How The World’s Elite Have Declared War On Science And Free Speech

In the olden days, science and politics were independent disciplines. That, however, has changed.

Today’s politicians micromanage science, particularly in heavily politicized countries such as Norway, ostensibly to ensure that science agrees with current policies.

Politicians first cast their eyes on social sciences, because social sciences are much more malleable than the natural sciences.

As a result, Norway now has the world’s highest number of social scientists per capita, and a total of 710 gender researchers, which is a lot for a population of only five million. But the reason is simple; gender politics are the main interest of Norwegian politicians.

Alas, natural sciences also fell victim to politics, but through a complicated interaction between politics, bureaucracy, and science, which reinforced each other through a mutual feedback process. However, at a deeper level, it was all about money.

Researchers fight a never-ending battle for funding, and some scientists are more successful at it than others. So, when someone receives a grant, it immediately attracts the attention of others, who in turn will seek to mimic the successful application.

But mimicry alone is not enough – a successful application also has to include certain key phrases that enhance your chances of success, such as “sustainable”, “environmental”, and “climate change”, or preferably all three of them.

These phrases were invented by politicians, and are then echoed by researchers, but unfortunately, bureaucrats interpret this as consensus and respond by turning the most agreeable applications into research programs.

This attracts even more scientists, who synchronize their response for each turn, and at a certain point, the entire scientific community is marching in lockstep.

A case in point is the Norwegian aquaculture program of halibut, which very few biologists believed stood any chance of succeeding, but which through the above feedback process, developed into a colossal gravy train that devoured more than $200 million before it was stopped.

Research programs can be likened to supertankers on autopilot, without navigators; it is a safe workplace as long as you don’t question the course, but if you do, you are given a rubber dinghy. Young researchers with family responsibilities thus never question governmental research policies.

Retired scientists, on the other hand, do because they are not dependent upon research grants. They have got their pension and they don’t give a hoot about what research politicians think they should say or not say. One such scientist is the German physics Professor Carl Otto Weiss, aged 78.

Weiss specializes in non-linear optics, where wave functions are the tool-of-choice. However, since wave functions describe cyclic phenomena, Weiss asked himself whether global temperature variations also could be a cyclic phenomenon, but like all good researchers, he first did a literature search to investigate what had already been done on the subject.

He was in for a shock; he discovered that we had spent $15 billion on climate research, without investigating whether global temperature variations were cyclic or not.

Weiss concluded dryly that “something fishy must be going on,” so he decided to investigate the problem himself, together with two of his colleagues, Lüdecke and Hempelmann, but only after he had retired.

At their disposal, they had more than 250 years of temperature data from six different sites in Europe (these measurements started in 1757), Antarctic ice cores, 2,500 years of proxy data from tree rings, stalagmites and sediments.

They ran all these data through a mathematical process known as a Fourier transform, which produced the individual sine waves, and then ran them back again through an inverse Fourier transform, in order to reconstruct the original data.

The results were astonishing: 1) Temperature variations are indeed cyclic and show cycles of 1,003, 463 and 188 years, which in turn reflect the solar activity over the same periods (~ 1,000, ~ 500, and ~200 years); 2) There is no trace of any non-periodic phenomena; 3) It is not a mathematical artifact; 4) The phenomenon is global; 5) We are presently headed towards a colder climate.

This is in sharp contrast to atmospheric levels of CO2, which is monotonously increasing, and it is at odds with the alarmist claim that the Medieval Warm Period was only a local phenomenon.

With this, the debate should have been over, but with the opposite message of what we usually hear; variations in global temperatures are seemingly unaffected by anthropogenic CO2, or at least they have been unaffected by CO2 levels for the past 2,500 years.

Which means that attempts to control the Earth’s temperature by manipulating CO2 emissions are unlikely to succeed.

These are indeed very good news to us all because it means that we can turn our attention, and our money, to other and more pressing problems, such as energy, food, and other resource shortages.

However, the UN, the EU, the liberal elite, journalists and the climate industry were not happy, perhaps because they had too much invested in the opposite view.

At any rate, they simply chose to ignore the publications of Lüdecke, Hempelmann, and Weiss (2013, 2015), and for good measure, letters to the UN by the authors received the same treatment.

Instead, the authors were vigorously attacked by other scientists, whose main objection was that the authors were “known contrarians” (since when did that become a scientific argument?) and that they hadn’t cited enough critics in their reference list.

Their use of methodology and statistics were also criticized, but the main claim of the authors, namely the fact that temperature variations are cyclic, was left unchallenged.

The alarmist community then resumed their endless routines of claiming that “97 % of climate scientists” agree that human activity affects temperature, that there are more hurricanes and that the sea level is rising.

However, there is no one who disputes the fact that human activity affects the climate, at one level or another, but such effects are so minute that they cannot be measured.

The climate is changing, as it always has, but it should also be noted that the temperature and the number of hurricanes presently are on the decline. Yes, the sea level has risen since the end of the last Ice Age, but this, of course, is to be expected.

What is disagreed upon is whether or not anthropogenic (human-made) CO2 has anything to do with it, and the evidence says no. Likewise, the alarmist claim that the Medieval Warm Period was only a local phenomenon, has also previously been proven false.

As if this was not enough, alarmist predictions also fail to materialize, such as the claim that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”

This should at least raise an eyebrow or two in the alarmist camp, but for some odd reason, it doesn’t. Again, the preferred response is a resounding silence.

Instead, they leave the stage to thousands of young schoolgirls who go on ‘school strikes’ and demand a global war on CO2 emissions.

Why? Well, they don’t say why, but they deliver their message with a sulky and resentful tone of voice, sprinkled with tears, and for some odd reason it works, probably because it is tacitly understood that teenage girls cannot be challenged with any force.

Their leader, a 16-year-old Swedish girl by the name of Greta Thunberg, has been nominated to the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts, along with an honorary doctorate from the University of Mons and an Amnesty International prize, and she has met with the President of the EU Commission, UK parliamentarians and the Pope!

God knows for what reason, but again, the reasoning seems to be superfluous in this matter, and their language bears witness of the same; no arguments are presented, absolutely none whatsoever.

Instead, they resort to slogans like “our house is on fire” and claims of having supernatural abilities, such as being able to see CO2 with the naked eye.

Such tactics cannot be reasoned with, other than with the late Christopher Hitchens’ words from a similar debate; “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence”, or perhaps more appropriately “Youths oppress my people, and women rule over them” (Isaiah 3:12).

In this game, Professor Doctor Carl Otto Weiss does not stand a chance. He represents a forgotten era, a time when science paved the way for development, a time when elders were a source of knowledge and wisdom, a time when politicians looked to science for advice and not the other way around. But those days are over.

Center-left politicians are now all on board with Greta Thunberg and her entourage, the Pope included, and since they control not only science but also the press, no one can stop them.

Spurred on by their own success, they have decided to wage a full scale “war on climate,” spending billions of hard-earned tax payer’s money on measures that will have little effect, or more likely no effect at all.

Norway has even donated billions to help China reduce its CO2 emissions. The Chinese have responded by accepting the money, and then schedule the construction of 288 new coal power plants.

The result of all this nonsense is, of course, nil, but our politicians are nonetheless undeterred. What we are witnessing is nothing less than a complete breakdown of communication and logic.

I suspect the reason is that this age of political correctness demands less of cognitive skills of our politicians than before, and more of symbolic qualities such as age, ethnicity, and gender.

Which in turn means that politicians over time inevitably will produce weaker ideas, and weak ideas cannot survive without some sort of protection, such as censorship. And censorship is what we have got.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D) suggests that climate scoffers have earned official treatment under the RICO act.

Others push for laws that make it harder to criticize center-left core values, Norwegian politicians demand that conservative Internet news media are shut down, Google labels mainstream conservative media as Nazis, and Angela Merkel was overheard demanding that Mark Zuckerberg remove certain critical comments from Facebook, to which Mr. Zuckerberg obligingly agreed.

This means that the new political class has in fact declared war, not on climate, but rather on the entire free world, or what is left of it, for the sole purpose of protecting and consolidating their own power, and quite possibly some hitherto undisclosed agenda.

However, this is extremely dangerous, because the day it dawns on the public that they no longer live in a democracy, their response may be equally undemocratic.

Jon Gulbrandsen, Ph.D., M. sc. and B. sc., University of Bergen, Norway. Marine Biologist, researcher/Assoc. Professor with Nofima, Norway and NOAA, USA. Retired, now author and columnist. Shares his life between Norway and Burundi.