George Bernard Shaw aptly wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.” There couldn’t be a better description of the ten aspirants for the high office participating in the CNN-sponsored seven-hour climate change townhall.  

The townhall was CNN’s contribution to the movement that has been characterized by a profusion of prophetic absolutism and fanatical devotion to the cause. Instead, it exposed the illiteracy and shallowness of the candidates who believe that the electricity comes from the outlet and money comes from the bank. CNN and the participants were trying to convince the viewers that the skies would soon fall under the weight of rising CO2, but the magnificent ten, like Atlantes and Caryatids, would hold up the skies while we reject the hydrocarbons and plastic straws, outlaw meat, install expensive light bulbs, enact population control, and blow trillions of dollars to fend off “the existential threat” to our civilization.  

This was an affirmation of faith, obligatory for believers intent on following the most farsighted stateswoman and formidable authority on the climate change, former bartender Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who put forward the Green New Deal as the key to salvation.  

But my Eastern European suspicion tells me otherwise. Let’s make it clear --  climate change is real. Historical records confirm that the temperature on this planet was at some periods significantly lower and higher than we experience nowadays. 

It has been well documented that the collapse of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia around 2200 B.C. were brought about by a catastrophic rise in temperatures and subsequent droughts. It is well known that Romans grew grapes in northern England. Hence, temperatures on this planet were a lot higher then. At various times, the European continent was subject to prolonged ice ages.

However, given the level of erudition of the presidential candidates, one may doubt that they are aware that neither the Bronze Age civilizations nor the Romans had internal combustion engines, oil refineries, or coal-fired power plants.

Although high on emotion, politics, and passionate intensity, none of the candidates offered a shred of evidence, scientific or otherwise, that the humans have anything to do with the climate.

The strongest and ironically the weakest argument that has been put forward is that 97 percent of scientists support the climate change theory and name CO2 as a culprit. Although we will never know where the mystical number "97%" came from, just for the sake of argument let’s accept it as true. But it is not a fact, it is still an opinion. And what about the remaining 3% who disagree? Are among them Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, or Albert Einstein? The point is that the "majority argument" is totally irrelevant because scientific disputes are not settled by majority consent. As a matter of fact, science is not advanced by a majority; it is advanced by individuals. Once the majority believed that Earth was flat; the Sun revolved around the Earth; the atom could not be cracked, and has been proven wrong throughout history. The most recent exemplar is the majority’s hysterical prediction of global cooling.  For those who have suppressed their memories or sufferer historical amnesia, or had not been born yet, here are just a few examples of the scientific consensus of a few decades ago.

NASA warned of a coming human-caused ice age in 1971

The world “could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts…” -- Washington Post, July 9, 1971.

National Academy of Sciences issued report warning of coming ice age in 1975

“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale, because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.” -- Peter Gwynne, “The Cooling World,” Newsweek, April 28, 1975

Science Magazine, July 9, 1971

NASA scientist S. I. Rasool, using a computer program developed by warming gadfly James Hansen, predicted that. “In the next 50 years” -- by 2021 -- fossil-fuel dust injected by man into the atmosphere “could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees,” resulting in “new glaciers that could eventually cover huge areas...” “If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age.”

The New York Times: Obama’s global warming–promoting science czar John Holdren “warned of a coming ice age” in 1971

In the 1971 essay “Overpopulation and the Potential for Ecocide,” Dr. Holdren and his co-author, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, warned of a coming ice age.

1970: First Earth Day promoted ice age fears

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1970, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

I rest my case.

Alexander G. Markovsky is a scholar of Marxism and a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that examines national security, energy, risk-analysis and other public policy issues. He is the author of Anatomy of a Bolshevik and Liberal Bolshevism: America Did Not Defeat Communism, She Adopted It. Mr. Markovsky is the owner and CEO of Litwin Management Services, LLC. He can be reached at info@litwinms.com