The Great Climate Change Conspiracy
In 1945, physicist Edward Teller and colleague, Robert Oppenheimer, watched the Trinity Test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert. Teller did not lie on the ground with his back turned as instructed – he eye-witnessed the explosion with sunglasses tucked beneath the government-issued welding goggles. Twelve years later, eyes wide open, he was warning Americans about a “greenhouse effect” caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
The audience was the American Chemical Society. The average global temperature was 57 degrees Fahrenheit as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its predecessors. It was the beginning of a new era in Earth’s history – for the first time, human beings were developing technology that could wipe out all life.
Teller told those chemists in 1957 that the large amount of carbon-based fuel that had been burnt since the mid-19th Century was concentrating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This would “act in the same way as a greenhouse and will raise the temperature at the surface” – and Teller calculated that if the concentration of CO2 increased by 10 percent, “an appreciable part of the polar ice might melt,” according to M.A. Matthews, the Shell Oil Co. scientist dispatched to refute him in a 1959 rebuttal for The New Scientist.
Teller went on to found Lawrence Livermore Laboratory to develop nuclear weapons aimed at deterring the Soviet threat. The Hungarian immigrant was no tree-hugging liberal with stock in solar panels. The ardent anti-Communist envisioned commercial uses for nuclear power and hydrogen bombs – for example, to help dig a harbor in Alaska to expedite the shipping of coal and oil. Meanwhile, Shell was arguing that Earth’s massive ocean would easily absorb most of the CO2, assuring the public that “Man’s efforts in burning large quantities of fossil fuels are inevitably small compared with the magnitude of Nature’s carbon cycles.”
As far as we can tell, Teller was right and Shell was wrong – at least according to NOAA Climate Science Program Manager Howard Diamond. “Well, Dr. Teller was prescient,” Diamond says. “The surface warming of the planet only constitutes about 10 percent of what is happening, as about 90 percent of anthropogenic warming is taking place in the depths of the oceans. The Earth's climate system is out of energy balance and heat has accumulated continuously over the past decades, warming the ocean, land, cryosphere and the atmosphere.”
Unless, of course, the NOAA, United Nations and most climate scientists are part of a conspiracy to scare humanity into accepting government regulation, socialism and huge investment in wind, solar and nuclear energy technologies.
“Global Warming is a non-event, a manufactured crisis and a total scam,” came the 2007 proclamation of John Coleman, long-time meteorologist for ABC’s “Good Morning America” and co-founder of The Weather Channel. “Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long-term scientific data back in the late 1990s to create an allusion of rapid global warming … it is the greatest scam in history.”
Conservative conservation
To be sure, conservatives can be environmentalists, as evidenced by the pioneering conservation work of Republican President Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service, created five national parks, and helped set aside 230 million acres of public lands for what would now be called “sustainable development.” Roosevelt’s conservative conservation looked at how natural resources could be effectively used to benefit humans economically, as opposed to John Muir’s vision of preserving pristine natural environment for its own sake.
Coleman’s 2007 manifesto, published by the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project (ICECAP), was a reiteration of a conspiracy theory that dates back to the 1960s – namely, that scientists engage in duplicitous environmental alarmism in order to fill their coffers with research grants and advance a one-world (totalitarian) government.
“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them, then teamed up with movie, media and other liberal, environmentalist journalists to create this wild ‘scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. Now their ridiculous, manipulated science has been accepted as fact and become a cornerstone issue for CNN, CBS, NBC, the Democratic Political Party, the Governor of California, school teachers and, in many cases, well informed but very gullible environmental conscientious citizens.” – John Coleman
The Drudge Report picked up Coleman’s essay and, as traced by the Columbia Journalism Review, “within days its author was a cause célèbre on right-wing talk radio and cable television, beaming into Glenn Beck’s TV show via satellite from the KUSI studios to elaborate on the scientists’ conspiracy.”
Despite the shared etymology of “conservation” and “conservative,” many of Roosevelt’s Republican colleagues worried that environmentalism could stymie the economic development of the West and bloat Washington bureaucracies. The right wing that welcomed Coleman’s use of “scam” to describe climate change had once noted that the date of Earth Day – April 22, 1970 – coincided with Vladimir Lenin’s birthday.
What might be called “The Great Climate Change Conspiracy” has been the staple of the John Birch Society for decades. Gary Benoit, editor of the Society’s The New American magazine since 1986, has been tracking the ideological underpinnings of environmentalism since the first Earth Day. To his credit, Benoit doesn’t just speculate about possible motives of a shadowy cabal, he quotes extensively from Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1969), The Environmental Handbook: Prepared for the First National Environmental Teach-in (1970) and articles and speeches by various Earth Day leaders. Controlling runaway population and the commensurate consumption of global resources and energy would likely require lots of government intervention.
For example, in The Population Bomb, Ehrlich proposed a federal Department of Population and Environment (DPE) to take “whatever steps are necessary to establish a reasonable population size in the United States.” This DPE would develop a system of incentives and penalties, and even resort to compulsion if voluntary methods failed.
“Writing five years before Roe vs. Wade, he [Ehrlich] candidly stated: ‘Abortion is a highly effective method in the armory of population control,’ ” Benoit reflected in 1990, in a dire warning to conservatives on the eve of Earth Day’s 20th anniversary. “One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.”
Earth Day speakers were often socialists or – heaven forbid – communists. Benoit points to Chicago Seven member Rennie Davis’ 1970 proclamation, “Earth Day is for the sons and daughters of the American Revolution who are going to tear this capitalism down and set us free.”
Regardless of one’s place on the political spectrum, the essential questions remain: Did scientists intentionally falsify climate data to produce the greatest scam in history? Did the corporate purveyors of fossil fuels hoodwink conservatives into denying history’s greatest calamity?
Fossil Fooled
From a neutral, journalistic point of view, a “conspiracy theory” is not necessarily false, misguided or misinformed. It is a simply a narrative that departs from the conventional understanding of events. Conspiracy narratives usually involve a cover-up – namely, a powerful group intentionally hiding the truth from the public. Whether it’s a mysterious Illuminati or the Nixon White House, the conspirators cover up the truth via false-flag operations, black-bag operations, non-denial denials, withholding information or creating disinformation.
A conspiracy is not the honest debate over the facts and what they mean, it is a willful attempt to hide the truth. So when Shell Oil geophysicist M. King Hubbert sided with Teller on the greenhouse effect in 1962, he appeared to be engaging in scientific exchange, not globalist conspiracy.
“There is evidence that the greatly increasing use of the fossil fuels, whose material contents after combustion are principally H20 and CO2, is seriously contaminating the earth's atmosphere with CO2,” Hubbert wrote in Energy Resources, a National Research Council report prepared for the Kennedy Administration. “Analyses indicate that the CO2 content of the atmosphere since 1900 has increased 10 percent. It is possible that this is already producing a secular climatic change in the direction of higher average temperatures. This could have profound effects both on the weather and on the ecological balances.”
Hubbert concluded his report with Yale biology professor G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s recommendation that America seriously consider the “maximum utilization of solar energy.”
Shell was non-plussed and proceeded to fund more research. The company’s worldwide head of research, Victor Rothschild (yes, of the Rothschild Family), enlisted British chemist and inventor James Lovelock to advise Royal Dutch Shell on the possible global consequences of air pollution. His 1966 report, “Combustion of Fossil Fuels: Large Scale Atmospheric Effects,” was never published. But Lovelock confirmed to Shell that global warming was the trend from about 1850 to 1940, and then the planet began to cool. Either trend could reverse and land serious liability into the lap of petroleum producers.
“What seems to be important is not the explanations and whether they are correct in detail,” he wrote, according to Leah Aronowsky, a science historian who dug the report out of Lovelock’s archives at the Science Museum at Wroughton, UK. “But rather the almost certain fact that the climate is worsening and the probability that the combustion of fuel is responsible.”
Investigative reporting over the past eight years has unearthed documents indicating that Shell (as well as ExxonMobil and Total) developed a strategy in the early 1970s to make a conspiracy theory out of climate change science. This fell on the heels of 2010’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by American science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Their scenario: find a renowned scientist with a certain amount of public fame and fund him to cast doubt on climate change.
One candidate for doubt merchant was Dutch chemist Frits Böttcher, a co-founder of the Club of Rome. In 1972, this global think tank published the Dutch-language version of Limits to Growth – what could be considered a sequel to The Population Bomb. Using MIT computer modeling of trends in population, food production, industrialization, pollution and consumption, the Club of Rome augured a mid-21st Century collapse of the world as we know it.
Böttcher, who worked as a part-time advisor to the Netherlands-based Shell for 30 years, became the point man for developing responses to Limits to Growth by government officials, scientists and industrialists. Böttcher’s Working Group Future – nicknamed The Club of The Hague – soon published Work For The Future.
Although I have been unable to obtain an English translation of Böttcher’s report, Dutch journalists have written that it called the greenhouse effect “controversial” and suggested the exploration of tar sands, shale oils and coal advance while climate research continued. “Shell was the main sponsor of Böttcher's fight against what he himself calls the 'carbon dioxide smear,’” write Alexander Beunder, Bas van Beek,Merel de Buck and Jilles Mast in a 2020 article in de Volkskrant. “Between 1990 and 1993, the company donated a total of 142,000 guilders to its 'CO2 Project', according to documents from Böttcher's personal archive.”
No fewer than 24 companies sponsored Böttcher's CO2 Project, a decidely pro-industry response to the the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), founded in 1988. Dutch Environment Minister Ed Nijpels convened a climate summit in Noordwijk in 1989, hoping to hammer out an international agreement to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The UN held its ground-breaking “Earth Summit” in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. Climate change was still non-partisan, with President George H.W. Bush signing the original Rio Declaration.
Groups like the National Association of Manufacturers felt threatened with all this momentum around climate change. The Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was formed in 1989 to advance the interests of producers and users of fossil fuels . Members included Shell, the American Petroleum Institute, National Coal Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The well-funded coalition opposed regulation to mitigate global warming and challenged the science of the IPCC, all in hopes of scuttling the 1997 Kyoto Protocol .
They succeeded with the unanimous passage of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, the bipartisan U.S. Senate effort to torpedo Kyoto. Now-President Joe Biden and then-Senator (now Climate Envoy) John Kerry joined the unanimous vote to reject the protocol on grounds that Kyoto’s climate policy was not good economic policy. The GCC spent more than $13 million on its ad campaign. Another big spender was Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held company in the U.S., involved in the manufacturing, refining and distribution of petroleum, chemicals and energy.
Patriarch Fred Koch was a founding member of the John Birch Society. He turned over his industrial empire to sons Charles and David (now deceased) in 1967. From 1997 to 2017, the Koch Brothers spent $127 million on nearly 100 organizations promoting the Great Climate Change Conspiracy Theory, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute and the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment, according to Greenpeace – an admittedly biased organization. (Do numbers lie?)
Indeed, do numbers lie? When Teller gave his warning in 1957, global average temperature was 57 degrees Fahrenheit. The world recorded its hottest day ever this past July, according the U.S. National Centers on Environmental Prediction. The global average temperature hit 63 degrees.
