Facts of life

Absurd outcomes

Everyone dies. No one wants to die. These immutable facts have created countless religions, cults, absurd beliefs, and consume a massive amount of the world’s income on “health care” which seeks not to “save lives” but to “extend lives” since “saving lives is at best extending them. Something like 80% of the health care costs spent on every soul are incurred in the last few years of life, as efforts to prevent the inevitable rise to extremes.

Organized religion came into existence in part to try to explain the mysteries of life on Earth and in part to create the fantasy of “life after death” to make the misery of life palatable. The largest and most popular religions require their adherents to pledge feilty to their faith and throughout history to attack, persecute, torture and inflict all manner of evil on people who disagreed with their “faith”, all for their own good, of course, you know, to “save their souls” and ensure they get a free pass into heaven, deserving or otherwise. Organized religion is all about power.

The rack, the thumbscrew, the “iron betty” and the gibbet were all developed to enforce “faith” on the heretics who refused to sign up for the gobbledygook priests, pastors, imams, rabbis, and other clerics preached regularly to perpetuate the myths their power depended upon. Now that religious faith is ebbing and being replaced by science, common sense and the absence of any faith (atheism or agnosticism are on the rise worldwide) a large void is present in the structure of society which benefited from religious belief to create order where chaos was likely without it. The “Ten Commandments” - four of which require adherence to the faith rather than guide moral or ethical behaviour - provided a template for society to assess what was “good” and what was “evil” and the threat of eternal damnation or hellfire and brimstone was ever present to police and enforce those “commandments”.

To fill the void in over-arching faith arising from abandonment of organized religion, new quasi-religious beliefs have emerged bordering on cults. Climate change allegedly caused by CO2 emissions is such a cult-like belief. Widely accepted, promoted on social media by leftists and climate nutters, the concept that mankind’s use of fossil fuels with inherent creation of CO2 emissions causes catastrophic climate change is utter nonsense. The theory is devoid of scientific underpinning and is no surprise that its adherents claim otherwise. Reality is that any capture of outgoing long wave infrared energy - which climate nutters claim responsible for “global warming” is an aphysical impossibility. CO2 interaction with LWIR is long since saturated¹. Claims that the rise in the trace element of CO2 since the industrial revolution arose from fossil fuel emissions is likewise debunked by empirical measurement of the isotopes of CO2 found in today’s atmosphere.²

The attack on CO2 emissions, now in high gear, sees the Biden Administration spending billions promoting the fight against climate change in the so-called “inflation reduction act”, considering a ban on natural gas cooking stoves, providing subsidies to electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers and their customers, suppressing oil & gas production and all manner of self-inflicted wounds on the U.S. economy, and Justin Trudeau in Canada imposing a useless “carbon tax”, putting major federal barriers in place to prevent construction of pipelines or major fossil fuel projects, vilifying coal as a source of fuel for electricity generations and squandering billions of taxpayer money on subsidies for EV battery manufacture. In Europe, trillions have been squandered on so-called “renewables” - wind and solar - littering the landscape with detiorating wind towers and fields of toxic waste from damaged solar panels without makin a dent in fossil fuel demand but crippling economic growth.

The race to “NetZero” promises the end of life on Earth if ever achieved since without fossil fuel emissions the dangerously low levels of atmospheric CO2 would within 40 years fall below the 150 ppm by volume needed to support plant life and with it our own lives. Along the route to NetZero, developing economies are hamstrung by their lack of affordable and reliable energy condemning billions of people to poverty. Annual emissions now running at 35 gigatons (equal to 7 ppm of atmosphere by mass and 10 ppm by volume) see measured increases in CO2 at Mauna Loa rise by only 2 ppm by volume, and CO2 concentrations would almost certainly fall by 7 or 8 ppm by volume absent the fossil fuel emissions, dropping from the current 410 ppm by volume to less than 150 ppm by volume within 40 years. The suicidal race to NetZero has momentum since much of the Western electorate has bought into the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) charade and keeps electing nutters like Biden, Trudeau, Sunak, Macron and Scholz to the halls of power, each bent on a Quixotic mission to alter nature with damaging consequences but supported by a confused, misled and frightened electorate who have become deluded by the AGW propaganda from the hard left wing of politics.

As Francois-Marie de Arouet famously said (under his nom de plume, Voltaire) “If you can persuade people of absurdities, you can make them commit atrocities”. That is certainly what is happening in left wing administrations in Western democracies.

1. Dieter Schildknecht, Saturation of the Infrared Absorpton of Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere, Cornell University, March 27, 2020. [

2. Skrable, Chabot and French, World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018), The Radiation Safety Journal, Health Physics Society, January 2022