Which “Ecological Conversion?”

Ecological frenzy feeds on the fear of collapse and gives rise to many very different attitudes. Between the excesses, the integral ecology of the Church traces a path respectful of all balances which only achieves its full coherence in a process of conversion.

To make the libertine of thought feel how dizzying their emptiness is before the Everlasting, which understands them and which they can only try to understand, in order to prepare their souls for conversion – such is the famous approach of Pascalian apologetics. Fright as a propaedeutic. Anguish as a preamble to metaphysical conversion. And this is also the method of a certain ecology of the doom-and-gloom variety.

The call for “ecological conversion” is fueled by the anguish of collapse. It is necessary to describe a crisis so that the feeling of ecological urgency arises, and with it the call for a radical change of lifestyle, a reversal of perspectives. The almost metaphysical vertigo, which engenders the consideration of the fragility of life and its conditions of existence, therefore, seems to entail a religious attitude.

It is one of the paradoxes of our time to seek in ecology the most ultimate contradiction to its technical frenzy. As if the consumption of organic quinoa seeds could make modern humans forget their addiction to new technologies. The recent investitures of so many mayors bearing this label of ecology, during the last elections in France, revealed both the omnipresence of the question of ecology in people’s minds and the great diversity of realities that it covers. There is Cassandra with apocalyptic prophecies, aka, Greta Thunberg now consecrated as priestess and pythia of this new spiritual order, which has given rise to public demonstrations of disturbing fervor, when it does not use openly pagan voodoo rituals, as in the case, for example, of the term “Demeter” used in viticulture.

It may be enlightening to read on this subject, Murray Bookchin, a thinker who worried about the epidemic rise of a “spiritual” ecology, and according to whom ecological problems are emptied of all social content and reduced to a mythical interaction of natural forces. Even among some Christian environmentalists, it seems that the way to Heaven sometimes resembles a bike trail, so that the question arises whether the way is even now clearly understood. Thus the “Green Church” label recently set down by the French Bishops’ Conference might well raise questions. Should the epidemic rise of this spiritual ecology worry Catholics? Is it a prelude to a radical conversion of the soul towards its Creator and Savior, or an ersatz conversion within the Church itself?

It appears that the relationship that man has with the Earth, which welcomes and precedes him, brings to light three possible attitudes that engage the individual in various ways.

Surface Ecology

The first attitude is a surface ecology, well-intentioned but really just navel-gazing, and steeped in inconsistencies. This explains the paradox of the Whole Food movement in the United States, offering “organic” products from all over the world, and also prospering on the awareness of the undeniable ravages of an ultra-productivist agricultural policy on the other side of the Atlantic. The recent takeover of this sector by the giant Amazon shows how much the logic of the market has taken hold of this attitude to better serve increasingly hegemonic group interests. In La Cyberdépendance: pathologie de la connexion à l’outil Internet (Cyberdependence: Pathology of the Connection to Internet Use), the psychiatrist Philip Pongy writes: “Capitalism is a past master in the art of recovering everything, including its most critical and virulent opponents. Promoting conviviality on Twitter strengthens Silicon Valley. To talk about degrowth on TV is to serve the entertainment industry.”

Thus, the consumer who eats quinoa seeds and soybeans from the ends of the earth, after leaving the overheated gym, can afford good intentions at little cost. The attention paid to the nutritional quality of food from large-scale distribution only reinforces the domination of a system of culture and consumption, sinful in its very essence. This ecology in no way educates the selfishness of consumers, governed by their pleasure principle, but rather adorns their impulses with a green polish. It is therefore not a question of a conversion of the individual but of the exaltation of his desire. It is not surprising that this pageantry-ecology can culminate in the apology for PMA, or in protests, because the endocrine disruptors contained in the waters of the Seine from the contraceptive pills discharged by Parisians which are causing a sex-change in fish, thus promoting “gender fluidity” among the lower orders. The primacy of the individual at the expense of the Whole is thus the matrix of this first green imposture.

“Deep Ecology”

The obverse of this surface conversion, is the second attitude, which is not mistaken in calling itself “deep ecology.” This Malthusian and guilty ecology, far more ideological, makes the Whole triumph over the individual. Humans are too many; they are a parasite; potential polluters who can be easily intimated by their carbon footprint, and must be destroyed. The appalling number of vasectomy treatments, the new face of this thousand-headed hydra that is the culture of death, illustrates the dissemination of this thesis to the general public. This ideology of Greenpeace activists, who immolate themselves when a whale is slaughtered, or castrate themselves to avoid giving life, is part of a vegan and animalist movement ranging from the agit-prop of League 214 (which wants to highlight the suffering of animals by shocking acts) to the candidates of animalist parties that we saw appear during the last European campaigns. It is no longer a question of exalting the desires of the subject, but of refusing any preeminence of human nature.

In this new face of transhumanism, man is nothing more than the link in a chain of mammals, all equally capable of suffering, and therefore all potentially subjects of law. The regulations protecting farm animals are thus underpinned by the recognition of their sensitivity; that is to say, of their capacity to feel pleasure, suffering and emotions. In France, it is Article L214 of the Rural Code (codification of a law of 1976) which mentions their character as sensitive beings. In 2015, the Civil Code recognized that animals are sentient beings, who yet remain subject to the regimen of property. On January 29, 2021, the National Assembly adopted at first reading, with modifications, the bill aimed at strengthening the fight against animal abuse.

Integral Ecology

Consideration of the singular vocation of the human soul and the duties which bind it to Creation, which has no rights but towards which the human sou has duties, can resolve this antinomy. Man is not an animal like any other precisely because his freedom makes him capable of taking care of Creation that is entrusted to him. This answers the anti-speciesist.

Ecology can thus only be chosen in an integral way; that is to say, by involving all dimensions of existence, and by requiring coherence. Such a consideration, to which the luminous encyclical of Pope Francis, Laudato si, beckons, is therefore at the same time an ecology of nature, a human ecology and an ecology of peoples, with each of these three orders meriting its balance to be preserved by the application of a principle of precaution. Ecology, which seems dangerous when it abolishes all transcendence in order to spiritualize matter, takes on meaning if it opens a Franciscan path of poverty and sobriety that takes care of the common home by considering creation as the image of the Creator, a mirror of His greatness. The “ecological conversion” is therefore neither ontologically nor chronologically first – it is the consequence of the choice to follow Christ, so that the most successful model of ecological life is undoubtedly the monastery.

Maylis de Bonnières is a French educator in philosophy. (This article appears through the kind courtesy of La Nef. Translated from the French by N. Dass).

The featured image shows, “Rocky Mountain Waterfall,” by Albert Bierstadt, painted in 1898.

The Great Reset! The Gospel According To Klaus Schwab

There is a book everyone should read, an exceptional book, which promises to be among the classics of contemporary literature. It is Covid 19: The Great Reset. Its author is the humanist and scholar Klaus Schwab, the founder and president of the World Economic Forum in Davos, a club of people of the world. This group of merry fellows meets for a while to breathe the fresh air, experience the vertigo of the peaks and yodel about on barrels. In the evening, in front of a campfire, they reread aloud a few pages from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. They make money, of course, but they are aesthetes above all. Schwab’s masterpiece has still not gained much traction, even among nationalists camp, which is a pure scandal, so exquisite is its style and its precious content.

Schwab writes little, but when he writes posterity trembles. His style makes Christine Angot pass for Marcel Proust and Marc Lévy for Julien Gracq. “In today’s complex and adaptive world, the principle of non-linearity means that suddenly a fragile state can turn into a failed state and that, conversely, a failed state can see its situation improve with equal celerity thanks to the intermediation of international organizations or even an infusion of foreign capital.” What insights! What turn of phrase! We are struck by a very colorful style. To accomplish this task, Schwab enlisted the help of Thierry Malleret, an economist who writes as he thinks. Before publication, the book received feedback from a few bosses in the circle of reason. This is to say how much those who know how to make money have both taste and culture.

Herr Schwab’s book should be read as a road map, an economic and social program designed to meet the great challenges of the West after the epidemic. Schwab, not pondering the origins of Covid 19, however sees the virus as a real opportunity. Covid is a great and formidable opportunity to change society. Opportunity, they say, makes the thief. In short, this pandemic crisis reveals the limits of a global, technocratic and neo-liberal system. Schwab recognizes that this world, his world, is wrong, but it is up to people to pay the consequences, with or without their consent. The self-proclaimed and co-opted elites agree to change the system for the people to follow, so to speak.

The book was written in 2020, during the first lockdown. Undoubtedly motivated by boredom, Schwab discovered the vast range of possibilities offered by this peaceful, creative, enjoyable moment of retirement. In his ivory tower, he announces the color: “The worldwide crisis triggered by the coronavirus pandemic has no parallel in modern history.” This very subtle sentence makes it clear that the crisis and the management of this pandemic are the causes of the turmoil and damage the world is experiencing, not the virus itself. It is only at the end of his epic poem that Klaus von Ravensburg recognizes that Covid 19 will hardly kill anyone and that it will not make history. He could have announced this from the start; then he would not have needed to lay down a political program to change the entire face of the world. What shame! In his Introduction, Schwab continues, “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never.” What a relief!

Now, thanks to the Boss, we are sure of one thing: history is being written ante-covidium and post-covidium. Schwab, at the beginning of his book, explains that the Black Death caused profound changes in medieval society (the disappearance of chivalry and feudalism) and copies the effects of all that on to Covid to justify the Great Reset. What then does the Sumo Poeta advocate? A confinement of one to two years, more or less strict, followed by generalized vaccination. Then will come the great changes necessary for humanity. When you have twisted, creeped out, oppressed a population to such an extent, it is not difficult to make them submit to any change. His Majesty, the Lord of the Flies is such a genius that Machiavelli himself could not have done better to manipulate his people. Because the Covid, he explains, is changing our society, it is imperative to change the program and reinvent ourselves, based on four major ideas: a new capitalism in the light of technology, the ecological emergency, universal healthcare, and inclusion of minorities. These notions complement each other and are linked to each other.

Containment and measures require working remotely and therefore being hyperconnected. Many people will have to adapt, others will lose their jobs. We must therefore rethink a more just, egalitarian and ethical capitalism. Because the virus is, according to him, linked to global warming, it is urgent to save the planet. He who says climate change, also says climate -regulation. Deregulation is therefore a malfunction: only technical measures are able to resolve it. This is without counting on the youth who believe in progress and who are able to save what we have as the most precious thing: the earth. Because the virus affects our lives, our relationships, and kills thousands of people around the world every day, it is necessary, to protect ourselves and others, to wear a mask, to adopt concrete measures, to respect new rules of distance, to be vaccinated. Death, on the model of the climate, is a disruption of life, a deviance, a problem. We must therefore find the means to resolve death. And all this on behalf of others. We find the thought of Master Attali and his concept of altruism already formulated for forty years in his opera omnia. Many people, ante-covidum, from among minorities were excluded. We must therefore rethink a more just, green world, based on inclusion, tolerance and progress.

Graf von Schwab speaks of benevolence in the last chapter of his book. It’s really cute! Nationalists, identitarians, ardent defenders of sovereignty, of tradition, are villains who are in retreat. Obscurantism, intolerance. It’s all terrible. It’s all about openness and sharing. It is only fair that His Holiness Klaus VI does not ask us to be charitable and make a donation for the little lepers. Wisely, he advocates “reinventing our mind map,” striving for ethical capitalism and “being creative.” The Right Reverend Abbot even becomes a Rousseauist, when he tells us that “nature is a formidable antidote,” and adds that “it will gradually become essential to pay more attention to our natural assets.”

It is all beautiful, very beautiful even, but it does not exist. At Strasbourg Cathedral, we find the statue of the Tempter. The young man, charming, seductive, offers a cut to whoever desires it, but on his back swarm toads, scorpions and snakes. Likewise, behind every beautiful and good idea that Jean Jacques Schwab and Klaus Rousseau articulate, hides the devil himself.

Remember that an idea is not generous, it is true or false. To quantify happiness, kindness, altruism in a society, is confusingly ridiculous, gross stupidity. In other words, well-nigh dotage. Likewise, “nauseating,” rancid “are not concepts, just as kindness is not a given that can enter political, economic or social thought. Schwab pretends to advise the world. He wants to appear to controls events, knows everything and foresees everything in advance. He is a man who has too much influence and too much power for his own good and ours. He thinks his ideas are necessarily the best because he and his friends have a lot of money. Parody is added to megalomania, ridicule to dotage, mediocrity, role-playing. This great pontiff from the University of Geneva has the historical and philosophical knowledge of a passable student in a management school. He looks like a Z-List Goldfinger who doesn’t understand he’s dead-end, out of touch, a nerd long past his sell-by date.

This book, a tonic cocktail of muscular Attali, ultimately offers nothing new of what has been known since Alain Minc’s Happy Globalization of 1997. Nothing learned, nothing understood. There is not an extra gram of imagination; it’s poor and repetitive like a pulp novel. The world elite has neither thought nor genius. It’s the little utopia of a banker who only knows the world by going back and forth between a Sofitel and two airports. These globalists claim to be at the forefront of modernity, advocate openness, but have a narrow and stunted view of the world. Schwab talks about money, people, the others, the land and the world; these are abstractions which do not refer to anything real. Has he been out on the streets over the last ten years? I doubt it.

The minstrel from across the Rhine brilliantly asserts ready-made truths, ideas thrown into the air; gives figures without a source; demonstrates nothing, but announces; makes shortcuts, bordering on sabotage; launches studies as if they were going out of style. When ideas are a little hard to find, Schwab turns into a commentator, exhibitor, and calls on experts who are always on his side, friends of his. Such is European governance. When the ideas are sympathetic, he becomes a decision-maker and prescriber, with the peremptory tone of a wise man among the wise who has inhaled a little too much Alain Minc, extra fine.

This book is the Oktoberfest of BS. Let’s have a laugh, then: ” a vacuum of global governance and the rise of various forms of nationalism make it more difficult to deal with the outbreak;” ” As the critique of economic growth moves to centre stage, consumerism’s financial and cultural dominance in public and private life will be overhauled;” “COVID-19 was a determining element: George Floyd’s death was the spark that lit the fire of social unrest.” Hats off to the artist!

The big reset is a Davos-style mafia stunt: we take Godfather; take out the spaghetti; put sauerkraut instead – and we have Schwab. It’s a tour de force, a huge hostage-taking. President of the global crime syndicate, he says nothing about the terrible consequences of this great reset. He recognizes that ” The global economy is so intricately intertwined that it is impossible to bring globalization to an end.”

Destroying millions of jobs as a result of the Covid, Schwab concedes, putting people into unemployment, replacing part of the workforce with robots, would be an evil, certainly, but a necessary evil: ” In all likelihood, the recession induced by the pandemic will trigger a sharp increase in labour-substitution, meaning that physical labour will be replaced by robots and ‘intelligent’ machines, which will in turn provoke lasting and structural changes in the labour market.”

For example, there is this very enigmatic sentence: “The small restaurants that survive the crisis will have to reinvent themselves entirely.” What? Will they have to succumb to Uberization, subcontracting, giving way to large restaurant chains that can make both pizzas and sushi? Just water off of Schwab’s back. Technological, hyperconnected capitalism therefore promises the collapse of part of the wage and entrepreneurial middle-class, and an increased and definitive polarization between the richest, blessed with globalized metropolises, and the poor in “not very interesting” jobs.

Schwab is not unhappy to see all the structures blow up for the benefit of the individual, atomized, who is then more apt to subscribe to globalism, to the law of victimized minorities, to youthism. Better stray sheep than a strong flock that lives on. Ecology with Schwab becomes globalism, since it gives the individual, wherever he comes from, consumer and employee, the responsibility of saving the planet, the climate, the seas. Only this ecology is just the flip side of the same coin which faces capitalism, financial domination. Doctor Klaus and Mister Schwab do not say everything: behind the idea that death would be a mistake, hides the desire to impose a generalized post-covidium surveillance company: ” the containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise.”

After all, new viruses will emerge because of global warming. In the name of the good, that is, health, Frankenschwab wants a society of testing, tracing, a kind of global health dictatorship established by governments and maneuvered by the exploits of technology. It is reminiscent of the fact that a dictatorship is never imposed in the name of evil, of dominating in order to dominate, but always in the name of a higher and collective good. Tyrants are, above all, the little fathers of peoples. Small tasty detail – Schwaby goes so far as to recommend connected toilets to control our health, just in case the mess of the day before does not bode well. What a brilliant idea!

Schwab is committed body and soul to the “vanguard of social change.” Of course, societal progressivism, in the absence of a real social struggle, always makes it possible to rescue capitalism and accept its rule. Schwab is, as Audiard would say, a synthesis. Jean Claude Michéa speaks of a liberal-libertarian alliance. It’s Cohn-Bendit, just a bit less despicable; Thunberg in a necktie. In other words, we allow surrogacy and assisted reproduction in the name of individual freedoms. But we are also fully masked and are subject to curfew. Everything is allowed, but nothing is possible, as Michel Clouscard said.

Schwab will also have to explain to us how he intends to “to rethink governments’ role.” All this, of course, will happen through one world government: ” if both the nation state and globalization flourish, then democracy becomes untenable.” And to continue further: ” A hasty retreat from globalization would entail trade and currency wars, damaging every country’s economy, provoking social havoc and triggering ethno- or clan nationalism.

The establishment of a much more inclusive and equitable form of globalization that makes it sustainable, both socially and environmentally, is the only viable way to manage retreat. This requires policy solutions addressed in the concluding chapter and some form of effective global governance.” Living in a green and completely sanitary world will not lead to the best of all possible worlds. In the name of ecology, one could think of excessive taxation, repeated confinements, the one-child policy, the establishment of a tax on the air we breathe. Nothing like paradise.

Emperor Palpatine’s words are so contradictory, once one gets lost in his intentions. He struggles to bring out a good idea, floundering in his book as on the Bodensee during a vacation. The end of the book, which we finished with disgust, so much did the language of this Kojak of Davos sicken us, nevertheless did warn us. These changes will be painful, and not everyone will make it. Without being threatening, Schwab draws back, slithers about, dodges. Does this mean that we will have to get rid of part of the harmful and recalcitrant population and return to global Malthusianism in the name of ecology and health?

In 2009, at the Copenhagen summit, physicist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber said: “This is a triumph for science because at least we have managed to stabilize something; namely, the estimate of the carrying capacity of the planet, that is to say, one billion people. What a triumph! On the other hand, do we want to come to this? I think we can do a lot better!” In France, Laurent Alexandre and Jean Marc Jancovici, in a work of evangelism of the young elites of the country, decreed that there would be for tomorrow the men-gods, mastering technology; and the others, the slaves, the unproductive, minimum wage-earners who pollute because of their overly high standard of living. We will have to think about what we want.

Is this book a program? Some will readily see the trajectory of the reset taking shape. Schwab also enjoys, let’s be honest, the conspiratorial aura that revolves around his multinational organization. Because he has influence and an address book, he is credited with the means to do harm. Does he really have the means? There is something terribly burlesque, even parodic, in the way he plays rector mundi. This book is in many ways a dotard’s dream, the masturbatory delirium of a bourgeois globalist in front of his little comrades. Doubt is possible. Let’s hope that Schwab does not become a prophet.

Nicolas Kinosky is at the Centres des Analyses des Rhétoriques Religieuses de l’Antiquité. This articles appears through the very kind courtesy of Monsieur Christophe Geffroy of La Nef. Translation from the French by N. Dass.

The featured image shows, “A four-footed monster,” a print by Samuel De Wilde, printed in 1807.

For the Birds and the Rest of Us

Whether your only experience with birds is that of chasing away pigeons stubbornly trying to nest on your balcony, or whether you spent your last pre-Covid vacation trudging through tropical forest in search of the elusive Pinto’s Spinetail, Richard Pope’s Flight from Grace: A Cultural History of Humans and Birds (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) is a must read. Passionately engaged, wide-ranging, eye-opening, witty, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, the book asks the readers to consider the relationship of humans and birds throughout the millennia, ultimately posing a sobering question: is humanity willing to do anything to stop the extinction of birds that is occurring at a shocking and ever-accelerating rate.

Pope, a distinguished scholar of Russian literature and culture, poet, writer, and a dedicated bird-watcher, brings a scholarly rigour but also a delightful sense of humour and a decidedly fresh perspective to an examination of how humanity thought of birds from the time that humans could think.
His account of the fraught human-bird relationship begins with prehistoric art, images of birds found in caves so deep in the earth that getting there is a terrifying and hazardous journey even today. It is in these caves, or as Pope memorably describes them, these “vast, hidden power sites deep underground in the forbidden realm of powerful spirits…ideal spots for vision quests, rituals, and magic…[like] geodes—plain and unprepossessing on the outside but repositories of stunning beauty inside” (13). that we find images of birds.

Most of these bird images—some painted and some scratched into the cave surface—yield little information to a non-birder. Pope, on the other hand, encountering a 30,000-year-old etching of what is, to the non-initiated, a vaguely-owlish looking bird on the wall of the French Chauvet Cave, teases out a wealth of insights: the etching is most likely that of the Eurasian eagle-owl, “a top predator of impressive size and fierceness, perhaps the largest owl in the world” that frequently inhabits caves; the parallel markings on the body are actually indicative of a back view, with wings folded and “its full face twisted at 180 degree angle to look straight at us over its back” (18). Owls, in case you didn’t know, are among the very few creatures to be able to rotate their faces fully—“something else that makes owls unique and magical…Owls see all” (18). It is inconceivable, Pope argues, that the Owl of Chauvet was drawn only for aesthetic satisfaction; instead, “The owl, in the most sacrosanct part of the cave, was a bird deity with power and capabilities” (19).

Beginning with the Paleolithic owl deity, Pope takes the reader on a dynamic six-chapter tour through time and space, with chapters dedicated to the sacred birds of Mesopotamia and Egypt; Peru; and those of Greece and the Judeo-Christian world. Altogether, it is an impressive demonstration of how an early worship of bird deities morphed into the bird goddesses of the Neolithic era, and then—as humans became more anthropocentric in their outlook—into anthropomorphic gods whose sacred status was reinforced by an addition of wings or who had bird avatars: from the owl deity to the owl of Athena. Here again, Pope’s avian lens allows him to re-examine and challenge well-established conventions. For example, in Homer’s epics, Athena is described as glaukoopis; for those of us who need to brush up on our Classical Greek, Pope helpfully explains that glaukos, when applied to eyes, usually means green or blue, which is how her eyes are rendered in most translations. But another meaning of glaukos (gleaming) is connected to glauks (owl), because that is how the owl’s huge eyes appear to the observer. In Athena’s case, Pope posits, the word really means “owl-eyed, in reference to her knowing glare and that of the bird she once was” (119).

Owls were not the only birds to be deified. Vultures (associated with the cult of the dead), ibises, eagles, doves, and a host of other birds were worshipped for one reason or another, and their images, statues, figurines, and objects associated with them were documented at countless archeological sites all over the world. But why this worship of birds? What is it that makes birds so special and exciting to humans? Pope points to two main factors: flight and song, and devotes two thoroughly documented and lavishly-illustrated chapters to each of these in the second part of his book.

Flight is almost solely associated with birds and, Pope contends, is one of the main reasons for seeing birds as sacred: “flight is miraculous and godlike…and wings are its agent and symbol,” which is why severed avian wings abound in Paleolithic sites (136). From winged ancient goddesses like Ishtar, to winged Greek gods and winged magical creatures, such as Pegasus, wings have always been perceived as the sign of divinity. Drawing on his expertise of working with medieval texts, Pope shows how wings were assigned to angels in Christian iconography from fourth-century onward as a way of visually identifying them as divine (halos were already taken for saints). Pope quotes John Chrystostom, a fourth-century Christian theologian, who explains that angels are shown flying “not because angels have wings…[but to show] the loftiness of their nature. The wings, then, reveal the lofty natures of the powers above” (142). Humans, as ancient myths suggest, and Renaissance-era sketches confirm, have always longed to replicate bird flight, a mark of divinity, and failed to achieve it until recent times, although as Pope points out, flight by plane “is a mere surrogate for real, unassisted flight, and is entirely lacking in magic” (136).

Besides envying the birds their flight, humans have been enthralled by their song. Because of the association of birds with the divine, it was assumed since ancient times that bird song carried arcane knowledge (hence, Roman augurs who specialized in interpreting the will of the gods through birdsong). It is birdsong, Pope contends, that “tightly links humans and birds to each other and both of them to the divine” (164). According to neurobiologists, he writes, humans are closer to songbirds than to their closest relative, the great apes, when it comes to speech acquisition; humans and birds also share a surprising number of neurological similarities. Over and above that, humans and birds share the sheer joy of making music (it turns out that avian brains flood with pleasurable dopamine when they sing), something that poets knew all along, Pope shows, by citing lines about birdsong from the poems of Shelley, Frost, Keats, and other poets.

Indeed, one the many delights of the book is Pope’s readiness to support and further his claims not only by mining various archeological, anthropological, zoological, neurobiological, ecological, and historical sources, but also by finding illustrations in sources as diverse as the Qur’an, Dante, Schopenhauer, Mozart, Lucretius, the Venerable Bede, Marx, J.K. Rowling, and—taking advantage of his superb knowledge of Russian literature and culture—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Russian icons, Russian medieval tales, and so forth. There is also a plethora of photographs of various bird-related artifacts, some of them little known and stunningly beautiful, and of birds themselves, as well as paintings by El Greco, Chagall, and others. The book itself, in fact, is an object of beauty, with the jacket, by the award-winning jacket designer David Drummond, showing a detail from a Georgian-era portrait, where a bright yellow bird perches trustingly on a shoulder of a young woman, and with the light-blue front and sunny-yellow back flaps evoking bird plumage, but also the skies and the sunshine of the birds’ higher element. Pope would have undoubtedly pointed out here (as he does in the book) that we share our sense of aesthetics with the birds.

All this beauty makes the ugly picture that Pope unfolds for us in the ultimate section of the book, titled “Our Betrayal of Birds,” even more shocking. Pope’s central thesis is that as humans moved toward anthropocentrism from the Neolithic era onward, and developed modes of thinking which encouraged homo sapiens to see himself as separate from and towering above all the other species on the planet, our attitude toward all other creatures who share the planet with us became shamelessly predatory. Focussing on the Western Civilization, Pope argues that Judaism and Christianity, in particular, promoted a worldview in which man was created in an image of a non-animistic god, and completely separated from his fellow creatures, and that the rise of science during the Age of Reason drove “the last nail into the coffin of animistic thought” (219) with dire consequences for our fellow creatures.

Taking among his examples the lines from Genesis 9:2-3, about God telling Noah that all beasts, fowl, fishes, and other creatures are delivered into his hand, Pope makes the case that Judaism and Christianity convinced followers that all non-human life forms are to be used as humans see fit. One could, of course, counter this argument by pointing, for example, to the prohibition in Deuteronomy against plowing with a donkey and an ox tethered together, as God’s directive that mankind should take care of animals and their needs. Nonetheless, the evidence that Pope marshals of the appalling ways humans have actually been treating their fellow beings, namely birds, over the last two millennia is both disturbing and undeniable. That birds should be treated this way, creatures whom we have once worshipped and who still obsess us (Pope writes that almost 1 in 4 North Americans is a bird enthusiast), is particularly outrageous.

We have killed birds for their meat, their feathers (as part of our fashion industry and our cultural practices—ceremonial headdresses made out of eagle plumes, birds of paradise feathers, and the like), their habitats (forests cleared for farmland and golf courses), the damage they do to crops (forgetting that they also kill insects that wipe out our crops), for science (no matter how inane the experiment and how obscure its purpose), for exercise (hunting), for fun (that’s how the great auk became extinct), on purpose and inadvertently (the bird population of the island of Guan was wiped out after the unintentional introduction of the brown tree snake). Pope pulls no punches: we are all culpable, from industries and large corporations, to small-time farmers, to denizens of tall buildings (bright lights confuse and kill migrating birds), to backyard gardeners (depriving birds of food by dousing our plantings with herbicides and insecticides), to cat owners (free-roaming cats kill “between 1.3 billion and 4 billion” birds a year [202]). We, humans, homo sapiens, the species, are responsible for the decline of bird populations throughout the world and for the extinction of 190 species of birds in the last 500 years alone (currently, 1,200 species are under threat of extinction). No wonder Pope chose as an epigraph for his concluding chapter the words of the embittered prophet Jeremiah: “Destruction upon destruction is cried…all the birds of the heavens were fled.”

But Pope’s book is not a dirge—it is a call to action. Any student of Russian literature will recognize the title of his last chapter, “What is to be Done?” as the title of the 1863 radical novel written by Nikolai Chernyshevsky with a prescription of how to take Russia to a radiant future—a novel frequently called a revolutionary’s handbook. Pope is also advocating for a revolution—a revolution in how we think about birds and nature itself. We, humans, are not that different from birds, nor are we separate from nature, and the decisions that we make in our everyday life must take into consideration our larger home and all of our fellow residents, feathered and not. Ultimately, we must become “better stewards of the earth” (240).

Unlike the utopist Chernyshevsky, however, Pope cannot be accused of naivety: “Because of our propensity for violence, our greed, and our selfishness,” he writes, “it is unlikely that we humans will act collectively and soon to halt the degradation of our biosphere…Most people simply do not care and are quite unwilling to make any sacrifice for nature if it entails any degree of discomfort for themselves” (245). All the same, Pope points out, if we are too corrupt as a society to act collectively, we can still act individually—in fact, we must, even in the face of failure: “Make no mistake about it,” he writes, “the issue is one of morality.” To that end, Pope provides a 13-point practical list of what each one of us can do to “slow down and even prevent some of this degradation [of the biosphere], helping birds and other animals to survive and giving our own lives more meaning through ethical conduct and a closeness to our environment” (239).

Essentially, Pope proposes that each one of us becomes a dissident within our criminally indifferent society, no matter how hopeless it might seem. Citing Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s position on the “ontological existence of evil and its unstoppable nature,” Pope comes to the same conclusion: “We may not be able to stop [the desecration of nature], but we can refuse to abet it” (233). Is it a foolish act when seen in the context of the seemingly inexorable degeneration of our biosphere and our individual helplessness? Perhaps. But Pope leaves us with this thought: “True folly is to assume that we will not damage ourselves severely if we sit back and just watch as others recklessly damage the planet” (248). A world without birds is a horrible prospect. Let’s hope it never comes to pass.

Maria Bloshteyn, PhD, researches Russia and the West and is the author of The Making of a Counter-Culture Icon: Henry Miller’s Dostoevsky. She is also a literary translator and has published Alexander Galich’s Dress Rehearsal: A Story in Four Acts and Five Chapters, and Anton Chekhov’s The Prank.  Her various translations have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Her most recent book is Russia Is Burning. Poems of the Great Patriotic War.

The featured image shows, “Young woman with parrot,” by Frédéric-Pierre Tschaggeny, painted in 1872.

How To Slay The Climate Change Dragon

In our time, as truth corrodes, myths become necessary. As people drift away from truth, they readily agree to intrusive governments – and such invasive governments give consent to supranational entities and conglomerates who then use myths to manufacture political, social and economic consent.

The sales-force that sells these fictive narratives is the vast media-education-entertainment complex which employs, for such purposes, the punditry of experts, the professoriate, globe-trotting zealots, and sanctimonious thespians. Any dissent from these fables is decried, ridiculed, and suppressed.

One such myth is CO2 in the role of the arch-enemy, Hades-bent on heating up the planet, until life becomes impossible; and it is treacherous human activity that has set free this culprit into the hapless atmosphere to work havoc. After much struggle with vile traitors who greedily serve the villain CO2, and their henchmen, the climate change deniers, a few wise politicians and selfless NGOs will finally hurl CO2 into the netherworld of Zero Emissions, from which it will never rise again. Thus, the planet was saved and is now inhabited by fewer but better humans.

People love stories. The more far-fetched the better. The greater the lies, the more believable it is.

The reality is that the monster, the villain is not CO2 and the Greenhouse Effect. The monster is the myth itself, whereby human life – and the very future of humanity – is being asked to conform to the dictates of the lie that is “catastrophic climate change.” An entire complex of anti-human strategies are now justified by way of this lie – carbon taxes, deindustrialization, veganism, fossil fuel divestment,a green economy, population reduction, Gaia worship, green ethics – a brave new world.

It is precisely this global warming, catastrophic climate change myth that The Sky Dragon Slayers. Victory Lap sets out to slay. This book is a follow-up to the earlier work, Slaying the Sky Dragon. Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, which was published in 2011, and which, as the title suggests, did destroy the pretense to “science” that revilers of CO2 leaned upon.

But in the ensuing decade, the myth of global warming has become more deeply entrenched – a lie that must not be questioned. Why this has happened is an important question, and it points to the success of the mythographers, who have a very clever trick up their sleeve – namely, the denial of truth.

Thus, we are supposed to be living in a “post-truth” world, in which “truth” is nothing more than a social construct, where there is only “your truth” and “my truth.” Such “truth” is personal preference, personal taste. In this way, both purpose and meaning are called into question, which brings about cynicism and gullibility; and, thus, people are the more easily led by “thought-leaders,” who serve many masters.

In such a hollowed-out world, climate change is packaged as piety. As Tim Ball observes in his Foreword to the book, “It is hard to believe that such false information as that created and perpetuated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continues to exist. Worse, it goes almost unquestioned and is the prevailing view.”

Ken Coffman in his Publisher’s Note succinctly captures the dynamics of this piety: “We have to give credit to the manipulators – they achieved a lot based on nearly nothing. The human-caused global warming was destructive, wrong and stupid, but masterful use of hyperbole and fear-mongering.”

Earlier, Coffman had noted, “There is no limit to the ways a bad theory can be false.” It soon becomes obvious that the climate change myth is not about science – but about power – and to those who manage the levers of power, truth will always be inconvenient and dangerous, and must, therefore, be suppressed. Truth is the greatest foe of ideology.

The Sky Dragon Slayers. Victory Lap offers this truth which is dangerous to those who sell the climate change myth. Thus, in Chapter 1, the entire premise of climate alarmism, of irreversible, catastrophic natural changes, brought about by human activity, is systematically dismantled and then destroyed.

The weapon which slays this mythic beast is the precise definition of what science really is and what it is not. The first Chapter carefully differentiates between the traditional scientific method and “post-normalism.” The former is empirical, rational, and cumulative, where predictions become laws when they can be repeated and always yield the same results. These results become evidence which leads to conclusions, or laws, about reality.

Here, Karl Popper’s famous paradigm serves as a guiding principle: “In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.” In other words, truth is first known by evidence and then truth is known by how it is lied about. In our era, post-truth is the lie about truth.

We have to bear in mind that those in power have persuaded many that biological reality of the two sexes is a lie, while the lie of gender-fluidity, that a person can choose his/her own sex – is the truth. This is precisely what Popper meant by falsifiability. We can know truth, when others feel an urgent need to lie about it.

This lying is post-normalism, which stems from norm criticism and intersectionality; both are now de rigueur in all of academia. This means that, by and large, to be educated nowadays means to believe in and promote lies. In such a topsy-turvy world, post-normalist science serves power, not truth, since “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent,” as per Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz.

Such flapdoodle, always uttered with a very serious face, is about managing and controlling the “stakes” and the “decisions,” in which science must be nothing more than another rhetorical device to brainwash people.

This is made rather plain, in case of any doubt, by the academic Mike Hulme: “Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although evidence will gain some insights into the question if it recognizes the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists – and politicians – must trade (normal) truth for influence.” Post-normal “science” is politics by other means.

Thus, climate change is not about the climate – it is not about the environment. Instead, it is an absurd attempt to play God – to change how life exists on the planet. And this existence is to benefit the few, rather than the many, via the Fourth and the Fifth Industrial Revolutions – the point being to cull humanity, so it can pollute less. The shade of Malthus once again raises its head. We are in a death-struggle between two opposing views of humanity. One sees human beings as a harmful virus in the body of noble Gaia, which must be controlled, if not eradicated – and the other which sees great value in human life. It is an epic battle between good and evil.

After Chapter 1, which is the longest of the book, the remaining chapters serve as mop-up operations, in which the various limbs of the dragon that is catastrophic climate change are lopped off and destroyed.

Thus, Chapter 2 tosses the famous Hockey Stick Graph into the dustbin of history. As is well known, this graph, the fabrication of Michael Mann, was the show-piece of the IPCC, and made famous by Al Gore – and it remains to this day the most iconic image of climate alarmists. It purported to “prove” that CO2 trapped heat like a blanket and thus heated up the planet, until life would eventually become impossible.

Things came to a head for Mann when he filed a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Dr. Tim Ball, who had quipped that Mann was from Penn State but more properly belonged in the state pen, given his many falsifications of data.

Throughout this ordeal, Dr. Ball insisted that he wanted Mann to show his “secret science,” or the R2 Regression Numbers, in court, which Mann claimed he had used to fashion his Hockey Stick Chart, aka the Hokey Schtick. The Supreme Court of British Columbia dismissed Mann’s lawsuit and awarded the defendant Ball full legal costs. Such is the cunning of reason – Mann was undone by the very mechanism he had devised to destroy Dr. Ball. God indeed works in mysterious ways!

Chapter 3 guts the myth of the Greenhouse Effect, which is still taught as monolithic truth throughout the education system because it is post-normal science. According to the IPCC (whose usefulness would vanish in a trice if it had to rely on truth rather than post-normal science) the Greenhouse Effect is to be described in this way:

  • The Earth’s surface is warmed by both the Sun and the energy coming back from the atmosphere.
  • The Earth’s surface in turn radiates all the energy, which is wholly absorbed by the atmosphere.
  • The atmosphere then radiates half of that energy into space and the other half back to the Earth’s surface.
  • The result of this continual process is that the Earth’s surface becomes warmer than it would be if it were only warmed by the Sun.

In this model, CO2 becomes a heat-trapping blanket enwrapping the planet. The solution, therefore, is a straightforward one – get rid of the blanket! Hence, all those calls to reduce the “carbon footprint,” to stop using dirty fuels, to save the planet from reaching a “tipping-point,” from which there will be no return. And so forth.

Although this fuels climate alarmism very efficiently, this myth, of course, has nothing to do with scientific facts. The atmosphere is colder than the earth’s surface, so heat cannot bounce back from above, because “colder cannot heat hotter.” Energy is not wholly absorbed by the atmosphere. Some of it escapes into space, the rest is stored in the earth and the oceans and is used to evaporate water.

Any energy that returns to the earth from the atmosphere is always colder, never hotter than the earth’s surface. Therefore, energy returning from the atmosphere can never heat up the planet. All the four points promoted by the IPCC are in fact lies – or, rather, they are post-normal science. It is the sun which heats the planet, while excess heat is radiated out into space.

Chapters 4 and 5 are historical in nature, as they trace the development of various radiation theories, from 1871 to 2010. All the models proposed during these nearly 140-years cannot together prove that heat radiated back to the earth from the atmosphere does actually heat the planet.

In 2010, Claes Johnson called into question the theories of Max Planck and Albert Einstein – and thereby clearly demonstrated that “HEAT can ONLY be transferred from the warmer to the colder body as required by the 2nd law of thermodynamics.”

Chapter 6 is a summary of a paper by George V. Chilingar, which shows that CO2, in fact, cools the planet rather than heats it up. This happens because as “the infrared radiation is absorbed by the molecules of greenhouse gases, its energy is transformed into thermal expansion of air, which causes convective fluxes of air masses restoring the adiabatic distribution of temperature in the troposphere… estimates show that release of small amounts of carbon dioxide (several hundreds PPM), which are typical for the scope of anthropogenic emission, do not influence the global temperature of Earth’s atmosphere.” Thus, the myth of global warming is slain.

Chapter 7 records the results of an experiment conducted by Professor Nasif Nahle, with IR thermometers and radiometers, in which he shows that back-radiation from the atmosphere to the Earth’s surface is not real. As Nahle explains, “It is very clear from Thermodynamics and Stefan-Boltzmann Laws that heat is transferred exclusively from warmer surfaces towards cooler systems, never the opposite, and this experiment demonstrates, it is applicable to [the] climate system.” Again, global warming is a lie.

Chapter 8 lays out the experiment carried out by Carl Brehmer in which he shows that the positive water vapor feedback hypothesis is false. The premise of this hypothesis is that “if something increases the Earth’s temperature, this will cause an increase in the evaporation of water into water vapor.”

This leads to increased humidity, which in turn absorbs more infrared radiation from the earth’s surface, thus warming the air and allowing it to hold more water vapor. This supposedly leads to more evaporation, so that humidity continually increases, thus heating up the planet.

By way of a series of experiments, Brehmer discovers that although it is true that higher temperatures create higher humidity through evaporation – it is not true that higher humidity leads to warming. In fact, humidity has a cooling effect, whereby areas that produce higher humidity are cooler than arid areas. This means that “water acts as the Earth’s thermostat and not its heater.”

This falsifies “any notion that there could ever be runaway global warming driven by positive water vapor feedback where the oceans evaporate into the atmosphere and all life on Earth perishes. Why? Because ‘water feedback’ is negative feedback… the presence of water on our planet acts as a stabilizing force, exerting negative feedback against temperature change – up or down.” Evaporation, therefore, continually stabilizes temperature. It cannot increase temperature.

Chapter 9 is a very important study, by Tamarkin and Bromley, of carbon dioxide. Currently, two views predominate. The first is scientific in that CO2 is the “gas of life,” which provides the carbon that all life on this planet needs. Then, there is the post-normal view, promoted by the IPCC, which regards CO2 as a pollutant and which, therefore, must be eliminated.

Given the funding-clout and global influence of the IPCC, it is the latter view that is the norm and which resonates the most with the public at large, because it is easily comprehensible and requires a straight forward plan of action – get rid of the pollutant. To manufacture consent, various computer models have been generated which use the “Radiated Greenhouse Emissions” theory for the usual alarmist predictions – if we do not do something right now, the climate will change so drastically that life on this planet will become difficult if not next to impossible.

As Tamarkin and Bromley rightly remark: “No demonstrable, empirical evidence of this theory is available. No signs of anthropogenic climate change have been discovered.” Even the much-repeated statistic that humans are responsible for increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 33 percent is entirely false – because actual evidence shows that manmade carbon dioxide is so low that it cannot even be measured and burning fossil fuels does not impact climate change.

In other words, the only “evidence” is a mathematical computer model, which is contrived to fulfill the demands of alarmist ideology – because the conclusions suggested by this model cannot be observed in nature, nor recreated in experiments. Thus, the political notion of catastrophic climate change, because of Radiated Greenhouse Emissions, is fake news, a grand hoax. More post-normal science hard at work to strip you of your freedom and your dollars.

But more worrying is the fact that this hoax is responsible for affecting real human lives. Politicians are busy implementing real-world policies to counter the effects of a theoretical, computer model. If all this were not so tragic – it would all come off as a silly comedy skit. But the carbon taxes, the war on fossil fuels, the demand for population reduction, the clamor for a one-world government (which might the more effectively “save” this planet via policies that will continually curtail and ultimately deny human freedom) – all these are becoming startlingly real.

Far from destroying the planet as a “pollutant,” CO2 is actually greening the planet, because it is the basis of all life on earth. Also, measurement of infrared radiation suggests that the planet is actually cooling rather than heating up. These various cooling and warming events are natural – and not the result of human activity.

Chapter 10 is the “victory lap,” which details the various achievements of the many brave and resolute scientists who did not kowtow to the IPCC nor submit to political pressure and agree to produce “post-normal science.” Here is a brief list of the changes brought about by these valiant men and women:

  • The foremost British climate scientist, Dr. Phil Jones, admitted that the so-called “historic” temperature data was fake. This became known as the “Climategate scandal.”
  • The work of George Chilingar and John Robertson has positively impacted heat transfer physics, so that other scientists also now agree that adiabatic pressure accounts for the variance in temperature – a process in which CO2 plays no part whatsoever.
  • In 2017, a group of Italian scientists was forced to admit that climate models are “very likely flawed,” since there has been no warming trend over the past century. This means that the greenhouse gas theory can no longer be sustained.
  • It is now known that there is no “tipping point” whatsoever, since carbon dioxide does not drive temperature change.
  • Oxford University’s Myles Allen has conceded that there is no rapid warming happening anywhere on the planet.
  • William Happer of Princeton University admits that the various climate change models do not work because they are fundamentally flawed: “They haven’t worked in the past. They don’t work now. And it’s hard to imagine when, if ever, they’ll work in the foreseeable future.” In other words, climate alarmism has no basis whatsoever in science.
  • Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger of the Cato Institute and the journal, Nature Geoscience, now acknowledge that warming has been on the low end of all model predictions for the last sixty years.
  • Kenneth Richard compiled evidence from over thirty peer-reviewed papers, which showed that all the regions of the earth have been cooling over recent decades. Richard then asks a pertinent question: “One has to wonder how and from where a large net ‘global warming’ signal could have been obtained when there has been so much regional cooling.” Obviously, the answer is simple “global warming” is a lie.
  • In 2012, the influential science magazine, Nature, also admitted that climate change science was “riddled with systematic errors.”
  • In 2017, Nokolov and Zeller affirmed that the “heat-trapping mechanism” that brings about global warming is nothing more than a theoretical conjecture, with no science to back it up. In other words, it is a myth.
  • Russian scientists have recently shown that global warming is DOA.

Chapter 11 summarizes the great work being done by Principia Scientific International (PSI), which has long fought for real science and truth. Its aim is to “shun the vagaries of political advocacy,” and to refuse to be subordinated to the “moralizing pre-determinism of discredited ‘post normal’ science.” PSI is sustained by the unpaid and voluntary work and effort of its many members who are dedicated to the pursuit of truth no matter what the personal cost.

The monster, the dragon that is catastrophic climate change has long been slain – the news of its death has yet to be universally acclaimed. It was slain by the efforts of all those serious scientists who refused to abandon truth for political rhetoric. Their courageous work is meticulously recorded in The Sky Dragon Slayers. Victory Lap, which ends on a very hopeful note, because truth can never be defeated, though is may be suppressed for a time. The final words of this marvelous, engaging, and deeply informative book are prophetic in the true sense – “The momentum is ours.”

The Sky Dragon Slayers. Victory Lap is a book that everyone must read, because it is a thorough and precise vademecum for all those who want to become “slayers” of the political lie that is manmade and catastrophic global warming – wherever they may encounter it in their own lives. Everyone must read this book to not only learn about the hoax still being perpetrated by supranational agencies, politicians and their various minions – but more importantly it must be read to win freedom from the influence of snake-oil hucksters who want to own your mind and enslave your spirit so that you might the more readily do their bidding.

But such fraudsters have already failed. “The momentum is ours.”

The image shows, “Saint George and the Dragon,” by Vittore Carpaccio, painted ca. 1502.

Global Warming Is Not Science

Introduction

In a previous article, with the same title, I demonstrated that the Greenplate effect does not occur.

This is the supposed back radiation effect, which purportedly happens to a flat plate, if you expose it to a radiant heat source, within a vacuum and then simply put another plate behind it. The presence of the 2nd plate is supposed to cause an increase in the maximum steady state temperatures of the 1st plate as well as decrease the rate of heat loss, thus causing the 1st plate to warm more rapidly. This is a falsehood. Greenplate effect does not exist.

In my first demonstration, people criticised that the 1st plate was supported by brackets near the light and so this, apparently caused the test to fail. That is false argument, as I will demonstrate. It was also criticised for having the 2nd plate supported by the 1st with plastic spacers, because apparently this caused the test to fail also. Again, this is a false argument, as I will also show.

Although, it is reassuring that if we pretended that this back radiant effect existed, it is surely so weak, its is nullified by a handful of plastic spacers, in which case, it really is a feeble force and can be ignored entirely. Although, as you will see, Radiation Greenplate Effect is a force which does not exist.

New Experimental Arrangements

For my new arrangements I have plastic velceo straps on the inside of the cylinder. These velcro straps are glued to the glass on one side and glued to small right angle aluminium brackets on the other. The 130mm black powder coated aluminum disc, simply rests upon these supports.

Picture 1 – Velcro and Angle Bracket

Picture 2 – Brackets attached to inside of Cylinder

I have also added a support nipple to the bottom plate, so that the thermometer can go straight up the middle of the hole in the second plate. It is glued to the plate. This is done because the putty melts and burns and the thermometer slides.

Picture 3 – Bottom Plate

I have also changed the light bulb, from a 40 watt spiral bulb, to a 100 watt Bulb with built in reflector, this ensures that all the energy is directed upwards towards the plate & as it has a higher rating it is achieves higher steady state temperatures and achieves much quicker warming phases. I tested this bulb and fully exposed to atmosphere at room temperature, the maximum temperature of the glass achieved 206 degrees Celcius.

Picture 4 – New Bulb 100 Incandescent Halogen Reflector

These changes are more than sufficient to show that Radiation Greenplate Effect does not exist, & anyone who talks of it as if it is real is a liar, a charlatan or a faker. My demonstration model can be performed anywhere. Radiation GHE is a lie. Let no-one impart this lie upon you without you repelling it.

I have put together six different arrangements and tested each one, 5 times, with each test being performed one after the other for a duration of 10 minutes. The you-tube video which I have which shows Test 1 of each arrangement can be seen here. I video recorded all tests.

In the first minute of each video, I show the arrangement and then at exactly 1 minute of recording I switch on the light and record for 10 straight minutes. The unit is switched off and left to cool for 50 minutes.
The position of the bottom black plate and the cylinder itself remains unchanged through out all the tests. Each arrangement was tested on consecutive days, so Test 1 is a cold start each time.

Arrangement 1 – Single Plate in Chamber, No Lid.

In this arrangement I placed only a single black plate in the chamber, just above the light. The chamber lid was left off so that the plate is exposed to the air. I then switched it on and recorded the temperature of the plate over 10 minutes and repeated this 5 times, with each one performed after the other after a 50 minute cool-down each time.

The chamber as the lift is left off, would naturally result in the coolest temperatures as the maximum amount of convective cooling is experienced to the plate.

Arrangement 1: One Plate Open Lid
Time (Mins) Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
0.0 23.3 25.7 25.7 26.9 26.3
0.5 26.8 29.9 30.0 31.7 30.5
1.0 33.1 37.1 37.6 39.1 38.1
1.5 40.2 43.5 44.3 45.9 45.5
2.0 46.7 49.9 51.3 52.6 52.8
2.5 53.3 56.5 57.7 59.3 60.0
3.0 59.5 62.1 64.1 65.5 66.4
3.5 65.2 67.5 69.9 70.9 72.7
4.0 70.5 72.3 75.1 76.0 78.3
4.5 74.9 77.0 80.1 80.9 83.5
5.0 79.5 81.1 84.6 85.2 88.2
5.5 83.6 85.6 88.7 89.3 92.5
6.0 87.3 89.5 92.5 93.1 96.5
6.5 91.0 92.9 96.2 96.4 100.4
7.0 94.2 95.9 99.5 99.5 103.9
7.5 97.5 98.8 102.7 102.5 107.1
8.0 100.5 101.5 105.7 105.4 110.4
8.5 103.3 104.1 108.1 107.7 113.9
9.0 105.6 106.3 110.7 110.0 116.4
9.5 107.7 108.5 113.0 112.3 118.5
10.0 110.0 110.4 115.0 114.3 120.5
Change 86.7 84.7 89.3 87.4 94.2

Here we can see that, each test is warmer than the last as some residual heat has remained during the 50 minute cooldown period. Although test 2 after 10 minutes had the same peak temperature as test 1, despite starting slightly higher. Peak temperature between 110 & 120.5 degrees Celsius were experienced.

Graph 1 – Arrangement 1

Arrangement 2: Single Plate in Chamber, Lid Placed & Valves Closed.

In this arrangement there is a single plate as previously, this time I have placed the plastic chamber lid in position and ensured that the valves are closed to prevent any air ingress/egress.

It would be expected that restricting the convective cooling, by adding the lid, will result in quicker warming and higher peak temperatures, which is exactly what occurred. This is how a greenhouse works.

Arrangement 2: One Plate Closed Lid
Time (Mins) Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
0.0 23.1 25.6 24.3 27.3 24.4
0.5 24.7 30.5 29.0 32.5 29.5
1.0 28.6 38.6 36.9 41.2 38.3
1.5 33.3 46.0 44.7 49.4 46.5
2.0 38.8 53.7 52.1 57.3 54.2
2.5 44.6 60.6 59.3 64.9 62.0
3.0 50.6 67.4 66.1 71.5 68.8
3.5 57.4 73.7 72.3 78.2 75.0
4.0 63.7 79.3 78.1 83.9 80.8
4.5 77.1 84.4 83.6 89.5 86.4
5.0 84.4 89.2 88.4 94.7 91.5
5.5 90.1 94.0 93.4 99.5 96.2
6.0 94.8 97.9 97.5 103.8 100.6
6.5 99.3 101.7 101.9 107.6 104.3
7.0 103.5 105.1 105.8 111.5 107.9
7.5 107.2 108.1 109.2 115.0 111.4
8.0 111.1 111.4 112.8 118.0 114.5
8.5 114.2 114.4 115.9 121.0 117.4
9.0 117.1 117.2 118.7 123.5 120.0
9.5 119.8 120.0 121.3 125.8 122.4
10.0 122.2 122.4 123.6 127.7 124.5
Change 99.1 96.8 99.3 100.4 100.1

We can see that peak temperatures are higher here and that temperatures increased more quickly than previously. Peak temperatures of between 122.2 & 127.7 were recorded.

As you will see, the lid of the roof offered no back radiant heat induction upon the plate. The temperature increase is entirely explained by a reduction in the rate of convective cooling.

Graph 2 – Arrangement 2

No idea why Test 1 had that sort of curve; nothing changed with the test. I just put it down to the thermometer lag on the read out.

Arrangement 3 – Two Plates – Open Lid

Here, this arrangement is the same as Arrangement 1, except now there are two plates instead of one.

The convective restriction is much more stark than the merely placing the lid. As the 2nd plate is the same 130mm diameter as the first plate and there is a mere 2.5mm space around this disc to the glass, offering minimal escape path for the air. Meaning the space for convective cooling of the bottom plate is only that between the 1st and 2nd which is a mere 40mm. The nipple on the bottom plate is 20mm long. This ensures no contact between the two plates. This restriction causes a large increase in peak temperatures and an increase in the rate of warming also.

Arrangement 3: Two Plate Open Lid
Time (Mins) Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
0.0 24.4 25.8 24.3 26.3 26.7
0.5 27.5 29.9 28.2 31.0 31.1
1.0 34.5 37.6 36.3 39.1 39.1
1.5 42.6 45.4 44.5 47.3 47.1
2.0 51.6 53.5 53.1 55.4 55.3
2.5 59.7 61.2 61.2 63.6 63.4
3.0 67.3 68.6 68.7 71.0 71.0
3.5 74.8 75.8 76.2 78.1 78.4
4.0 81.8 82.2 83.1 84.8 85.2
4.5 88.3 88.7 89.6 91.4 91.9
5.0 94.5 94.8 95.8 97.4 97.9
5.5 100.7 100.6 101.7 102.9 103.8
6.0 105.9 106.1 107.5 108.2 109.1
6.5 111.6 111.3 113.0 113.4 114.3
7.0 116.5 116.3 117.9 117.9 119.4
7.5 120.6 120.9 122.4 122.0 123.6
8.0 124.8 125.2 126.4 125.8 127.7
8.5 128.5 129.3 130.8 129.5 131.7
9.0 132.3 133.0 134.6 133.1 135.4
9.5 135.6 136.7 138.1 136.5 138.7
10.0 139.0 139.8 141.3 139.5 141.9
Change 114.6 114.0 117.0 113.2 115.2

We can see that peak temperature after 10 minutes is between 139 and 141.9 degrees Celsius.

Graph 3 – Arrangement 3

Arrangement 4 – Two Plates – Closed Lid

This is the same as arrangement 3, except as in arrangement 2 I have now placed the lid on the chamber. This made no difference to the bottom plate, as the convective restriction between plate 1 and 2 has not changed. Only the rate of cooling of the 2nd plate would be affected.

Arrangement 4: Two Plate Closed Lid
Time (Mins) Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
0.0 21.9 25.5 27.9 27.3 28.2
0.5 25.9 29.2 31.9 31.5 32.7
1.0 32.3 35.9 38.9 39.0 40.3
1.5 39.8 43.3 45.9 46.8 47.9
2.0 47.4 50.7 53.3 54.3 55.9
2.5 54.8 58.1 60.3 62.0 63.4
3.0 62.1 64.8 67.4 69.1 70.8
3.5 69.0 71.5 74.0 75.9 77.8
4.0 75.6 77.4 80.4 82.8 84.6
4.5 82.0 83.5 86.9 89.0 90.8
5.0 87.9 89.1 92.4 94.9 96.8
5.5 93.7 94.7 98.1 100.9 102.4
6.0 98.8 99.8 103.5 106.5 107.9
6.5 104.1 104.7 108.2 111.9 113.2
7.0 109.1 109.7 113.3 117.1 118.2
7.5 114.2 114.3 117.6 121.5 122.6
8.0 119.0 118.3 121.8 125.7 126.6
8.5 123.0 121.8 125.3 129.9 130.5
9.0 126.5 124.8 128.9 133.5 134.3
9.5 130.2 127.9 132.3 137.2 137.8
10.0 133.5 130.6 135.2 140.0 141.1
Change 111.6 105.1 107.3 112.7 112.9

Peak temperatures between 130.5 & 141.1 were experienced, maximum attained was no higher than in arrangement 3.

Graph 4 – Arrangement 4

Arrangement 5 – Two Plates, Closed Lid & Full Vacuum

In this arrangement I had the two plates as in arrangements 3 & 4, but this time the lid was placed and all the air was sucked out to provide a full Vacuum.

Arrangement 5: Two Plate Vacuum
Time (Mins) Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
0.0 23.0 28.5 25.7 27.9 27.6
0.5 26.0 32.8 29.8 32.4 31.6
1.0 33.1 40.7 36.9 40.3 39.0
1.5 41.5 48.3 44.0 48.1 46.2
2.0 49.9 55.7 51.6 55.7 53.6
2.5 57.5 63.8 59.0 63.6 60.6
3.0 65.7 71.0 65.9 70.7 67.4
3.5 72.6 77.9 73.1 77.9 74.3
4.0 79.8 84.4 79.5 84.7 80.5
4.5 86.1 90.8 86.1 91.1 86.7
5.0 92.3 96.8 92.1 97.2 92.4
5.5 98.2 102.7 97.8 103.2 97.9
6.0 104.0 107.8 103.7 109.1 103.3
6.5 109.7 113.3 109.1 114.7 108.1
7.0 115.2 118.6 114.3 119.9 113.4
7.5 120.3 123.1 119.4 124.4 117.7
8.0 124.6 127.6 124.2 129.3 122.0
8.5 128.8 132.0 128.5 133.6 126.0
9.0 132.8 136.3 132.9 137.9 130.0
9.5 136.5 140.1 136.7 141.9 133.5
10.0 140.0 143.9 140.3 145.5 137.2
Change 117.0 115.4 114.6 117.6 109.6

Temperatures in this arrangement are above that of 3 and 4, with temperatures in the region of 137.2 to 145.5 achieved. Warming rates were also much higher. With all tests being over 100 deg C in less than 6 minutes.

This is no surprise as there is no convective cooling occurring at all. The other arrangements were warmer because we reduced the rate of convective cooling. With no convective cooling only radiation cooling is available to the plates and a negligible conductive cooling to the glass via the velcro straps. (Borroscillate glass has a high thermal resistance).

Graph 5 – Arrangement 5

Arrangement 6 – Single Plate, Closed Lid & Full Vacuum

In this final arrangement, the top plate was removed and test performed in full vacuum.

Arrangement 6: One Plate Vacuum
Time (Mins) Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5
0.0 22.7 28.5 27.6 28.2 27.7
0.5 27.1 32.6 32.7 33.1 32.7
1.0 34.8 40.7 41.2 41.9 40.7
1.5 43.2 48.6 49.4 50.1 48.7
2.0 51.9 56.6 57.5 58.4 56.5
2.5 60.4 64.6 65.4 66.4 64.1
3.0 68.4 71.8 72.7 73.7 71.1
3.5 76.2 79.1 80.2 80.9 78.1
4.0 83.6 85.8 86.7 87.2 84.5
4.5 91.0 92.2 93.5 93.6 91.0
5.0 97.6 98.2 99.5 99.5 97.1
5.5 104.4 104.0 105.3 105.4 103.1
6.0 110.5 109.4 110.7 111.1 108.6
6.5 116.1 114.6 115.9 116.5 114.2
7.0 121.6 119.5 120.7 121.5 119.6
7.5 126.0 123.6 124.7 125.8 124.3
8.0 130.2 127.5 128.7 130.4 128.9
8.5 134.0 131.5 132.6 134.7 133.2
9.0 137.9 134.8 136.1 138.7 137.1
9.5 141.4 138.1 139.5 142.7 141.1
10.0 144.6 141.2 142.7 145.9 144.6
Change 121.9 112.7 115.1 117.7 116.9

Arrangement 6 – Single Plate, Closed Lid & Full Vacuum

In this final arrangement, the top plate was removed and test performed in full vacuum.

We can see that peak temperatures of 141.2 to 145.9 were experienced. The rates of heating are virtually identical to arrangement 5, with the exception being test 5 on arrangement 5, which I have chosen to ignore on my statistical analysis. Nothing was changed. The cylinders are air tight and hold with no change in Vacuum pressure over 24 hours. I presumed the light output fluctuated on the low side.

The presence of the 2nd plate has no effect on the peak temperature or rate of heating experienced after 10 minutes. This is more obvious when comparing the averaged data on graphs below.

Mean Analysis

Average A1 A2 A3 A4 (Exc O) A5 A5(Exc O) A6
0.0 25.6 24.9 25.5 26.3 26.5 26.3 26.9
0.5 29.8 29.2 29.5 30.5 30.5 30.3 31.6
1.0 37.0 36.7 37.3 37.6 38.0 37.8 39.9
1.5 43.9 44.0 45.4 45.1 45.6 45.5 48.0
2.0 50.7 51.2 53.8 52.7 53.3 53.2 56.2
2.5 57.4 58.3 61.8 60.1 60.9 61.0 64.2
3.0 63.5 64.9 69.3 67.4 68.1 68.3 71.5
3.5 69.2 71.3 76.7 74.2 75.2 75.4 78.9
4.0 74.4 77.2 83.4 80.9 81.8 82.1 85.6
4.5 79.3 84.2 90.0 87.2 88.2 88.5 92.3
5.0 83.7 89.6 96.1 93.0 94.2 94.6 98.4
5.5 87.9 94.6 101.9 98.8 100.0 100.5 104.4
6.0 91.8 98.9 107.4 104.2 105.6 106.2 110.1
6.5 95.4 103.0 112.7 109.4 111.0 111.7 115.5
7.0 98.6 106.8 117.6 114.4 116.3 117.0 120.6
7.5 101.7 110.2 121.9 119.0 121.0 121.8 124.9
8.0 104.7 113.6 126.0 123.3 125.5 126.4 129.1
8.5 107.4 116.6 130.0 127.2 129.8 130.7 133.2
9.0 109.8 119.3 133.7 130.8 134.0 135.0 136.9
9.5 112.0 121.9 137.1 134.4 137.7 138.8 140.6
10.0 114.0 124.1 140.3 137.5 141.4 142.4 143.8
88.5 99.1 114.8 111.1 114.8 116.2 116.9

Arrangements 4 & 5 had a test with abnormally low peak temperatures, I elected to ignore these. Here we can see that Arrangement 5 mean temperatures are virtually identical to Arrangement 6 mean temperatures across the 5 tests. Wheras the increasing temperatures and faster warming patterns are obvious between the arrangements where convective cooling restrictions were applied and then convection was removed altogether.

This is also as represented in the graph below.

Graph 7 – Mean Averaged Temperature Curves

We can see in Graph 7, that the Vacuum arrangements are the hottest and warm the fastest, with virtually indistinguishable lines between arrangement 5 & 6.

Conclusion

The 1st arrangement was coolest and warmed least slowly, because the lower plate had the highest level of convective cooling exposed to it. The 2nd arrangement, the application of the lid, raised temperatures roughly by 5 to 10 degrees as the convective cooling was restricted to that inside the chamber only. This is how a greenhouse works. The addition of the lid, gave no radiant heating boost to the bottom plate.

Arrangements 3 and 4 gave roughly similar results to the temperatures of the bottom plates, because convection was restricted to the volume of air trapped in the 40mm space between the plates.

Arrangements 5 & 6 had no air in them at all, thus experienced no convective cooling and only cooled by radiation. This is why they exhibited virtually identical patterns of warming. No reduction in the rate of cooling, as a result of a supposed heat gain from the presence of the 2nd plate occurred. If the back radiant effect was real, the temperature of the 1st plate would have been much higher indeed and warmed far quicker, but it did not.

This is because Radiation Greenhouse Effect as a force does not exist. The mathematical explanation given in the Greenplate effect is wrong, it is false. To use it, is to mislead people. Any theories and fake physics based upon it all wrong, they are quite simply falsehoods. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics forbids this back radiant heating, back radiant heating which did not & does not occur as everyone can quite plainly see.

Geraint Hughes is the author of Black Dragon: Breaking the Frizzle Frazzle of the Big Lie of Climate Change Science.

The image shows, “Midsummer Eve Bonfire,” by Nikolai Astrup, ca. 1904-1917.

Interview: Drieu Godefridi

This is a new series we are launching – interviews with important thinkers of our time.

For our inaugural interview, we are very honored to have Dr. Drieu Godefridi. He obtained his PhD from the Sorbonne in philosophy, and he has written several important books on gender, the IPCC and environmentalism.

Dr. Godefridi’s books may be found here.

The Postil (TP): Welcome, Dr. Godefridi. Thank you for giving us this opportunity. To start, do you think the West is in crisis, where everything must be questioned so that it can be replaced by something “better?” Or, is it simply bad political management, in that we are in a period of kakistocracy?

Drieu Godefridi (DG): There is an element of risk in answering such a broad question. The West is more powerful than ever, its military might is peerless and its cultural impact is probably greater than ever. At the same time, the threats to this hegemony are evident — mass migration, economic stagnation in Europe, self-destructive totalitarian environmentalism — and a Left getting more and more extreme by the day.

TP: Why does the West still want to be “moral”, while also being aggressively atheistic (where science alone is the arbiter of truth)? Can this contradiction be easily resolved, or will it only produce chaos?

DG: I don’t see either the United States or Eastern Europe as being particularly “atheistic”. What you say is true only of Western Europe, and of the American Left. This is not “the West” as a whole; the Kulturkampf is still very much ongoing. As for the “morality” of Western Europe, for instance regarding foreign affairs, it leads nowhere, as Henry Kissinger predicted in his formidable book Diplomacy. After Brexit, I see the European Union — beyond its function as a common market — as condemned; it is now only a question of time. When Germany is unable to pour huge amounts of money into Eastern Europe anymore — which will soon come about, given the utter folly of the Energiewende, Germany’s energy transition to poverty — Eastern Europe will exit, too.

TP: The native populations of the West have constructed all kinds of myths about their own “evil” (white supremacy, colonialism, misandry, environmentalism, and now genderism). These are very powerful myths which now determine global intellectual and socio-political discourse. Where does this self-loathing come from? And how can we diminish its harmful impact?

DG: Myth and ideology are consubstantial with mankind. That aside, I see no commonality to those ideologies, for instance, you may think that colonialism was economically deleterious — as F.A. Hayek did — yet be radically opposed to the other ideologies you mention. Nevertheless, one thing they do have in common it is that they are false. To say that the West is “white supremacist” is grotesque and does not deserve serious consideration, no civilisation has taken in so many people from every race, continent, creed, religion and origin as has the West over the last 50 years. And genderism, basically the idea that sex is a cultural creation, not a biological reality, is a false theory with absurd consequences, particularly detrimental for women. As for environmentalism that is a very powerful and comprehensive ideology that is the subject of my latest essay.

TP: You have long defended Liberalism, while also refuting Libertarianism (or perhaps, “Rothbardianism”). Why is Libertarianism a failed project? And why is Liberalism still important?

DG: Capitalism is fundamental to the West and is the embodiment of freedom in economic affairs. I’m very much in favour of capitalism. Libertarianism as an apriorist theory that pretends to “derive” all rules of law and of morals from a single axiom —non-aggression— which seems to me a very simplistic contrivance. An anarchist political theory is a contradiction in terms.

TP: Is Croce correct in observing that liberalism has been replaced by “active libertarianism?” And is Croce also correct in calling “active libertarianism” a form of fascism?

DG: I do my utmost to avoid those words. The word ‘Liberalism’ had been employed, particularly in English, in so many different and irreconcilable ways, that even Joseph Schumpeter and Hayek were sceptical of its usefulness back in their day. It’s even more true nowadays. People in favour of infanticide — postnatal abortion — and euthanasia without consent or those viewing sex as a cultural creation are not libertarian, liberal or whatever: they are merely rationally and morally wrong. 

TP: You have also written about George Soros and his efforts to construct his own “empire.” This “Sorosian” imperialism has its roots in the ideas of Karl Popper (which is Marxism without Marx, in that the desire to change the world remains valid). But Soros is also a highly successful capitalist. How can “Sorosian” imperialism (making the West into an “Open Society”) be properly critiqued, while retaining the importance of capitalism?

DG: The political philosophy of Mr. Soros is international socialism with a heavy accent on “crony-capitalism” — he is himself the ultimate insider, and has been criminally convicted as such. Mr. Soros, who has invested $35 billion not in true philanthropy but in the promotion of his political ideas, must be seen as a sui generis phenomenon. You are right regarding its origins, for his foundation was named after the “open society” of Karl Popper. But in fact Soros is no Popperian at all. Popper was in favour of democracy; Soros is funding hundreds of extreme NGOs; some of which use violence and intend to abolish democracy in the name of Gaïa, Allah or whatever. Soros is no Popperian, he’s an international socialist who fancies himself as some kind of god. Popper defined himself as a liberal in the classic sense of the word, close to the philosophy of Hayek and the Founding Fathers of the Unites States.

TP: You have just written a very important book on the dangers of environmentalism, which we had the pleasure of reviewing. Why did you write this book?

DG: My goal is to show that the end result of the green ideology will be misery and the complete abolition of freedom. If human CO2 is the problem and we have to reduce it to zero —as stated by the IPCC, the EU, the UN and the American Left— there is no room left for freedom. Freedom = CO2. Whichever perspective we choose, be that theoretical or practical, contemporary environmentalism brings us back to this truism, this obvious truth: if human CO2 is the problem, then Man’s every activity, endeavor, action, and ambition is the problem.

TP: Why has environmentalism become the West’s new religion?

DG: People in Western Europe do not believe in God anymore so were ready for a new source of “meaning”. As Ayn Rand stated, real atheism is not for the weak. Most people try to find a substitute for God. Gaïa — the “All-Living” — is exactly that to the environmentalists.

TP: Freedom is disappearing very rapidly. Theoretically, freedom is a Western virtue. But in current Western socio-political policy, freedom has become a crime. Why this contradiction, and how can we overcome the emerging oppression?

DG: By winning the Kulturkampf. Cultural submission to the Left — the European way — is no solution. We must fight for freedom and defeat these extremists within the framework of the constitutional order — which is the American way, thanks to the ultimate fighter Donald J. Trump, probably the most important political figure of our time. You do not collaborate with the enemies of freedom: you fight them, you defeat them. There is no middle ground. We will not be subordinate to “Gaïa” — which is a concept devoid of meaning — nor material “equality” — which is a natural impossibility — we are the resistance; we are freedom fighters.

TP: Lastly, what do you think is the most important issue of our time? And why?

DG: Freedom is the most important issue of all time in the West because, from ancient Greece to today, it is the value on which our civilisation rests and is, at the same time, the driving force of our society. If you abolish freedom, you abolish the West as a distinct concept.

TP: Thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to share your valuable ideas with our readers.

DG: And I’d like to thank you for the recent appreciative review of my humble essay on the totalitarian essence of environmentalism.

The image shows, “Green Graveyard,” by the Brazilian artist, Benki Solal.

In The Green Reich, We Are All Jews

This is a book that everyone must read. It is brief, to the point – and utterly frightening, for it lays out the end-game of environmentalism, which will affect us all, if we blindly keep empowering it, as we are now so gleefully doing.

People often wonder how Hitler was allowed to come to power and carry out his plan? Just look at the way you vote, the way you think about humans and this planet, why you want to go green, what you demand from politicians you elect when it comes to the environment.

If you are honest about the answers that you arrive at, you will understand how evil becomes institutionalized and therefore massively murderous. Hitler famously said that he had planted the seed and no one could now predict how and when it would grow back again.

Environmentalism is that Hitlerian seed, sprouted and flourishing, and which is now so eagerly being nurtured to maturity by people who naively believe that they are doing the right thing. And once the process of evil is locked into place, its mechanisms always follow through to their bitter end. Such is the dire warning of this timely book.

The author, Drieu Godefridi, a Belgian philosopher, writes in the grand tradition of Émile Zola’s open letter, J’Accuse! Like Zola, he has shoved before our complaisance a defiant open-letter to humanity, in which he warns against the death-cult that is environmentalism, whose adherents now inhabit the highest political, social and cultural offices and positions, and who are widely regarded as the vanguards of morality. Huge money fuels environmentalism, because it is a source of profit and therefore an industry. Thus, celebrities tout it, experts hector us with its “facts,” politicians tax us over it and legalize it – and it is now a towering Moloch, to which all must bend knee, and into whose maw we must toss our humanity.

Godefridi’s original, French title was posed as a question, L’écologisme, nouveau totalitarisme? (“Ecologism, the New Totalitarianism?”). The answer to which is a ringing, “Yes!”

But this is totalitarianism in the true sense of the word, not in the muddled way that this term is commonly tossed about in popular parlance. Ecologism (or environmentalism, as is more usual in English) seeks to take total control of all aspects of human life, even to the extent of determining how many people may actually live on this planet.

Such totalizing means that human life itself can no longer be possible outside the parameters established and policed by environmentalism. Thus, the various curtailments of human liberty that we now agree as acceptable – hate speech laws, rights legislation, indigenization, the green initiative, fewer births and declining populations – these are all slow entrenchments of totalitarianism, where humanity is purely defined by the logic of environmentalism. But notice that this creed is always clothed in the appearance of morality, as being the “right” thing to do. And people for the most part love such clothing, because there yet remains a deep hunger for morality, despite avowed atheism. As such, environmentalism is the new religion whose tenets Goidefridi thoroughly explores.

The English translation of the book, recently published, bears a more sinister title, The Green Reich. The question in the original has now been transformed into a cogent warning, wherein the future is hyper-Hitlerian, in which all of humanity will be held in the same contempt as the Jews in Hitlerian ideology. And Godefridi makes it very clear that the grim program of the environmentalists is far more comprehensive and thorough than anything Hitler could imagine. But the aim is similar; only the labels have shifted – to return purity to nature, to the planet, through the destruction of verminous humanity.

Two common presuppositions that undergird all aspects of environmentalism are that the planet is over-populated, and therefore, there is overconsumption of resources. This results in harmful waste, especially CO2.

These Neo-Malthusian assumptions then proceed to fashion “solutions,” which must be implanted, in order to combat the glut of humanity. Thus, the population of the planet must first be reduced. This will greatly lessen the consumption of natural resources, which will eliminate C02. Therefore, very few humans, and perhaps none, should live on this planet, in order for earth to continue to live on into the future. Nature now is far more important than humanity, because humanity is seen as inherently unnatural, entirely alien to the planet. In effect, mankind is a terrible disease, from which earth needs to be cured.

Stark choices always construct the most powerful narratives, because they demand totalizing solutions. Thus, the deeply ingrained Christian habit of the Western world, of trying to be moral in action and thought, is weaponized against humanity, by making morality an efficient tool to achieve the goals of environmentalism. Humanity has gravely sinned against the planet and now must sacrifice itself in order to give an afterlife to mother earth. Here is the devastating consequence of Western Godlessness – sublimating redemption into self-annihilation. Thus, humanicide is the cardinal virtue of environmentalism. Since humanity is the greatest threat to the planet, humanity itself must find ways to limit its own potential to do harm. And the best limitation is self-elimination.

The book opens with a rather chilling dialogue, set in a stark future, between a father and son, after the “Great Stop” (i.e., the world, as we know it, has been stopped). It is a zero-carbon dystopia, where humanity proudly wears the badge of “Accursed Parasite,” and therefore the human population is slowly but surely being wound down. A nation of sixty-million now has 24 million – and counting.

Each human is allowed monthly CO2 rations, which means there is no travel, you must eat what is allowed, and live in prescribed accommodations. There are no schools or labor of any kind – what would be the point, since there is no world to build, let alone a future generation to prepare to inhabit it. Rather, the world is only there to be unbuilt. And the earth is worshipped as the goddess, Gaia, the all-wise mother, in whose praise the impieties of historical “Terracide” are remembered as piety, from a time when humanity was barbaric and given to robbing the earth of its wealth. Such is the new “holy” wisdom. Each human properly belongs to the “Official Altruistic Death Program” that encourages people to voluntarily “humusate” themselves (that is, made into humus, which is so very useful to Gaia). When the last human is thus composted, the planet finally will be able to recover from the destructive human presence and rejuvenate itself. Gaia utterly cleansed of humanity is the highest virtue.

The points in this dialogue are based on actual studies put out by environmentalist “scientists;” none of it is fantasy; only the conceit of the dialogue is imagined. In effect, environmentalism is an anti-human death-cult. To that end, The Green Reich makes some very disturbing connections, which should really make people question the kinds of politics that they are advocating when they hand power over to ideologues who say they want to “save the planet.”

Godefridi points out that the environmentalists’ only talking point is the vilification of CO2. Few people (voters) understand what is at stake here. Humanity is carbon, as is all of life – the very act of breathing is the constant emission of CO2. All life needs carbon; earth is dead without it. So, phrases like “carbon-neutral,” “decarbonization” and “carbon-free” become code-words for a human-neutral, dehumanized, human-free planet.

Once these code-phrases become part of everyday thinking, humanicide itself becomes that much easier to implement, because people will actually want to have a future that will have zero CO2 emissions – that is, a future without human beings.

The first stage of this program involves the end to all fossil fuels, the burning of which is held to be the greatest crime, or catastrophe. Here “local” takes on a drastic meaning, for you will only be able to travel as far as your own two feet can take you, the combustion engine having been outlawed. Thus, no cars, ships, planes or trains. And once herded into state-designated locales, humans will be that much easier to cull. Do you see how much more efficient this is over Hitler’s ghettoization of the Jews? For example, there are some environmentalists who object to relief aid for famine-stricken areas – because they see famine as a boon to the life of the planet. The more humans that can be wiped out, the better.

A localized humanity will also have to eat differently, because animals raised for food emit far too much CO2. This means that entire industries and livelihoods will be dismantled and eliminated, and a vague sort of veganism will be mandated. Food will serve no purpose, because life will no longer have intrinsic worth, which means that it will become harder and harder to justify human life as a good in itself.

Next, given the elimination of entire food groups, human health will undergo a drastic shift for the worse, as nutrition and medicine will become pointless – the end-game being depopulation. Keeping a human alive for years on end will serve no purpose whatsoever, especially since said human needs and sheds CO2 constantly. But the dystopia is not over just yet.

As already stated, the fundamental premise of environmentalism is its anti-human agenda. Thus, the direst disaster that human beings bring upon this planet is to give birth to more human beings. Babies are the greatest enemies of environmentalists, as these little, new humans produce too much CO2, and besides are guarantors of the CO2 cycle grinding on well into the future. Therefore, births must be reduced, if not eliminated, where child-bearing will be a moral and legal crime. Ultimately, environmentalism is a purified form of antinatalism, purified because human life is seen as harmful in its very essence, not simply because of its actions, or its outcomes. It is no longer about too many humans – the very fact that human life itself exists is bad – because humanity is a parasite upon the earth.

Godefridi describes the environmentalist ethic as “physisist,” where the being of the planet is more valuable than human beings. This down-grading of humanity as the least desirable type of life-form means that nature is the preferred value which supersedes any and all value that humans have given to themselves. It is now the job of environmentalist “thinkers” to brainwash humans into disavowing their own value. The planet cannot be saved with humans on it.

Such self-loathing is delivered for consumption via the education-media-culture conglomerate, where “norm criticism” (that pusillanimous mental exercise that sees every form of Western thinking to be inherently evil and fit only for eradication) is the ideology de rigueur. Thus, a habit of self-loathing is now the proper way to “think,” which makes environmentalist propaganda a breeze to disseminate. Hatred now is the most valuable cultural currency.

There are also various offshoots of antinatalism that derive their moral justification from environmentalism, such as, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia, both of which, as is obvious, work to rid the planet of humans, though Godefridi does not get into these. Such movements may seem laughable and loony – but notice that they are offered no real opposition. People simply accept the lie that there should not be to many people living on this planet. And it really is an elaborate lie.

This is because no objection to antinatalism is now even possible in the West, given the normalization of abortion, and now transgenderism and pedophilia. Everybody has already bought into the premise that there are too many people on this planet, and therefore people really must have fewer and fewer babies.

No one questions this assumption, let alone seeks to destroy it. No one in power disputes it – because such politicians are put into office by voters who have already accepted the Malthusian presuppositions of environmentalism. So, who will truly have the last laugh?

Many are the “philosophers” who promote this anti-human agenda, such as, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Michel Onfray, Thomas Ligotti, Martin Neuffer, Jean-Christophe Lurenbaum, E.M. Cioran, David Benatar, Gunther Bleibohm, and Julio Cabrera. Their etiology is rooted in the German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer. What they advocate is now no longer unimaginable; it even passes for “scientific” truth – the Chinese one-child policy is the perfect example of what can be done with the right kind of “help” from the government. Again, the basic tenets of environmentalism are accepted without question by the voting public.

It would have given Godefridi’s argument fullness if he had spent some time examining the deep connections that environmentalism has with antinatalism. However, his book is more of a philosophical essay rather than a history of those ideas that are now preparing us for mass extinction.

And, as such, Godefridi has written a stirring and urgent call to action for all humanity. We need to abandon the differences that always play so prominent a role in how we manage this world. Instead, we need to unite and confront the true enemy at the gates – the death-cult that is far too quickly gathering momentum and adding devout and powerful believers into its folds. If we do not come together and defeat this pernicious ideology, we may not survive the looming Holocaust that environmentalism is now preparing for us. This is Godefridi’s urgent message.

Indeed, environmentalism has had great successes. It has convinced the majority of the public that what it claims is scientific truth. It has convinced governments to implement anti-carbon policies, which are anti-human policies. It has convinced people not to have children. It has convinced people to panic whenever the environment is mentioned (eco-anxiety) – high emotions are the best way to bring about quick change. It has convinced people to work against their own humanity, not only their own interests.

Only time will now tell how willingly people will allow themselves to be humusated, for humanity has largely accepted the Great Myth that it is the source of all problems that are said to face the planet – because it is the “Accursed Parasite.”

Perhaps it is for this reason that Godefridi chose a more ominous title for the English version of his book, wherein the “logic” of Hitlerism concerning Jews is now extended to include all of humanity. In the emerging Green Reich, we are all indeed Jews. And for us, who constitute the Accursed Parasite, there is only the Final Solution, the ultimate Holocaust, so that the noble planet may at last be purified of its most pernicious disease. It would seem that most humans have now been conditioned to agree, because they accept everything that environmentalism preaches as the gospel-truth. Therefore, most have already decided that people really do need to disappear.

All hail the Green Reich!

The photo shows, “Doomsday Abstraction,” by Zdzislaw Beksinski.

Why Environmentalism Fails

Environmentalism, or ecologism, is a failure both as a science and as an ideology. It fails as a science because it cannot show “anthropogeneity” to be true, whereby mankind can actually alter the course of natural reality, nor can it define what it actually means by “nature,” and by “science.

As for its alarmism – is CO2 the great monster of our time that is being set loose by avaricious mankind for short-term gain, with dire results for all life on this planet? Or, is this all a great con-job by certain avaricious members of mankind for long-term gain? Evidence is shown to support both sides. This raises a problem with logic. If there are two contradictory types of evidence for one assumption, then the assertion that only one side of the argument is “true” is a lie. More crucially, “science” can hardly be “settled,” when it continually offers two opposing answers to one thesis.

This renders environmentalism nothing more than weak sociology – that is, a process of rhetoric, through which a drastic change of society is the desired outcome. In other words, a social science. And it is weak because it has no inherent verity – since it continually needs the support of rhetoric and political will in order to promote itself. In other words, environmentalism is merely sociologism, or a process to bring about revolution – that is, a “liberation” from all perceived wrongs of the past. Thus, environmentalism is pure ideology; and nothing else. (As a reminder, ideology is a form of speculative thought that seeks to justify a particular social action).

But is environmentalism a strong ideology? Hardly. It is nothing more than a jumble of contradictions.

First, environmentalism cannot define its own terms. It seeks to protect “nature,” but what is this “nature” that needs political salvation? Nor can it define what is means by “science.” Both these terms are continually invoked, as if they have a self-evident definition, which is not the case.

In the twenty-first century, “science” only means two types of paradigms – the Cartesian and the Neo-Darwinian. There is no third.

The Cartesian, or mathematical approach, states that “nature” is a construction of human reason (where mathematics is the mode of explanation). This is not because “nature” in itself is mathematical, but because human reason is mathematical. For Descartes, “nature” has no meaning outside the human mind. Thus, “nature,” only exists as a projection of reason. “Nature” does not inherently contain meaning, let alone truth. It possesses only matter and energy, which do not exist for a higher purpose. Only reason gives them that purpose.

Since “nature” has no being outside the human mind, what do activists want to protect outside the human? Random matter and energy? Thus, things like, “climate catastrophe,” do not exist in matter and energy. Rather, they are projects onto matter and energy by human reason.

This destroys any premise that environmentalism might want to offer as an explanation – for “nature” has no explanation. “Nature” is an idea – a function of human reason.

Next, there is Neo-Darwinism, which is concerned with the flow of genes, through the structure of evolution; that is, the mutation of genes and then their selection. Genes are, thus, packets of information (codes). This process of transmitting information into the future may be observed by way of an organism’s traits (the phenotype).

Once again, there is no “nature” as such – because everything essential happens at the genetic level, in which animate matter is nothing more than a container and delivery system for genes. Whatever might be termed “nature” shows itself to be nothing other than a continually evolving environment for genes to replicate in. This “environment” is essentially time, in which information will create the conditions that it needs to replicate – regardless of what mankind might or might not do, like releasing CO2.

In effect, Neo-Darwinism has no need for “nature,” because the phenomenal realm is always secondary to the micro-evolution of genes. Whatever destruction the phenomenal world might undergo, the genes will eventually reconfigure (recode), and keep replicating. And after destruction takes place, over time, complex life forms will once again evolve. Thus, there is no “nature” to destroy, because macro-ecology is nothing but a process of time. Whatever effect man might have on macro-ecology, micro-evolution remains unaffected. And it matters not at all whether CO2 is the great villain or not.

In fact, whatever “harm” mankind might be doing is ultimately part-and-parcel of the process of evolution, in which humanity is dutifully playing its role. If that role is one of “harm-bringer,” then so be it. Evolution will simply deal with it, reconfigure, recode and replicate.

Thus, the Cartesian paradigm denies environmentalism its rationale (“nature” is a construct of human reason). And Neo-Darwinism refutes environmentalism’s anthropogeneity, in that mankind can never alter the process of evolution. This means that environmentalism’s reliance on “science” is a sham. The alarmist claims about the loss of biodiversity, the collapse of ecosystems, and various extinction scenarios are meaningless in science as it is understood and practiced today.

This leaves only the projection of human emotion upon matter, energy, information, and time. In other, environmentalism is pure hysteria that has good political currency at the moment. But can any sort of economic, social, or cultural stability be built upon a lie?

Since environmentalism cannot claim any sort of “ownership” over science (Cartesian or Neo-Darwinian), anytime it uses scientific vocabulary, it contradicts itself. In the end, it possesses nothing.

Lastly, there is the question of humanity within nature. For Descartes, nature is formless and meaningless without human reason, which means that man creates the nature that he needs. For Neo-Darwinism, humanity is the subject of evolution, in that evolution creates mankind and will uncreate him in the flow of time. Thus, man can affect nothing in the process of information and time, no matter what he might get up to in the Destruction Department.

But environmentalism does have a rather effective weapon – mythology – through which it is now seeking to convince everyone that “nature” is “alive.” (Cue James Lovelock and his totem, “Gaia”). This endeavor also is bound to fail, because paganism was defeated long ago and thus can contribute nothing to the reality of human life in the twenty-first century.

The vain attempt to parse paganism as “ancient philosophy” is just wishful thinking, because paganism, as a vanquished paradigm, can no longer answer the fundamental question of life. And that question is this – How can I be free? Paganism was always about slavery (which is why it crumbled very quickly), for all it possessed was fear in the face of the incomprehensible. The habit of humanity to rely on reason can no longer be paganized, despite the efforts of universities and their Environmental Studies programs. Once the mind knows something, it cannot suddenly unknow it.

All this leaves environmentalism no real recourse but politics and the will of the state. But this is tyranny, which has failed every time it has been tried (though it does bring short-term misery). In effect, environmentalism is about defeat and failure – and thus it has no hold in the future.

The photo shows, “Metallic Tractors,” a print by James Gillray, London, England, 1801.

Greta Thunberg And Eco-Eugenics

Is fame random? Or, is fame the result of access to power? The recent prominence of Greta Thunberg is a case in point. Did she become famous for simply being photographed sitting alone in front of the Swedish parliament building, on strike for the environment? Or, did she inherit the mantle of an eco-prophet? Is she just an ordinary, outraged young woman, or someone with deep family links to environmentalism, and who thus has all the right connections?

For those that might not know, Greta supposedly shot to fame when the aforesaid photo of hers was put on Twitter in 2018. The Twitter account belonged to a group called, We Don’t Have Time, a Swedish organization, funded by Al Gore. Therefore, the photo was a clever piece of propaganda, designed to “capture” the hearts of people all over the world – a “lonely little girl,” speaking truth to power.

Of course, using children to further environmentalism is an old tactic. Back in 1992, there was Severn Suzuki, who at age nine started ECO (Environmental Children’s Organization), and gave a speech at the UN, which was far more coherent that Greta’s performance. But Severn’s father is David Suzuki, Canada’s foremost environmentalist.

Cory Morningstar has very meticulously, and very brilliantly, analyzed the deep connections that Greta has to the many power-structures, all of which seek to change the world. This excellent research should be widely read.

But why Greta? Why her photo? The clue lies in what she really advocates – the Fourth Industrial Revolution, aka, the New Green Deal. This is, very simply, transhumanism, which is the creation of a bio-digital world, where technology merges with humanity.

The oft-heard mantra of the environmentalists, “Change Everything,” means changing what it means to be human, what it means to work, what it means to be free, what it means to live a happy life. In short, it is Neo-Eugenics – or, the improvement of humanity by way of technology. This gives a whole new meaning to Greta’s iconic phrase, “I want you to panic.”

But why Greta? Because she belongs, as it were, to global warming “royalty,” being directly related to that very Swedish scientist who, a little over a century ago, invented, and then popularized, the concepts of both global warming and man-made climate change. His name was Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927), and his mother was a Thunberg.

Greta’s fame therefore is not accidental. She is continuing the project started by her illustrious ancestor – of course, enabled by her astute parents. Arrhenius’s name may not be familiar now, but in his time, he was well-known throughout Europe and North America.

People commonly assume that overwhelming data (inductive reasoning) led scientists to declare man-made climate change to be “settled science.” The problem with this assumption is that global warming and climate change are in fact hypotheses first invented by Arrhenius, and for which data (evidence) is continually being sought (deductive reasoning). It is hardly settled science, as recently shown.

Why do people back this hypothesis over any other? Because the majority of college graduates have a humanities or arts degrees, which skews how they perceive things scientific, for which they have little aptitude, let alone understanding. For example, innumeracy in the general population is very high. But these arts-degree-holders are also the electorate and their consent must therefore be continually manufactured.

Also, when it comes to sociopolitical matters, those with science degrees think the same way as their humanities counterparts, given that the entire purpose of higher education now is inculcation into radicalism. In the post-truth era, this means that those who research and teach science no longer believe that science is wedded to truth, as the recent humiliating defeat of the high-priest of global warming, Michael Mann, clearly showed, along with other studies, for example, here and here and here.

Science, like all other human activities, depends upon ideas, which are structures or models with which we understand, manipulate and benefit from the reality of the natural world. In other words, inductive reasoning was once the ideal of science.

But science, serving other masters than truth, now often aligns itself with social activism and social engineering (aka, power). Such cooption of science by the power-elite means that narrative (rhetoric) becomes far more important than truth – because rhetoric is the most effective tool to manufacture consent. Humanities degree holders are used to stories and they therefore respond well to rhetoric. And so goes the entire industry of environmentalism, where the “climate crisis” is continually narrativized for consumption.

Not surprisingly, in his popular writings, Arrhenius used rhetoric to further his hypotheses of global warming and man-made climate change. Early scientists had, in fact, variously looked at how air could warm the earth, such as, Leon Teisserenc de Bort, Alexander Buchan, Josef Stefan, Samuel Langley, Claude Servais Mathias Pouillet, Arvid Gustaf Högbom, Joseph Fourier, and of course, John Tyndall.

Arrhenius took this early work and imagined that the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), or “carbonic acid,” as he called it, in the atmosphere was directly responsible for warming the planet. He went on to suppose that if the amount of CO2 kept rising, then likewise the planet would keep getting hotter and hotter. This notion would become known as the “greenhouse effect.” And where would all this excess CO2 come from? Fossil fuels, of course.

He laid out this idea in a paper that was published in 1896 and entitled, “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.”

This paper would become the bedrock of the contemporary climate-change industry, even though it was much criticized at the time of its publications (and later also) for its faulty science, such as that the effects of water vapor are mistaken for the effects of CO2.

Many of his contemporary scientists pointed out (as many scientists still do today) that CO2 cannot have any warming effect (or climate sensitivity) – which thus means that CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas.” Also, Arrhenius’s math was severely criticized by many, such as the physicist, Anders Ångström.

But it would appear that alarmism was something Arrhenius excelled at, for he next wrote an international bestseller, entitled, Worlds in the Making, in 1908, in which he explained to the layman his “hot-house” theory, where the continuous burning of fossil fuels, by industry, would increase the earth’s temperature. Thus, he linked his dubious science to modern human life – the ideal formula for alarmism.

The logic followed in his book is obvious – control human activity and you will control the earth’s temperature. For this reason, Arrhenius is rightly called the “father” of global warming. He is also the “father” of the entire energy crisis industry, since he was the first to suggest that oil reserves were finite (aka, peak oil) and coal would run out.

Any alarmism worth its salt has an end-game (massive social change) and so must also offer solutions that will bring about this desired result. Accordingly, Arrhenius suggested that the use of oil and coal be limited, if not eliminated; that electricity replace oil as an energy source; that fuel efficiency be practiced; that bio-fuels be used; that atomic energy be developed. Arrhenius, in fact, gave modern environmentalism all of its talking points.

But how did his ideas become foundational to environmentalism today? Arrhenius was largely ignored until 1979, when the Charney Report, entitled, “Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment” was published. It relied heavily on Arrhenius and thus gave him instant legitimacy.

Then, in 1990, the IPCC used the Charney Report as the basis for its own report, which turned Arrhenius’s hypotheses of man-made climate change and global warming into “settled science.” Henceforth, climate could only and “correctly” be viewed through the lens of Arrhenius. Those who refused or objected would be labeled as “deniers” – i.e., heretics.

Another “settled science” in which Arrhenius made much contribution was eugenics. Just as animals and planets could be bred to show particular characteristics, so too, it was believed, could humans be made better by selective breeding (which was known as racial hygiene). Thus, human reproduction was to be controlled and limited by the state, all bulwarked and justified by science. The mantra of “listen to the science” that is oft-repeated by environmentalists in itself has a very sinister history, for eugenics was nothing but “settled science” for people like Arrhenius, Margaret Sanger and Hitler.

The obvious question that arises is a simple one, then – does Arrhenius’s work on global warming stem from his eugenics? For example, in 1912, he famously concocted an experiment in which public school children were electrified, in order to make them grow taller. Apparently, it was said to have worked. Thus, where does climate science stop and eugenics being for Arrhenius? It is a question not yet settled.

Further, Arrhenius was the founding member of the Swedish Society of Racial Hygiene, which was established on 1909, as well as the State Institute for Racial Biology, in 1922. Both institutes justified Sweden’s sterilization of non-Aryans, and other “undesirables,” long before the Nazis. And these institutes set the context for the forced sterilization of over 60,000 Swedish women, who were deemed unfit to breed. This practice continued until 1975. Sweden was hardly a socialist paradise for these unfortunates. As well, Arrhenius worked with Gustaf Retzius, who used phrenology (developed by his father, Anders Retzius) to further claims of Nordic racial superiority.

And, in 1900, Arrhenius was the founding member of the Nobel Institute and its Nobel Prize and headed both the Nobel Committees on physics and chemistry. Needless to say, he made sure that most of his friends received the Nobel (such as, Theodore William Richards and Wilhelm Oswald). Three years later, he himself became the first Swede to receive the prize.

Thus, Greta’s own nomination for the Nobel is part-and-parcel of being a member of the global warming “royalty.” It is interesting to note that her father, who is an actor, writer and producer, is named Svante; and her mother (Malena Ernman) is a well-known operatic singer, who has also co-authored, with her husband, the bestselling book about her family and their environmentalism, entitled, Scenes from the Heart (2018).

Like her mother, Greta recently published her own book, No One is Too Small to Make a Difference, which is a collection of her eco-activist speeches. And it does not come as a surprise that she herself has her biography on the Internet Movie Database, given her parents’ careers. But her recent stumble does give one pause as to her spontaneity.

As for Greta’s access to power? She is backed by the World Economic Forum, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute, the Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and more than twenty NGOs – and they all want to bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. She is hardly a “lonely little girl” heroically fighting the powers that be. Rather, she is famous because she is an effective ambassador of these powers, and because she belongs to the right family.

Greta means serious business. Wittingly or unwittingly, she is the child-herald of a nightmare future, inhabited by a mechanized humanity, wherein that century-old experiment, conducted by her relative, of electrifying children, will be upgraded for all humanity. Saving the planet means eugenics, for it is ultimately Malthusian in its logic, in that people are the enemies of the planet and their numbers need to be controlled. Greta’s alarmist environmentalism is impossible to accomplish without eugenics. But then global warming and man-made climate change are both the invention of her ancestor who understood such eco-eugenics well.