This article appears in the April 26, 2024 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Film Review
New Climate Documentary Demolishes ‘Climate Emergency’ Propaganda
[Print version of this article]
April 11—A new documentary film released in March, titled, “Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth),” effectively debunks the intense propaganda operation of recent years, that there is a global warming climate emergency, requiring drastic cutback in human economic activity. The 80-minute film is by British filmmaker Martin Durkin, and produced by the climate podcaster Tom Nelson. Durkin is known for such past works as his 2007 film, “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”
The documentary is deserving of wide international attention, and this process has already taken off. As of March 21, the film is available, in full, for free on many online sites. Though blacked out by the mainstream media, by the end of March, the film had a viewership of multi-millions, and had been translated into 10 languages. This author has translated it into Italian.
Significantly, a powerful backer of the documentary is the Clintel Foundation (Clintel—meaning “climate intelligence”). Clintel was founded in 2019 in The Netherlands by Guus Berkhout, a professor of geophysics, and has distinguished itself in recent years for its sustained efforts to combat dominant climate misinformation. Famous is the now-historic open letter titled, “There Is No Climate Emergency,” which was promoted by the group. Their petition has collected thousands of signatures of intellectuals, mostly experts in climatology and related sciences (atmospheric physics, etc.,); it has gone around the world.
On March 14, Clintel hosted the Dutch premiere of “Cold Truth” in Zeist, The Netherlands, to a packed house of 570 viewers. Clintel’s website gives a run-down of the contents and significance of the documentary.
The new docu-film mirrors Clintel’s ideas, by first of all, sweeping away a basic misunderstanding: The dispute is not about so-called denialism, because no one denies climate change. What is being questioned—and also questioned by the UN International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s highest recognized climate body, if you go and read its documents—is first and foremost, the anthropogenic origin of global warming. The assertion of man-made climate change is especially questionable in light of the record of continuous changes that the Earth’s climate has undergone over the millennia.
The film also questions the magnitude of the asserted global warming in recent times, the role of carbon dioxide, and the timing of this warming, all of which express Clintel’s own assessment, as seen in the very title of Clintel’s international petition, “There is no climate emergency.”
Setting the Climate Record Straight
The “Cold Truth” film proceeds to set the record straight once and for all about the cheap propaganda behind the climatist lies, according to which the planet is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe, obviously due to Man.
The film’s material—video clips, expert statements, graphics—is organized into a series of sections with very catchy titles. They range from “The Consensus,” to “The Climate Bandwagon,” to “Climate vs. the People,” to “Climate vs. the Poor.”
Experts from around the world with impeccable track records are interviewed, including professors from MIT and Harvard University, award-winning researchers, and even Nobel laureates. The Clintel website notes these include, “Professor Steven Koonin (author of Unsettled, a former provost and vice-president of Caltech), Professor Dick Lindzen (formerly professor of meteorology at Harvard and MIT), Professor Will Happer (professor of physics at Princeton), Dr. John Clauser (winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022), Professor Nir Shaviv (Racah Institute of Physics), Professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph), Willie Soon and several others.”
The data provided leave very little room for speculation on key questions. Much of the information is already known to the most alert and informed audience. But re-statement of the relevant historical and causal matters about climate is certainly worthy, in order to satisfy the attention by those viewers who might have been looking for serious ways to disentangle themselves from the thicket of climate propaganda.
Very little remains after this film in the way of questions of science, and that little is definitively demolished in the eyes of the viewer, when it is pointed out that climate/global warming activists believe and claim to be “anti-system,” while receiving the applause, support and even funding of pillars of the system: banks, crowned heads, governments, oligarchs (and even oil companies, we might add). At the same time, those who are silenced, slandered, ostracized from public debate, and even from the business world, are precisely the competent, experienced scientists who, applying the scientific method, cannot help but raise doubts and question the so-called “certainties” of climate activists.
Indeed, there is no shying away in the documentary from the political aspect of the climate scare propaganda. The analysis is presented of how the “climate emergency” assertion serves the interests and agendas of the international financial-political circles, which, as we know, are trying to create a new financial, “green” super-bubble, in a desperate attempt to revive the fortunes of their expiring trans-Atlantic financial system.
Questionable: ‘Free Market’ Thinking?
A distinction needs to be made here. In the film a questionable position is brought forward at one point, namely that the so-called climate-change activists are inspired by anti-capitalism and anti-liberalism, and are proponents of state intervention in every sector of the economy and society; while, in opposition, climate-skeptics are portrayed as those who, loving freedom, are for the free market (whose praises are sung, in our opinion, in an unjustified way). These folks are presented as calling for minimal state intervention.
This is a dead-end distinction. The economic science and historical-epistemological analysis of Lyndon LaRouche has made it clear that it is not the free market (on the British model), or capitalism per se, that has brought humanity to a level of development never before seen in human history. But, if anything, it is precisely those dirigist development policies—deliberate nation-serving policies of infrastructure-building, science-driver programs, and related interventions—that have their roots, for example, in what is called historically, the American System of economics. The early economic success in the new United States—called the American System—was born precisely in struggle against the liberalism of the British empire.
The film’s polarization into anti- and pro-free market systems seems to us really superfluous, as well as inaccurate. There are groups today opposed to greening the economy or ecological transition policies that are in open polemic against the free market. And on the other hand, it is a fact that radical climate/global warning theses are carried on the shields of the most prominent exponents of global turbo-capitalism.
Today, those of us who fight against climate disinformation wage an unequal war against the billions of dollars of the establishment and the Minculpop-like apparatuses[fn_1] of the corrupt global information system. We are often armed only with our own intellects and intellectual honesty. To be labeled and disparaged even by those who should share the same ideas for the good of humanity brings nothing but division and misunderstanding.
Overall, the documentary seems to us to be a meritorious work worthy of worldwide dissemination. It makes up for what we think is an ideological slip by its promoters, by inclusion of one of the last sections, that of “Climate vs. the Poor.” This section conveys to the viewer the terrible effects “free” market policies have had on the peoples of poor countries, to whom climate change scientists would like to deny the right to development in the name of a supposed fight against global warning.
Definitely, this is a documentary to be seen and circulated as widely as possible.
[fn_1]. Minculpop was the ironic abbreviation (sounding like a derogatory expression in Italian), of Mussolini’s MINistero per la CULtura POPolare, the fascist apparatus that controlled the press and suppressed free speech. [back to text for fn_1]
