decreased, with the latest report from 2020 showing there was an average of 14,893 climate-related deaths worldwide.

“CO2 is portrayed now as the cause of damaging extreme weather. Our research indicates these extremes are not becoming more intense or frequent,” Mr. Christy told The Epoch Times. “Thus, CO2 cannot be the cause of something not occurring.”

The U.N. is planning for countries to cut emissions to as close to zero as possible by 2050. The plan is “collective suicide,” says Malgosia Askanas, a senior research and development associate at Aurora Biophysics Research Institute.

Ms. Askanas said the concern over CO2 is not based on science.

“It started with the hysteria of the New Ice Age and a little-known CIA report in 1974 that claimed that a major climatic change was underway,” she said.

“Later, the ‘global cooling’ alarmism morphed into its opposite, by employing the false notion of global warming due to excess CO2—which is chemically a falsehood.”

Carbon Dioxide and Life

Mr. Christy said the earth’s climate has “tremendous natural variability” and that it’s currently in a gradual warming phase.

“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,” he said.

He calls CO2 the “currency of life.”

“In past epochs, there were many times more CO2 levels in the atmosphere than today.”

Mr. Moore pointed to a graph that charts CO2 and temperature over the past 500 million years. “It’s very clear that CO2 and temperature have been out of sync more often than they’ve been in sync,” he said.

“That more or less negates the whole idea that there’s a direct cause-effect going on there.”

Mr. Moore says current CO2 concentrations are “historically low.”

“Going back 150 million years, CO2 was somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500 parts per million (ppm),” he said.

Generally, atmospheric CO2 is low (around 180 ppm) during glacial periods and higher during interglacials, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Before the Industrial Era, circa 1750, atmospheric CO2 was about 280 ppm for several thousand years, the IPCC states.

The current peak level in the atmosphere is around 420 parts per million (ppm), according to 2021 data from NOAA Research.

Mr. Moore says that that’s a good thing, and that the push for net-zero CO2 is a disastrous policy. Anything under 150 ppm is “starvation level” for most plant species.

“CO2 is only now at 0.042 percent of the atmosphere. And the fact of the matter is plants would prefer between 1,500 and 2,000 ppm for optimum growth,” Mr. Moore said.

“Commercial greenhouse growers worldwide purposefully increase the CO2 level in their greenhouses to between 800 and 1,200 ppm. Really, it’s about 2,000 where you’re at the optimum level for trees and plants, in general.”

Patrick Hunt, president of Climate Realist of BC, said people don’t generally understand CO2.

“They’ve been told that a warmer Earth is bad, although evidence shows that’s wrong,” he told The Epoch Times. “In the Dark Ages, it was colder. It was colder and not nearly as comfortable living during the Little Ice Age.

“But during the medieval warming period, they had enough money left over to build cathedrals.”

Mr. Hunt said biomass, or plant growth, on earth has increased by 20 percent over the past 40 years, “and 70 percent of that 20 percent growth is attributed to CO2.”

In 2018, NASA published a report showing that the Earth’s “greenness” was increasing, which showed that the health of forests, grasslands, and farms was more robust.

“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,” said the report co-author, Jarle Bjerke of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

Subsequent maps have continued to show increases in the Earth’s “greenness.”

Temperature and CO2 as a Net Good

Since 1950, CO2 emissions from humans have risen “exponentially,” Mr. Moore said, but the temperature hasn’t responded the same way.

“There’s no way that that can be a cause-effect relationship. The cause is supposed to be CO2. But if CO2 was responsible for warming, it would have warmed more than it has,” he said.

The main global movement against temperature rises is the U.N.’s Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty to “substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions” in order to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial levels.

The agreement was enacted in 2016 and more than 195 countries have entered into it. President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement in June, 2017.

“The Paris Climate Accord is simply the latest example of Washington entering into an agreement that disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries, leaving … taxpayers to absorb the cost in terms of lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories, and vastly diminished economic production,” President Trump said at the time.

President Biden rejoined the accord on his first day in office, Jan. 20, 2021. The White House said addressing the “climate crisis” is one of the “four crises” the administration will focus on.

It’s impacting “not just the American people, but the global community [and] rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is a vital step toward doing that,” said Jen Psaki, White House press secretary at the time.

Mr. Moore said the 1.5 degree Celsius limit imposed by the Paris Agreement is “garbage.”

“This 1.5 degrees that’s going to destroy the whole Earth? The Earth has been way more than 1.5 degrees warmer throughout most of its history,” he said.

“We happen to be in a warming blip now called the Modern Warm Period. But the Modern Warm Period is coming out of the Little Ice Age, which peaked around 1600—long before we started using fossil fuels.”

In a peer-reviewed paper he authored, Mr. Moore wrote that, according to 800,000 years of historical patterns, a major glaciation period would have occurred if humans hadn’t caused an uptick in CO2.

Mr. Christy said the extra CO2 might put off the next ice age, but not by much.

“I suspect CO2 has a net benefit when you weigh the advantages of energy and carbon-based products compared with living without this energy or these products. I lived in Africa and can assure you that, without energy, life is brutal and short.

“The concentration of CO2 is increasing because humans use carbon in many ways to enhance living standards. The response of the climate system is gradual and, in my opinion, entirely manageable, especially considering the massive benefits to human life it brings.”

Politics Versus Science

Mr. Christy said climate science has become a “failed science” as the questioning of its claims are “discouraged or even prevented.”

“This is especially true among certain political groups and the majority of the media outlets that I see.”

Ms. Askanas pushed back on the widely propagated concept that there’s scientific consensus about “the harmfulness of CO2, about global warming trend, about the increase in natural disasters, about the melting of arctic ice.”

“These are all politically motivated dogmas that are buttressed by careless or outright fraudulent data, statistics, and arguments,” she said, calling the U.N. net-zero plan “fascistic through-and-through.”

She sees the climate agenda as a way for governments to gain total political control.

Ms. Askanas outlined several government-imposed climate remedies including carbon footprint regulations, carbon credits, skyrocketing transportation costs, and huge government subsidies for so-called green initiatives.

President Biden, in his fiscal 2024 budget included $52.2 billion in discretionary spending “to tackle the climate crisis,” according to a White House press release. It’s an increase of $10.9 billion over fiscal 2023.

“As president, I have a responsibility to act with urgency and resolve when our nation faces clear and present danger,” President Biden stated on Aug. 16. “And that’s what climate change is about. It is literally, not figuratively, a clear and present danger.”

Mr. Moore expressed particular concern over the impact and money being spent on the phasing out of fossil fuels in energy systems.

“With wind, you can’t predict it very far into the future, and neither can you with solar because the clouds are going to come. And so, you have about one-third of the time when those two technologies are producing,” he said.

“So, what do you do the other two-thirds of the time if you shut off fossil fuels? Well, the first answer would be nuclear energy, because that can do it. But no, we don’t want that in the West.”

Wind and solar, he said, “are not feasible, it’s not possible. It’s just a total pipe dream, a fantasyland. It can’t be done.”

Ms. Askanas agreed.

“Converting the Earth into a desert of solar panels and wind generators will still not provide enough energy. Although it might make the planet unlivable enough so no energy would be required.”

“There are far broader issues than how many bullets and bombs America has,” Gorka said. “Think of this, more than 90 percent of the medicines we have here in America, like antibiotics, we buy from China.

“If China decided that it wants to take Taiwan, it wants to get military aggressive in the Pacific region, and as a price of that, they say, ‘Oh, and by the way, we’re not going to sell you the medicines that you’ve been buying from us for the last 30 years.’ Then not only will we not be able to fight a multi-front war against the potential aggressor, but we probably won’t have enough drugs and medicines to provide for our own citizens.”

Gorka, a former strategist for President Donald Trump, is a counterterrorism expert and served in the British Army reserve in a Military Intelligence unit. He has a doctorate in Political Science and was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Gorka said President Joe Biden’s decision to send M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine was a “stupid move,” but being “in bed with Communist China” was even more problematic.

Geopolitical Stupidity

According to a recent report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), if a “major regional conflict”—like between China and Taiwan—occurred, the United States would run out of “some munitions” in less than one week.

“The U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed the current stockpiles of the U.S. Department of Defense. According to the results of a series of CSIS war games, the United States would likely run out of some munitions—such as long-range, precision-guided munitions—in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict,” the report found.

The report further stated, “The war in Ukraine has also exposed serious deficiencies in the U.S. defense industrial base and serves as a stark reminder that a protracted conflict is likely to be an industrial war that requires a defense industry able to manufacture enough munitions, weapons systems, and matériel to replace depleted stockpiles.”

Gorka, in part, agreed with the CSIS report and said Biden sending M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine is a perfect example of the Biden administration having “no idea what it’s doing when it comes to geopolitics and national security.”

“The M1 Abrams tank is not something Ukrainians have ever used. They haven’t been trained on. They don’t have the ammunition for it,” Gorka said. “Since the beginning of the war, I’ve been very clear. This is the Ukrainian nation’s war to fight.

“We can assist them, but we have to assist them in ways that make sense. Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. It knows how to use Soviet-era equipment, whether it’s the AK-47, or the T-series of tanks, or the BTL-series of armored personnel carriers or RPGs. … Why would they need M1 Abrams tanks they have no experience with? Provide them with stuff they can use, and they know how to use, not pallets of cash and not American equipment.”

Gorka said supplying M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine and the Biden administration leaving “$83 billion worth of equipment” in Afghanistan are examples of the United States not managing its resources well.

“If you look at what’s happened with the amount of equipment—$83 billion worth of equipment that was left on the territory of Afghanistan when Biden surrendered and left that nation precipitously last September—also, it hasn’t been a lot of thinking being done in terms of what we’re supplying to Russia, Ukraine, and how rapidly we’re supplying it,” Gorka said.

Those types of decisions, and lack of geopolitical savvy, have left the United States in a position where it couldn’t effectively fight a multi-front war.

Bigger Picture Issue

Still, the broader issue for the United States being unprepared is its reliance on China and lack of domestic manufacturing.

“We have been in bed with Communist China for far, far too long. And this is a nation with labor camps. With the Laogai system. This is a hardcore communist regime. Why we are doing business with China, as the son of somebody who escaped a communist prison, I don’t understand,” Gorka concluded.

Laogai is short for Laodonggaizao and means “reform through labor.” According to the LAOGAI Research Foundation, “Laogai was legally established in 1954. At the time, its main purpose was to handle the waves of political prisoners in China. Within a Laogai prison are several ‘Reform through labor detachments.’”

Additionally, the forced-labor camps were designed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to abusively “brainwash prisoners into unconditionally accepting the Party’s ideology and rule.”

The CCP replaced the term “Laogai” with “prison” in 1994. Despite the name change, the system remains essentially unchanged.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

The same month, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. Despite its name, the bill is the most significant climate action bill in U.S. history and won’t help inflation, non-partisan third-party analysts say.

Biden’s war on fossil fuels and climate change appears to have escalated in the past few months, but it is only the fruition of a yearslong push by the government and a mammoth private-sector investment fund toward electric vehicles as part of a “net-zero” energy-sector agenda.

In his 2022 Letter to CEOs, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink wrote in a letter to CEOs earlier this year that “capitalism has the power to shape society and act as a powerful catalyst for change,” but that companies need to work with the state to achieve the desired results.

“When we harness the power of both the public and private sectors, we can achieve truly incredible things. This is what we must do to get to net zero,” Fink said. The letter was only the latest advance in Fink’s yearslong campaign to combine corporate and state power to achieve his climate and political agenda.

BlackRock is advancing its corporate political agenda by accumulating money and exercising power over corporate boards. At the same time, the government is passing laws and regulations that help further BlackRock’s goals.

“In a few short years, we have all watched innovators reimagine the auto industry,” Fink wrote. “And today, every car manufacturer is racing toward an electric future.”

Net Zero Transition

Fink argues governments need to pass certain laws and regulations, and companies like BlackRock need to force change through environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG).

That’s especially true in the transition to “net zero,” which requires replacing internal combustion engine vehicles with electric cars, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The American public has shown little interest in the matter. In 2017, there were 280,000 electric vehicles sold in the United States, according to the IEA. For comparison, total car sales in 2017 were 17.25 million.

In January 2018, Fink sent a letter to the chief executives of the world’s largest public companies that, in essence, told them to commit to Blackrock’s political and climate agenda or risk losing the mammoth fund’s support. At the time of the letter, BlackRock was the world’s largest asset manager—a ranking it’d held since 2009—and, according to its 2018 Q4 report, had just under $6 trillion in assets under management (AUM).

In other words, BlackRock controlled $6 trillion in other people’s investing dollars and threatened to withhold, or withdraw, investments if companies didn’t bow to BlackRock’s demands of establishing specific environmental, social, and governance (ESG) guidelines.

In his 2020 letter, Fink took it a step further and said BlackRock would significantly reallocate its capital from “investments that present a high sustainability-related risk, such as thermal coal producers,” and screen against investing in other fossil fuels. He followed this with a warning to CEOs.

“Last year BlackRock voted against or withheld votes from 4,800 directors at 2,700 different companies. Where we feel companies and boards are not producing effective sustainability disclosures or implementing frameworks for managing these issues, we will hold board members accountable,” Fink wrote.

“[BlackRock] will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them.”

A major lever in Blackrock’s power arsenal comes from its control over corporate boards. Many corporations are set up so that a part of their board of directors is directly appointed by the top shareholders, who usually hold nowhere near the majority stake—their share could be as low as 5 percent or even less. In addition to the direct appointments, the top shareholders hold major sway over the vote on other board members.

According to Fink’s letter, the company exercised this corporate board power over 2,700 companies, all in pursuit of its political, social, and climate agenda.

Blackrock exercised its power further through strategic investments to advance specific policies and agendas.

Financing the Electric Vehicle Transition

BlackRock invested in all three of the world’s largest lithium mining companies traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and put a sizeable amount in Tesla.

Blackrock holds 8 percent of the shares of Albemarle, a U.S.-based mining firm valued at over $33 billion. Blackrock is the second top institutional holder of SQM and FMC, holding three and nine percent of the total stock, respectively.

Tesla is the most influential electric vehicle manufacturer on the planet, with a market cap of over $960 billion. BlackRock, once again flexing its institution might, is the second top institutional holder at Tesla, with around 5.3 percent of total shares.

Anything between five and 10 percent of direct or indirect holdings in a company is considered a “significant shareholding.” It gives the holder a fair amount of power when voting on how a company operates. Consequently, BlackRock has sway in some of the biggest mining companies and Tesla.

State and Corporate Guidance

Fink doesn’t believe companies can, or should, act alone in advancing social transformation.

In May 2021, IEA released the “world’s first comprehensive energy roadmap” that included the requirement that there are no new sales of internal combustion passenger cars by 2035.

The IEA said it intended its roadmap to inform high-level negotiations at the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in November 2021.

At COP26, 153 countries committed to new 2030 net-zero commitments, and “developed countries” committed to delivering a $100 billion climate finance goal by 2035.

COP26 reported that “Private financial institutions and central banks are moving to realign trillions towards global net-zero” because of the new rules, regulations, and climate goals. Months earlier, at BlackRock’s 2021 Future Forum, U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry alluded to the need for rules, regulations, and goals.

“Government is going to have to step in and … provide the guideposts and the rules of the road in order to excite that capital and obviously to give that capital the security, the sense of confidence it needs to have in order to make the longer-term investments,” Kerry stated.

At the forum, Kerry also pointed to BlackRock’s leadership in pushing the private sector to meet “climate goals.”

“There is a massive movement in the private sector which we’ve been working with very closely. BlackRock has been a leader in that effort and other American banks, the six largest American banks have been key to putting about $4.16 trillion on the table to help affect and speed up, accelerate this transition.”

As part of BlackRock’s leadership in the “energy transition,” it launched the Future of Transport Fund in September 2018.

BlackRock also launched the Global Renewable Power fund, which invests in infrastructure—something that’s needed to power the electric vehicle transition. BlackRock said it sees a $5 trillion infrastructure growth opportunity over the next 15 years.

These funds are ways to bridge the gap “between where that investment needs to occur … and where the capital currently resides,” BlackRock stated in its Future Forum.

BlackRock launched the Future of Transport fund after Fink sent his 2018 letter to CEOs demanding their companies commit themselves to improving the community and environment. The fund’s most significant jump happened in 2020, the same year Fink wrote to CEOs, stating that a “fundamental reshaping of finance” was underway.

The Temporary Trump Wrench

When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, he threw a monkey wrench in the United States’ steady push towards “tackling climate change,” energy scientists bemoaned. And as he implemented an “American First Energy Plan,” energy independence and the stock market soared, while gas prices plummeted. As a result, interest in electric vehicles was marginal.

But when Biden defeated Trump in 2020, BlackRock released a statement saying the win allowed the markets to “return” to where they were before Trump’s victory.

“We see an increased focus on sustainability under a divided government, but through regulatory actions, rather than via tax policy or spending on green infrastructure,” BlackRock stated.

The words “regulatory actions” proved prophetic. Since taking office in 2021, Biden signed several executive orders related to climate regulations and gave the Environment Protection Agency teeth by passing the Inflation Reduction Act.

Meanwhile, Biden’s revocation of the Keystone XL pipeline permit and other anti-fossil-fuel actions have led to skyrocketing gas prices. California joined the movement on the state level with the 2035 ban on the sale of new gas-powered vehicles.

Consumer interest in electric vehicles has increased since 2018, with 36 percent of Americans saying they plan to buy or lease an electric car, Consumer Reports recently found.

BlackRock Signals the Market

BlackRock has positions in 5,832 companies, according to its filings. And in 2021, it had “the strongest organic growth in our history,” generating $540 billion in net inflows (extra cash flowing into a company).

Also, in March 2021, BlackRock joined the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative as a signatory, committing itself to net zero alignments by 2050 or sooner.

As part of the move earlier this year, BlackRock announced that “an orderly transition to net zero by 2050 would benefit the global economy and our clients in aggregate.” Thus, “by 2030, at least 75 percent of BlackRock corporate and sovereign assets managed on behalf of clients will be invested in issuers with science-based targets or equivalent.”

In response to BlackRock’s move, Mindy Lubber, CEO and president at Ceres, said in a statement, “When the largest asset manager in the world ups its goal from 25 percent of such assets invested in science-based-target issuers to 75 percent of those assets, others should take note.

Lubber added that BlackRock’s new bar signaled to the rest of the market that “they need to adjust their investment strategies accordingly” because “the investor transition to a net zero emissions economy is well underway.”

BlackRock stated in its June 2022 Investment Institute report, the “transition towards a decarbonized economy is underway” and involves “a massive reallocation of resources.”

“Nearly 90 percent of the world economy now has net-zero commitments, while about half of major companies and financial institutions do,” the report said.

The corporate-government push to transition to net zero and electric vehicles is happening, and if companies get in BlackRock’s way, they risk financial loss. BlackRock did not return a request for comment.

Image by Blomst from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.