As I wrote in my recent book, Mind Viruses: America’s Irrational Obsessions:
In 1955, a few years after John von Neumann proposed a preemptive nuclear strike on Russia, he wrote an essay for Fortune magazine titled “Can We Survive Technology?”in which he argued that man’s technological and industrial prowess had reached such a large scale that it was unleashing forces that could disrupt the earth’s natural equilibrium, and that this would likely cause a major crisis between 1955 and 1980. “When or how it will end—or to what state of affairs it will yield—nobody can say,” he declared.
After acknowledging the risk of nuclear war that he’d helped to usher in, he proceeds to outline the risk of man-made climate change in what was probably the first time a major scientist issued this warning in a popular publication. His reflections on the possibility of human caused climate change are worth quoting in full, as they set forth the basic elements of a theory that ultimately became a widespread obsession and a major driver of public policy in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe.
All major weather phenomena, as well as climate as such, are ultimately controlled by the solar energy that falls on the earth. To modify the amount of solar energy, is, of course, beyond human power. But what really matters is not the amount that hits the earth, but the fraction retained by the earth, since that reflected back into space is no more useful than if it had never arrived. Now, the amount absorbed by the solid earth, the sea, or the atmosphere seems to be subject to delicate influences. True, none of these has so far been substantially controlled by human will, but there are strong indications of control possibilities.
The carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by industry’s burning of coal and oil—more than half of it during the last generation—may have changed the atmosphere’s composition sufficiently to account for a general warming of the world by about one degree Fahrenheit. The volcano Krakatao erupted in 1883 and released an amount of energy by no means exorbitant. Had the dust of the eruption stayed in the stratosphere for fifteen years, reflecting sunlight away from the earth, it might have sufficed to lower the world’s temperature by six degrees (in fact, it stayed for about three years, and five such eruptions would probably have achieved the result mentioned). This would have been a substantial cooling; the last Ice Age, when half of North America and all of northern and western Europe were under an ice cap like that of Greenland or Antarctica, was only fifteen degrees colder than the present age. On the other hand, another fifteen degrees of warming would probably melt the ice of Greenland and Antarctica and produce world-wide tropical to semi-tropical climate.
Following these opening reflections, von Neumann proceeds to make a series of vague assertions and wild speculations about how humans could, in theory, take measures to alter the climate to make it either cooler or warmer. The trouble, he claims, is making the determination about which alteration is more desirable. As he put it,
What could be done, of course, is no index to what should be done; to make a new ice age in order to annoy others, or a new tropical, “interglacial” age in order to please everybody, is not necessarily a rational program. In fact, to evaluate the ultimate consequences of either a general cooling or a general heating would be a complex matter. Changes would affect the level of the seas, and hence the habitability of the continental coastal shelves; the evaporation of the seas, and hence general precipitation and glaciation levels; and so on. What would be harmful and what beneficial—and to which regions of the earth—is not immediately obvious. But there is little doubt that one could carry out analyses needed to predict results, intervene on any desired scale, and ultimately achieve rather fantastic effects.
Von Neumann’s assertion that “to evaluate the ultimate consequences of either general cooling or general heating would be a complex matter” is the crux of his reflections. The earth’s climate is an extremely complex system composed of many interacting parts. Interactions among its various components may produce emergent and unpredictable results. Defining features of any complex system includes nonlinear relationships, feedback loops, adaptive responses, varied components, and multiple scales of time and space. Notable examples include the human body, ecosystems, economies, and the earth’s climate. As in all complex systems, it is extremely difficult if not impossible to predict the consequences of a major human intervention in the system. Any human intervention therefore carries a high risk of unintended consequences.
Von Neumann understood this, but he nevertheless proffered the wild claim that one could “intervene on any desired scale and ultimately achieve rather fantastic results.” As one says in German (the language of von Neumann’s formal education) er spinnt. The expression literally means “he spins” (a yarn); metaphorically it means “he’s talking crazy.” It’s possible that von Neumann believed his essay would be interpreted as low-resolution musings about theoretical possibilities that needed far more investigation and refinement before they could be considered scientific propositions. As it turned out, his vague musings have remained the basic tenets of “climate change” doctrine ever since.
Of all the nations in the West, Germany has proven to be the greatest votary of the climate cult, and its government has proposed and implemented all kinds of measures for drastically reducing the country’s burning of fossil fuels.
While out for my daily walk this afternoon, I wondered if the German government has ever attempted to quantify how much it’s greenhouse gas reductions will contribute to reducing the ostensibly disastrous effects of global “climate change.”
I did a web search and found a questionnaire that German MPs Karsten Hilse, Dr. Heiko Wildberg, Marc Bernhard, Andreas Bleck, Dr. Rainer Kraft of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) submitted in September 2019. Question number ten addresses what I was wondering:
Wie viel Grad Celsius Erderwärmung werden bei einer (gemäß Klimaschutzplan 2050 und in Planung befindlichem Klimaschutzgesetz) Minderung der anthropogenen CO2äqu.-Emissionen innerhalb der Bundesrepublik Deutschland um die insgesamt geforderten rd. 900 Mio Tonnen nach Kenntnis der Bundesregierung vermieden?
According to the German government, how many degrees Celsius of global warming will be avoided if anthropogenic CO2 equivalent emissions within the Federal Republic of Germany are reduced by the total required amount of approximately 900 million tons (according to the Climate Action Plan 2050 and the planned Climate Protection Act)?
In its reply to the questionnaire, the government avoided addressing this specific question, but touched on it in its reply to the question of whether it’s possible to quantify how much it will cost the German citizenry to make a measurable reduction of the earth’s mean surface temperature.
Die Bundesregierung wiederholt an dieser Stelle ihre Aussage aus der oben genannten Bundestagsdrucksache, dass eine anteilige Aufschlüsselung der Aufwendungen für die Begrenzung des Anstiegs der globalen Mitteltemperatur wissenschaftlich nicht möglich ist.
The Federal Government reiterates its statement from the aforementioned Bundestag document that a proportional breakdown of expenditures for limiting the increase in global mean temperature is scientifically impossible.
In other words, the German people are being asked to take radical measures to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions on the grounds that doing so could, at some point in the future, make some sort of contribution to reducing the adverse effects of human induced climate change.
As an old friend in Vienna likes to say of the Germans:
Deutsch sein heisst jede Sackgasse bis zum Ende abschreiten.
To be German means to walk every dead end street to the very end.
The entire climate change movement is based upon fraud and is nothing more than a
Money sucking operation from the central government. Science is complete incapable of explaining the ice ages beyond it got cold then it warmed up we think. It’s the weak minded politicians that view this whole scam as a way to winning elections the only thing they truly care about.
The late, great Dr. Michael Crichton observed that the global climate hysteria was the greatest scam and fraud in the history of mankind.