This article was originally published in Danish on January 3, 2016.
Over the past few years, people around the world have been stuffed with climate change scare stories in the same way the French feed geese to create the delicious foie gras. Unfortunately, no similar good comes from the tireless work of the climate mafia. On the contrary, it is the basis for a new endless stream of taxes and fees that simply go into the bottomless coffers of states without benefiting their citizens.
Every slightly older person knows that the climate is changing. The strange thing is that meteorologists only became aware of it very recently. Until a few years ago, the older generation’s talk of warmer winters and poorer summers was simply dismissed as memory shifts. An examination of radio archives and newspapers will confirm this. From one day to the next it changed. “As we all know, it’s getting warmer”, a meteorologist suddenly said on the radio – and then it was common knowledge that was previously denied. Already here you are called to reflection.
My grandfather, born in 1863, wrote a short piece in 1915 describing Christmas when he was a child in Northwest Jutland. He also immediately states that winters were naturally much harsher with much more snow then than in 1915. So climate change is something that has been known for a long time – and long before the pollution that is blamed today was widespread. Early images of glaciers also show how in the latter half of the eighteenth century they shrank from decade to decade. In fact, if the climate had not warmed over the last 10 to 15,000 years, we would be sitting under a kilometer-thick layer of ice today, because most of Denmark was covered in ice back then. The whole climate issue arises because the “Little Ice Age”, which occurred in the 17th and 19th centuries with a relapse during the Second World War, has been chosen as the starting point. This Little Ice Age was exceptionally cold – by the year 1000, however, Greenland was warm enough for the Vikings to farm – and the name was rightly given to the country, not as an expression of misleading marketing.
Yes, but what about CO2 , which is now almost considered a dangerous poison? Some scientists believe that CO2 is a consequence of warming and not its cause. In any case, the anthropogenic portion of CO2 in the atmosphere is vanishingly small – so small, according to these scientists, that it cannot possibly have any further impact. So why don’t we hear more about it? Well, politicians and journalists are totally ignorant and have no insight. They follow the signals of loud groups whose entire “raison d’être” is the climate issue and who see in it an income – and a means to divert people’s attention away from the real issues of the day. Once the media, always on the lookout for disasters to write about, whether real, imagined or hypothetical, and the politicians, who are nothing more than a puppet for the media and the real decision-makers behind the scenes, are aroused, the rest takes care of itself. Scientists who are skeptical get no tenure or no research funding, while the climate zealots get fat jobs and all the money they need. As a result, very few scientists question this new dogma of the age – it’s simply a career stopper on par with race theories and Holocaust denial. Who wouldn’t jump on the bandwagon? Very few. And it opens up entirely new career opportunities. A master’s degree in literary history advances from journalist to climate minister and on to climate commissioner, a position that is not – as you would expect – held by a professional, but by a miserable political opportunist who – for the sake of his personal career – refuses to return to Denmark in his hour of need to save his party. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The entire army of officials in the Commission and the Danish ministries create positions and make reports, discuss at meetings and conferences, which in themselves create large amounts of the CO2 they claim to fight. It has become a huge industry that you and I pay for – without getting anything in return, apart from an endless series of taxes and fees. Climate change is taking its usual course with the consequences it is now having.
And these consequences are not all negative. Rising seas due to melting polar ice is obviously bad news for some low-lying islands, but think of the vast currently uninhabitable areas that will eventually become habitable – the interior of Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia, Antarctica. But climate change could also reverse the Gulf Stream, without which life here will become truly uncomfortable unless compensated by increased warming. What is the conclusion of all this? Well, we don’t know much about that. What we do know is that the climate has always changed – often suddenly and dramatically. Fossils and oil deposits tell us something about these changes that have occurred throughout Earth’s history. Today, the dilettantes who already deny the natural sciences believe that politicians can change this natural evolution. It is hubris – megalomania of the very worst kind.
When we hear about floods caused by heavy rainfall, we are led to believe that these are consequences of man-made climate change. However, the causes are to be found elsewhere and are simply rather left unmentioned. These phenomena are often caused by overpopulation. Construction is now taking place in places that are naturally floodplains, and when rivers that have become channels with concrete walls overflow their banks, enormous forces are unleashed. Add to that increased desertification due to increased cattle farming, soil depletion, deforestation, etc. There are simply a few billion too many people on the planet.
However, it is worth sticking to the indisputable fact that greenhouse gases are a good. Without them, the earth would be uninhabitable. They are not dangerous, they are a prerequisite for life as we know it. Can’t there be too much of them? Maybe there is. Can we change it? I doubt it.
This should not be taken as a defense for polluting our surroundings. Pollution must be limited, of course, because it is harmful to humans, flora and fauna. However, CO2 is not pollution – it is naturally occurring and probably the least harmful thing we release into nature. When we talk about reducing the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and put taxes on it, while putting our faces in heavy, serious folds, we miss the little boy in Hans Christian Andersen Andersen’s fairy tale about the Emperor’s New Clothes, which seems to have been completely forgotten here in the poet’s own homeland.
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the climate nuts are right – that we are on the brink of disaster because we are continuously producing increasing amounts of CO2. So we have a big problem on our hands. Can it be solved by plastering the country with loud and obnoxious wind turbines? Hardly. To solve it, we need to change society. Take a look at the highways of Europe. Endless convoys of trucks transporting goods across Europe, goods that could just as easily be produced where they are consumed, but are now transported back and forth across the continent. North German milk is transported to South Germany – and with it comes loads of South German milk for sale in North Germany. Tomatoes from southern Italy are trucked to northern Italy, from where they are trucked back to southern Italy to be sold at ten times the price they could have been sold for without this crazy journey. The open European single market has killed the production of fruit and berries by Danish growers – they are now imported in trucks from Eastern Europe, Italy and by air from overseas. Soon you won’t be able to buy a Danish apple anymore. Tasty fresh fruit has been replaced by tasteless products picked unripe on the other side of the world to be sold here. Danish apple varieties can actually stretch most of the year. And some things we can get in season – we’ve lived well with that in the past. Tulips and other flowers are flown in from Kenya and sold for nothing, we get fish from Lake Victoria in East Africa, New Zealand butter fills the fridge and is cheaper than Danish butter. We could go on and on.
In Denmark, there are now only 3 large dairies left that “produce” drinking milk. Similarly, the production of cheese, butter and milk powder is concentrated in just a few dairies. The milk is trucked from the milk producers (formerly farmers) to these mega dairies and back to the few remaining grocery stores, where people have to start their cars to get there. In the countryside, public transportation has long since been de facto abolished. The concentration of ever-larger units naturally also means that people have to travel further to work – a distance that outside the cities can only be covered by car – often several hundred kilometers a day for a family. And this applies not only to manufacturing companies, but also hospitals, municipal administration, etc.
Danish manufacturing companies have long since moved abroad, from where the goods are then transported to Denmark. And we are often talking about the other side of the globe. Almost everything we used to produce here is now imported from abroad. This is, of course, a national and economic problem – but it’s also an environmental problem. Relatively clean Danish factories are replaced by smelly and highly polluting production units in China and India, because a big part of the idea behind the relocation is to save on all the rules that make production expensive, including the wages of the Danish worker, who needs more in an hour than a Chinese worker needs in a week.
Maybe this is the place to start lowering CO2 emissions! If nothing else, it would have other beneficial effects, but that won’t happen, because it would be at the expense of big business profits! And it is big business that owns the politicians. In any case, the ever-increasing globalization shows that the whole climate hype is just a circus without real content, the basis for a new object of taxation. If politicians themselves believe that CO2 is the cause of climate change, they are criminals, because they are not stopping globalization, but promoting it. If they do not believe in the CO2 myth, they are criminals because they are helping to spread this myth, thereby creating unrest and uncertainty, and they have set up a completely useless, huge bureaucracy and are therefore guilty of unprecedented economic waste, which they are paying for with increased taxes stolen from the pockets of the working population and with funds that should have benefited the weakest in society. In any case, they will have a lot to defend on Judgment Day!
Povl H. Riis-Knudsen
Translated by means of AI
Danmarks Frihedsraad 
