DiCaprio film ignores real climate change monster

August 29, 2014 Babatunde Ojetola

By Tom Harris and Bob Carter

In Carbon, Leonardo DiCaprio’s new film about the ‘climate crisis’, we are told that the world is threatened by a ‘carbon monster’. Coal, oil, natural gas, and other carbon-based forms of energy are causing dangerous climate change and must be turned off as soon as possible, DiCaprio says.

But he has identified the wrong monster. It is the climate scare itself, something that DiCaprio is promoting with his sensationalist, error-riddled film, that is the real threat to civilization.

Carbon is the first of four films that DiCaprio is releasing in the weeks prior to the United Nations’ Climate Summit 2014 to be held in New York City on September 23. If Carbon is any indication of what the rest of the series will be like, then the public needs to brace against receiving yet another intense dose of mind-numbing propaganda on the global warming issue.

Besides repeated use of the “carbon pollution” and “carbon poison” misnomers—carbon dioxide is, after all, plant food—DiCaprio’s film is based on a myth, namely that we know that carbon dioxide from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change lists thousands of scientific papers that either debunk or cast serious doubt on this popular though misguided notion.

Oregon-based physicist Dr Gordon Fulks sums up the situation well: “Carbon dioxide is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring, for ocean acidification that is not occurring, and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

The climate scare, according to Fulks, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus,” for which DiCaprio’s film will act as yet another vector.

Through the use of skilled campaigning, the climate scare has now captured governments, corporations, the education system, mainstream media, and even churches. Millions of people have been misled into believing, quite sincerely, that we must now act quickly to avert climate catastrophe.

In response, political leaders have created a huge network of national and international global warming bureaucracies and advisors. The UN itself, primarily through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has focussed for more than two decades on how to stop climate change (a physical impossibility—climate changes no matter what we do). In addition, there now exist innumerable national greenhouse offices, ministries of climate change, state and municipal greenhouse offices, climate change sections within government departments, and a legion of multifarious climate change research groups.

Yet global warming ceased in the late 1990s, and the Earth has been cooling slightly over the past decade. This, despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels have risen by almost 10% since 1997, a figure that represents an astonishing 30% of all human-related emissions since the industrial revolution began.

So although we have intense lobbying for climate change action, what we don’t seem to have is any measurable human-caused warming for action to be taken against.

The costs of feeding the climate change ‘monster’ have reached staggering levels. According to the Congressional Research Service, between 2001 and 2014 the US Government spent $131 billion on human-caused climate change projects. They also allowed tax breaks for anti-carbon dioxide energy initiatives totalling $176 billion. Federal government spending is now running at $11 billion a year, and tax breaks at about $20 billion a year for a total of more than double the total value of wheat produced in the United States in 2013 ($14.4 billion).

Dr Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion annually by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century. Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, asserts, “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”

So, Al Gore was right in one respect. Climate change is a moral issue. There is nothing quite so immoral as the sight of well-fed, well-housed Westerners assuaging their consciences by wasting huge amounts of money on futile anti-global warming policies, using money that could instead be spent on improving the living standards in developing countries. Denying poor nations, many of whose citizens lack adequate sanitation, schooling, clean water, and health services, the finance to build inexpensive hydrocarbon-fired power stations, and who in consequence suffer millions of premature deaths every year, has been aptly described as technological genocide.

And that is where the moral outrage should lie. Perhaps Mr DiCaprio would like to make a film about it.

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Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa-based International Climate Science Coalition. Dr Bob Carter is formerprofessor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia.