This Friday, March 25^th, the global youth movement known as "Fridays for the Future" has asked its members to organize protests all around the world. Their overly generalized call is for “climate reparations and justice.” You can read their Twitter post here.

I’m not sure how much participation the group will rally for this movement, but it does show us that many people are so fearfully concerned about the climate that they will organize, picket, march and dedicate a lot of time to their cause.

But is the motivation of their climate activism guided by thoroughly accurate and balanced sources, or by half-truths and fear-based speculations?

I’m recommending reading Patrick Moore’s book entitled, Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace but left the non-profit after 15 years because, as he explains, “Unfortunately, Greenpeace had gone from an altruistic group of volunteers with a noble vision, to a business with an ever-expanding budget, a matching payroll to meet, and was now rapidly transforming into a racket peddling junk science.”

Patrick describes how he was forced to leave Greenpeace due to their “transition from what was sensible environmentalism, to a platform of anti-human and anti-science campaigns that were more concerned with fundraising and scaring people.”

I think this is a good book to have on your shelf as a reference. If you don’t read the entire book, at least read the introduction by Patrick Moore, where he defines the terms "ecology" and "sustainable development." He points out that during his years at Greenpeace he saw that people had become an afterthought and were only considered once the perfect environmental policy had been achieved, without regard for the impact on humanity.

Contrary to the popular narrative, he states boldly that the push to phase out fossil fuel use in the next 30 years, “is the biggest threat to civilization in the world today.”

Patrick spends several chapters debunking stories about climate change. He says that it dawned on him one day that most of the scare stories of the past, present and future about the planet and about climate change are based on subjects that are invisible or are extremely remote, such as carbon, coral reefs, trees in Africa or polar bears. In other words, these scare stories are hard for most people to empirically verify on their own. We tend to believe stories we read about, even when we can’t verify them.

Concerning the changing climate, Mr. Moore points out the earth’s climate is ever-changing, and it has always been this way since its genesis — sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly. To think that we will ever witness an earth with a "perfect, stable climate" is a pipe dream.

Concerning carbon dioxide, he shares his list of things that "carbon emissions from humans" is blamed for causing, including both higher and lower temperatures, droughts, fires, floods, rising sea levels, disappearing glaciers, loss of ice at the poles, dying reefs, fish and forests, crop failures and many others. He the spends a good amount of time trying to convince the reader that “there is no hard evidence that any of these things have been or will be triggered by human-caused emissions of CO₂.”

Along with their climate alarmism, the "Friday for the Future" group is unsurprisingly anti-capitalistic. Their website says, “The catastrophic climate scenario that we are living in is the result of centuries of exploitation and oppression through colonialism, extractivism and capitalism, an essentially flawed socio-economic model which urgently needs to be replaced.”

Obviously, capitalism has its failures, but it surely beats socialism and communism. I do wish those who think otherwise would go live for a few years in China, Venezuela, Russia or Cuba. That would undoubtedly have a balancing effect on their thinking.

Ignorance of history is one of the primary reasons people are so quick to disparage the economic system that has alleviated so much poverty and suffering in the world. And it might surprise some that capitalists can be responsible stewards of the environment, all without producing the dread of climate doom or inflicting needless human suffering.

Let’s sustain the planet and elevate the human condition. We can do both!

Global warming: Reality or hype, Part 2

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