Climate activists dressed in red descend upon Washington’s National Mall, a man uses his body to smear blood on the ground, and in the background, a teenage Greta Thunberg cries, “People are dying! Entire ecosystems are collapsing! We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is the money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?”
The above is the opening scene from “Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth,” a new documentary produced by Thomas Nelson and directed by Martin Durkin.
Instead of being one of many movies and documentaries extolling the virtues of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) and a net zero future, this film takes a decidedly different approach.
“People need to wake up about how much this scam is being used against us,” Mr. Nelson told The Epoch Times. “In many ways, it’s a war against working people. There are so many ways that working people’s lives are being made worse by the climate scam.”
Available to watch for free starting March 21 on YouTube, Rumble, and other streaming services, the purpose of “Climate the Movie” is to show how “an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry.”
Mr. Nelson said the push by governments and global organizations to control CO2 emissions is “going to make life way worse.”
“The whole idea that CO2 is going to make our kids’ lives worse—that’s not going to happen. But this CO2 scam is absolutely going to make our kids’ lives worse if we don’t fight as hard as we can,” he said.
The film features some of the most prestigious names in science: Nobel Laureate John Clauser, who received the Nobel Prize for physics in 2022; Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT; William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton; Steven Koonin, theoretical physicist and professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering; Willie Soon, an astrophysicist and geoscientist who previously worked at Harvard and the Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics; and many more.
Giving Scientists a Voice
Mr. Nelson said he started thinking about making the film after speaking with Mr. Durkin, who also directed the documentary, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”“[Mr. Durkin] volunteered that he'd like to remake that movie,“ Mr. Nelson said. ”It was a quick effort, and he thought he could do a better job, knowing what he knows now, etc. So that kicked off the whole thing.”
Mr. Nelson said making the film took “around a year,” and when they approached scientists such as Mr. Clauser and Mr. Happer, they were quick to show support.
“They want to push back on [the CO2 narrative] because they see all the negative effects. And they can see how it’s harming science itself. Because they’re being suppressed, and they’re being suppressed for their views. And that’s not the way science works, of course.”
In the film, all the scientists agreed emphatically on one central point: There is no climate crisis emergency and the push to declare one is about power, control, and money.
“It’s a wonderful business opportunity, okay? ‘You want climate, we'll give you climate,’” said Mr. Koonin in the film.
“What used to be a cottage industry has now blossomed to become a major part of the world economy,” Mr. Clauser said. “There are not just billions, but there are trillions of dollars at stake. There’s a huge amount of money involved.”
Matthew Wielicki, a geologist who taught at the University of Alabama, said in the film that students started to come into “our earth science departments, with a focus on climate.”
“That never happened before, but they started to look at their career prospects and they were smart, and they were looking at who’s hiring,” he said.
“And the fact of the matter was that everything in the hiring pool had ‘climate’ somewhere attached to the name.”
“This is a huge, big money scam,” Tony Heller, a geologist who previously worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in the documentary. “A lot of people’s livelihoods depend on it. They’re not going to give that up.”
Mr. Nelson said that as a consequence of the above, scientists who examine natural, non-manmade causes of warming are seen as problematic. This leads to ostracization, loss of funding, and even loss of employment.
He said he’s heard about people losing their jobs and funding “over and over since I’ve been involved in the debate.”
“It’s completely crazy that they can’t speak out. And that’s how we get these terrible effects,” Mr. Nelson said.
“Charlie Munger called it the ‘lollapalooza effect’ when so many of these different incentives are all pulling in the same direction. And that’s how humanity has gotten just way off the rails on this crazy idea that CO2 is the climate control knob and that the No. 1 thing we have to do is fight carbon dioxide.
“I think people in the future won’t be able to believe, when looking back on this, just how crazy it got.”
In 2003, Mr. Soon and Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist who worked at Harvard and the Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics, published a paper criticizing Michael Mann’s iconic “hockey stick graph” that suggests human activity is the main cause of global warming.
The Soon–Baliunas paper instead showed that temperature changes are the result of solar variation. The authors faced fierce opposition and were subjected to frequent personal attacks.
“When we started to estimate that the sun changed [temperature] quite significantly in terms of climatic sense, immediately the attack is there because it’s not following the narrative,” Mr. Soon saya in the film. “They need the CO2 to be the only one, the only dominant player.”
Ms. Baliunas ended up retiring early as a result of all the attacks.
“When you tried to say, ‘Well, we’re just looking for the background of natural variability,’ the response would be, ‘We can’t have natural changes as an effect. It has to be human-caused,’” she says in the film.
“And some of that was directly stated, but most of it was indirect.” She said funding started to dry up.
The Consensus Scam
Mr. Nelson said that neither he nor Mr. Durkin is making money from the film, but they made it to push back against the narrative.“It’s going to get way worse,” Mr. Nelson said. “The only reason the grids are still operating is they haven’t pushed it far enough.
“But if they push it as hard as they want to push it, then we’re going to have all sorts of blackouts, our ambulances aren’t going to arrive on time, and just all sorts of things in our real lives will be impacted.”
He said a thriving scientific community involves the ability for everyone to speak freely about their observations and what the data is showing without fear of being marginalized or silenced.
“We have got to have all sorts of debates, and we have got to have people thinking for themselves and saying, ‘Here’s what I think, here’s my data.’ And then other people will say, ‘Oh, you’re wrong. Here’s what I think, and here’s my data.’ You got to do it that way,” Mr Nelson said.
“You can’t just pick one narrative and go with that one for decades. That’s how we’ve gotten so far off the rails. And then it just builds; this whole thing snowballed.”
In the film, Ross McKitrick, an economist and statistician at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, said silencing the opposition is a tactic used by those in power in order to reach their “consensus.”
“If a scientifically qualified person stands up and says, ‘We don’t see an upward trend in the data on Pacific typhoons,’ well, suddenly they lose standing to address the topic of Pacific typhoons,” Mr. McKitrick said. “Not because what they said is wrong, but because it’s off-message.
“They can marginalize any kind of criticism of the narrative by saying, ‘You are not qualified to talk about this because you don’t support the narrative.’ And then, having marginalized everyone who doesn’t support the narrative, they can turn around and say, ‘Well, everyone who counts supports the narrative. So, we must be right.’”
Mr. Lindzen said the push to demonize CO2 has turned into a “cult.”
“It’s completely divorced from science,” he said.
Positive Response
“Climate the Movie” premiered in London, the Netherlands, and Virginia before being released to the general public. So far, Mr. Nelson said the response has been overwhelmingly positive.He said the government policies enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic led people to question “so-called experts.” He hopes that discernment spills over into the climate crisis narrative.
“It is the movie we need right now because we’re poised to hear this message. It’s exactly the right time for this movie to come out because so many of us have noticed so many lies in the rest of our lives.”
Mr. Nelson said that over the past few years, he’s seen the climate crisis narrative erode to the verge of collapsing.
“As people start questioning all this stuff, I think there’s going to be strength in numbers,” he said. “I’m hoping that the whole thing crumbles. I think when it does crumble, it'll crumble pretty fast.”
