TIME Magazine’s 2022 Feature Article, “Earth, Inc” …

“Ignorance Posing as Journalism”  

Robert W. Endlich

Once again, an old magazine in a doctor’s office waiting room was fertile ground for this month’s topic, “TIME Magazine’s 2022 feature article, ‘Earth, Inc’ …Ignorance Posing as Journalism.”

TIME’s 25 Apr/ 2 May 2022 print edition is the source of an absurd article on the alleged climate crisis, supposed journalist-experts waxing, in what they think is eloquent prose, the proclamation that a human-caused, CO₂-fueled ‘climate crisis’ is upon us.  In this feature, they write,

“For better or worse, corporations are more involved than ever in how the world handles the climate crisis.”

The puffery of journalist self-importance starts with a leading editorial by Edward Felsenthal, a Princeton Grad, TIME Editor-in-Chief and CEO, who announces a new TIME division, CO₂, bringing

“a climate action program…to help guide every sized business, including ours, in becoming net (CO₂ emission) zero and nature positive.”

The article itself is written by self-proclaimed Climate Expert Justin Worland, a Harvard History major who among countless others in Government, The Academy, and now in seemingly overwhelming numbers in the Private Sector, holds the belief (it is indeed a quasi-religious belief), that controlling “greenhouse gas emissions” will lead to human control of earth temperatures.

How does that work? Let’s look at some recent historical data in Figure 1 below:

So, to answer that previous question, about emissions of CO₂ controlling Earth temperatures, “How does that work?” It fails. Emissions (of CO₂) more than tripled from 1945 to the 1970s, and temperatures plummeted!

Never mind that an examination of proxy temperatures (and specifically Fig. 5 in the above linked to post) from the Greenland Ice Cores which show that most of the last 10,000 years surface temperatures were distinctly hotter than today, with a lot less CO₂ in the air. Knowledge of climate history be damned, “TIME marches on,” or rather, TIME magazine marches off a cliff, pronouncing “climate crisis” where none exists, except in the minds of truly ignorant climate alarmists.

Earth has done this experiment countless times for us in the past, if only the alarmists would look up Climate History’s data, or realize that High School Chemistry, specifically Henry’s Law, shows that TEMPERATURE controls the concentration of CO₂, not the opposite, as is claimed by the climate alarmists.

TIME’S MADE-UP “CLIMATE CRISIS”

TIME’s article right away proclaims “the climate crisis,” but fails to define it other than as an echo of the pronouncements of President Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and others.

The graphic below, from Andy May, shows a temperature reconstruction based primarily on the O₁₆/O₁₈ ratios in the ice obtained from the GISP2 ice cores from Greenland, compared with historical events.  Andy May discusses some of this in his blog.

Among the significant points which may be deduced from May’s reconstruction: Climate never “flat lines;” climate change is the norm.  The Minoan, Roman, Medieval, and Present Warm Periods were and are periods of human progress and historical achievement. The cold periods: Bronze Age collapse, 1000-500 BC; Dark Ages, ~300 AD and ~600 AD (Roman Empire collapse); and Little Ice Age 1300-1800, coldest in the previous 10,000 years; were times of strife, war, famine, hunger and human suffering.

THE GLOBAL WARMING ALARM:  A COMMUNIST PLOT AGAINST FREE-MARKET WEST

There is, in my judgement, a more sinister plot afoot in the global warming alarmist movement. In my analysis, this contrived fear of Human-Caused, CO₂-Fueled Global Warming is a Communist (or at least Leftist) Plot.

After the failure of Big Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the anti-free-market Left joined the environmental movement and invented the notion of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming as the methodology to bring about the collapse of the free-market West.

The presentation graphics prominently show a climate demonstration from Martin Durkin’s “The Great Global Warming Swindle” video, showing a Hammer and Sickle banner with a sign,

“Climate Change hurts the poorest HARDEST.”

In 1991 the Club of Rome, another anti-free market group, published The First Global Revolution, and in it, on page 75, was this smoking gun,

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine, and the like would fit the bill.”

So, rather than commenting on this situation from a point of critical thought and analysis, TIME joins in the alarmist party, actively spewing prejudicial (to the truth as seen by us climate alarm skeptics) words and graphics. A splendid example of the latter is this TIME prejudicial graphic stating,

“Planet Earth’s Future Now Rests in the Hands of Big Business,”

in the color inset in Figure 4 below.

WATER SUBSTANCE DRIVES CLIMATE, NOT CO₂

Blogger Pierre L. Gosselin from No Trick Zone has an excellent post written by Kenneth Richard from 24 May 2021, quoting Demetris Koutsoyiannis from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.  Among Dr. Koutsoyiannis’ statements:

“The scientifically vacuous term ‘climate change’ is a political construct designed to suggest climate variability has not occurred until (the) last few centuries and therefore what is occurring in the modern era is unnatural.”

“The ‘naïve idea’ or ‘wrong perception’ that climate is generally constant unless an external agent changes it is the consequence of the ‘white noise paradigm’ that has ‘misled climatologists’ for the last two centuries.” 

“Water is easily the main element driving Earth’s climate.  CO₂ is but a tiny bit player by comparison.”

“Another misconception, common in nonexperts, is that atmospheric CO₂; is the product of human emissions, while in fact the latter contribute only 3.8% to the global carbon cycle.”

“Using reliable instrumental measurements of global T and CO₂ concentration covering the time interval 1980–2019, a recent study found that in the relationship of CO₂ and temperature, the dominant causality direction is T → CO₂, rather than the other way round, despite the latter being the common perception.”

Regarding the latter, he is absolutely correct!  We in CASF have in “New Visitors” this topic which leads us to High School Chemistry’s topic of Henry’s Law.

ALARMISTS IGNORE THEIR THEORY’S FAILURES

Failures in the alarmist line of thought are abundant, if they would only look at (or for) failures. But failures abound if critical thought is brought to bear on the numerous examples in plain view.

Climate forecasts have a lousy forecast record.

The NWS outlook for February 2021’s temperatures was for above average to much-above average temperatures from eastern Minnesota to Texas. That was the year of an extreme Arctic outbreak which devastated much of Texas.

Here is one slide which illustrates the point:

Here is a lightly-edited paragraph from Wikipedia on this event:

With the record cold advancing so far south, effects were crippling and widespread. Many regions within the Southern Plains such as Oklahoma and Texas, in addition to Arkansas, broke or nearly reached record-low temperatures not seen in decades or even a century. In Texas, the record cold caused enormous strain on the power grid and froze pipelines, leading millions to lose power and many pipes to burst. At least 278 people were killed directly or indirectly by severe cold, and the damages are estimated to exceed $27.575 billion (2021 USD), including at least $26.075 billion in the United States and $1.5 billion in Mexico.

This article alone should have alerted the global warming alarmists to the errors of their ways, but it did not.  Let us count the lessons NOT LEARNED by the alarmist community:

Climate forecasts are unreliable, principally because the equations of motion of the atmosphere contain mathematical terms, the nonlinear terms in the partial differential equations, that cannot be solved by mathematicians today.

In science, a fundamental principle is that if you understand a system, you can predict its behavior. This example is but one of many climate forecast failures studiously ignored by the Alarmist community.

Cold kills many more people than heat.  Note well from the above, “At least 278 people were killed directly or indirectly…” from this cold weather event. This reinforces the point made by Gasparrini et al in The Lancet in 2015.

HUMAN ANCESTOR FOOTPRINTS TELL THE STORY

Consider two items which demolish TIME’s story of “Climate Crisis” supposedly caused by the gentle warming of today’s climate.  The two items are a 2013 story from the British Museum describing ~800,000-year old human ancestor footprints found in the clay at the foot of the cliffs at Happisburgh, UK, and an analysis of the ice age and interglacial temperatures from the Vostok Ice Cores from the blog of Ole Humlum, Emeritus Prof. of Geosciences, University of Oslo.

The two items are displayed in the next two figures below.

ONE

Figure 6 shows 800,000-year-old human ancestor footprints from mudstone at the base of the cliffs at Happisburgh, Norfolk, England.

TWO

The figure below is a time series of temperatures from the past 420,000 years, from the Vostok Ice Cores from the blog of Ole Humlum, emeritus professor of Geosciences from the University of Oslo, https://climate4you.com/

Taken together, Figures 6 and 7 show facts from the physical world which destroy the notion pushed by TIME that somehow, we are in a climate crisis. About 800,000 years ago humans wandered through a muddy area in the Thames River Basin, leaving footprints. They and their successors survived some eight Interglacial periods and glacial periods, temperatures revealed from the Oxygen Isotope analysis from the Vostok Ice Cores. The last interglacial period, the Eemian ~125,000 years ago, was so warm that Hippos wandered through the Rhine and Thames River Valleys.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, despite TIME’s cries of climate crisis, data from the physical world, rapidly internet-available to supposedly “educated journalists,” show numerous facts, measurements and data from the physical world disputing the cries of climate crisis. Although present temperatures are very modestly increasing, severe tornado numbers are down, heat waves peaked almost one hundred years ago, occurrences of extreme high temperatures peaked in the 1930s, and there is little change in hurricane numbers and strengths. During the previous interglacial, the Eemian, ~125,000 years ago, it was so warm that hippos grazed in the Rhine and Thames River valleys, but now they are found only in Africa, south of the Sahara.  Human ancestor footprints from near Happisburgh, England, from over 800,000 years ago show humans are able to thrive in temperatures and conditions much warmer than today.

TIME fails its Geology, Anthropology, and Critical Thought Exams.