A Materialist Refutation of the Anthropogenic Climate Change Scam, and the coming U-Turn

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21^st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of interference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.” –  Professor Richard Lindzen

I must begin by making it clear what I am not arguing. The climate is changing; this is an observable reality and not a matter of serious dispute. Earth’s climate has never been stable when viewed over geological timescales. It is dynamic, cyclical, and influenced by a vast range of natural forces. It is also not disputed that average global temperatures and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have been gradually rising since around 1850, a date coinciding with the end of the Little Ice Age. Nor am I arguing that human activity does not damage many aspects of the environment, it plainly does. Notable examples include the destruction of tropical rainforests and the pollution of the oceans with plastic waste. 

The real threat to civilisation comes not from the atmosphere, but from global capitalism itself. We must challenge claims that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are driving an imminent civilisational-scale climate catastrophe requiring urgent global de-carbonisation.  Civilisation is under attack, not by nature, but by accumulated capital. This is a class conflict: ultra-rich networks use their institutional and financial influence through the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, and funded think tanks and NGOs, to shape scientific narratives and economic policy in ways that protect their power and control, not to save the planet, its logical consequence being a controlled demolition of industrial civilisation. I will argue that this agenda must fail, as decarbonisation’s shrinking of the productive forces within participating countries will collide with the growth-based imperatives of the BRICS and Global South, leaving the imperial core at a geopolitically untenable material disadvantage, forcing a policy U-turn. The fight against this agenda is part of the broader struggle against imperialism itself.

The CO₂ climate alarmist scam can be exposed through three interconnected themes:

1. The abuse of the scientific method, which constructs a crisis that can only be “solved” by drastic reductions in fossil fuel use.
2. The real crisis, the worst-ever systemic crisis of overproduction, intrinsic to capitalism, which is an existential threat to imperialism, and cannot be resolved within the logic of capitalism itself.
3. Who benefits, what they aim to achieve, and why the climate alarmist narrative is being promoted. This is evident from the recognition that the bourgeois state is not neutral, that power is concentrated, and policy driven by, elite networks of holders of accumulated monopoly capital.

Abuse of the scientific method

As Marxists, we ground our outlook in material reality, rejecting idealism and speculative assumptions. Alarmist claims about CO₂-driven climate change must be evaluated strictly through the scientific method. This method follows a clear sequence: observation → hypothesis → prediction → verification or falsification. In plain terms, it means observing the real world, proposing an explanation, and testing whether it produces accurate predictions. If predictions repeatedly match reality, the explanation is validated; if they fail, it must be reassessed or rejected, no matter how confident or authoritative its supporters appear.

Science advances through falsifiable evidence and reproducible results, not through appeals to consensus, ideology, or modelling assumptions that consistently fail to match observable reality. The first element of my argument is that the scientific method is being abused: alarmist hypotheses have repeatedly failed verification. Decades of projected catastrophes have not materialised, yet we are now asked to believe the 1.5 °C arbitrary ceiling catastrophe hypothesis.

The Fallacy of the 1.5 °C Arbitrary Ceiling

Climate alarmists frequently present 1.5 °C of warming above pre-industrial levels as a hard “red line” that humanity must not cross. Yet this threshold is entirely arbitrary: it is not derived from empirical evidence demonstrating a sudden, catastrophic tipping point at that exact temperature. Historical and paleoclimate records show that human civilisation has survived, and even thrived, through natural temperature swings far exceeding this limit.

The fixation on 1.5 °C serves an ideological and political purpose: it is used to justify urgent, global-scale economic interventions under the NetZero agenda. By presenting a number as if it were scientifically sacrosanct, alarmists give the impression of precise scientific authority while masking the inherent uncertainty and complexity of the climate system. A proper scientific-materialist approach must recognise that no single, arbitrary temperature target can dictate rational policy, especially when it threatens the future possibility of maintaining an industrial economy. Evidence on the ground, and viewed from space, tells a very different story.

An empirical refutation

Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, published a paper in 1896 predicting that doubling atmospheric CO₂ could raise global mean temperatures by 4–6 °C. Unlike modern climate alarmists, Arrhenius saw this warming as potentially beneficial, improving agricultural yields and promoting thriving plant life and ecosystem vitality. His prediction has since been empirically validated.

If rising CO₂ and temperatures were truly harming the biosphere, we would expect widespread ecological deterioration. Instead, satellite imagery shows that, from 1980 through to 2023, global vegetation has steadily increased, with the planet greening more strongly over time.  Higher concentrations of CO₂ have directly stimulated photosynthesis; leading to measurable increases in plant biomass. Far from being harmful, the increase in CO₂ is a material benefit to the biosphere, supporting crop yields, agricultural productivity, and food security. The modest warming and higher CO₂ levels we observe today enhance, rather than threaten, human civilization and ecological health.

Below is a graph showing CO₂ concentration and temperature levels over a geological timescale, the CO₂ concentration in 1850 is marked. What should be noted here is that at 280 ppm it was the lowest concentration in 570 million years. If CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere were ever to fall to around 150 ppm, the machinery of photosynthesis would begin to fail, undermining the biological foundation upon which complex terrestrial life, including human civilisation depends.

The complexity of the earth’s climate and its uncertain relation to both CO₂ and temperature levels are revealed in this graph. Notice the how ice ages occurred at CO₂ levels in excess of 5000 ppm. Also notice that for well over 200 million years the Earth had no arctic ice cap. How can climate alarmist advocates explain the periods of negative correlation of rising CO₂ levels while temperatures fall?

A reliable guide to the real nature of the CO₂ alarmist movement is not its rhetoric, but their behaviour. Time and again, actions contradict stated principles, exposing the hypocrisy behind the language of “settled science.” In 2025, ahead of COP 30 in Belém, Brazil, a 13 km stretch of protected Amazon rainforest was cleared to make way for a highway, while delegations arrived on private jets. Elites ignore the rules they wish to see imposed on everyone else. These are not mere inconsistencies or exceptions, they are behavioural giveaways. Are these the actions of people who genuinely believe in their own narrative?

Zack Polanski leader of the Green Party of England and Wales recently stated his opposition to the proposed building of a nuclear power station at Hartlepool. So why would the Greens oppose CO₂-free energy? Because you cannot run an industrial society on low density, intermittent weather-dependent renewable energy, but you can on nuclear power. The truth is that both wind and solar farms would be economically non viable without huge ongoing government subsidies. This “small is beautiful” mindset was captured perfectly in a quote by Karl Kraus, “All progress celebrates Pyrrhic victories over nature.” The greens act as if this were literally true, treating industrial and technological achievements as though they were crimes to be undone. In effect, climate alarmism functions as a secular movement that proclaims the imminent collapse of modern civilisation, a pseudo-scientific form of Millenarian thinking.

Crisis of Overproduction

The scientific narrative around CO₂ represents an abuse of the scientific method, used to justify what amounts to a controlled demolition of productive capacity in the economy. It masks a crisis that capitalism’s internal logic ensures cannot be overcome, that of the problem of overproduction. The imperialist economic system today faces its worst ever crisis of overproduction, accelerated by the digital revolution, and automation which is even greater than that experienced during the 1930s Depression.

A 1930s conversation in a miner’s cottage, quoted in Political Economy – A Beginner’s Course by A. Leontiev, captures the absurdity of overproduction in real life:

“A miner’s son asked his mother: ‘Why don’t you light the fire? It’s so cold.’
“‘Because we have no coal. Your father is out of work, and we have no money to buy coal.’
“But why is he out of work, mother?’
“’Because there’s too much coal’”

This illustrates the irrationality of capitalism. There is an abundance of coal that the market cannot absorb at a profit, so production halts and workers go without work, wages and heating. Overproduction is poverty amidst plenty, an intrinsic feature of capitalism, a phenomenon unknown under any other mode of production.

Capitalism continually bursts its own limits. More commodities are produced than can be sold. Workers create more value than they receive in wages, and so cannot buy back all they produce. A proportion of the surplus value extracted from their unpaid labour time is retained as profit; a proportion of this profit is not spent back into the economy, this eventually results in a glut: warehouses overflow, production is halted, and workers are laid off. This is the inbuilt contradiction of the capitalism, the cause of recurring crises of overproduction.

A Class Project

Who stands to benefit from the decarbonisation agenda? The CO₂ alarmist explanation is not an objective scientific hypothesis; it is a fear-based narrative used to justify what is a class project. This is fundamentally about power relations, because capitalism as a mode of production is built on power relations. Decarbonisation will function as a controlled demolition of productive forces, designed to shrink industrial and agricultural capacity. Networks of elite institutions drive this agenda, ultra-wealthy actors who don’t require economic growth or profits, needing only to retain their control. Economic contraction is not a threat for them, it is the objective.

The green movement did not emerge in isolation. The Rockefeller network (comprehensively adumbrated by Jacob Nordangard in Rockefeller – Controlling the Game) played a central role in shaping early environmental politics, financing the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report and founding the Trilateral Commission. Promoting an agenda of planetary limits, resource scarcity, population pressure, and global governance, developed and advanced within elite policy circles long before it entered mainstream politics. From the mid-1980s the Rockefeller Brothers Fund “openly started funding organizations and scientists working to make climate change a political issue.” (Jacob Nordangard Rockefeller – Controlling the Game pp.137-138)Illustrating that the language of planetary crisis did not rise organically from below; it was formulated by elites and handed down as though it was received wisdom, circulated through mainstream media and amplified by large environmental NGOs, notably Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. This is a class project.  

These transnational elite networks did not disappear; they evolved. The Rockefeller record shows a documented, multi-generational commitment to Malthusian ideas, overpopulation, and the management of humanity within supposed planetary constraints. That outlook did not end with the Club of Rome. It continues in contemporary forums where billionaires, CEOs and policymakers set direction. The World Economic Forum brings them together to coordinate the decarbonisation agenda, while the United Nations, through bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, constructs global frameworks that governments then adopt. They fund research, set scientific priorities and guide political messaging, enthusiastically popularised by their useful idiots in the Green movement. Dissenting voices are pushed aside and the slogan “the science is settled” is repeated as a mantra. The result is further deindustrialisation, a degrowth agenda, embracing a logic that can only lead in an anti-human Malthusian direction.

The alarmist agenda aligns with one of the goals of imperialism, that is, to hold back independent economic development across the Global South, as demonstrated beyond all doubt by President Obama in a speech in Africa in June 2013: “Ultimately, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over.”

A policy u-turn will be forced

There are two reasons why the climate agenda will have to be either abandoned or drastically scaled back.

The first reason is that there are the divisions within the ruling class, which explains why there is growing opposition to the NetZero agenda from lower-level capitalists. This section of the ruling class depends on profits and economic growth for its survival,and finds political expression in figures such as Donald Trump in the United States and Nigel Farage in Britain. They cannot support policies that deliberately shrink industrial capacity and inflate energy costs. This pushback is attracting growing support within a working-class struggling with rising bills and declining living standards. As they begin to join the dots, steel closures, North Sea oil being run down, the NetZero agenda of decarbonisation and renewable energy are revealed as managed decline, the green road to degrowth.

The second reason is geopolitical. China, Russia, the BRICS, and most of the Global South will not sacrifice economic growth to appease an imperial core responsible for the bulk of the world’s historical CO₂ emissions. They will continue expanding their industrial base and asserting economic sovereignty, regardless of empirically unproven predictions of climate catastrophe. The imperial core cannot afford unilateral contraction while non imperialist countries; rivals in an intensifying hybrid war continue to develop their productive capacities. Strategic industries: steel, chemicals, fertiliser, and military production, cannot be allowed to atrophy without creating serious national security risks. The NetZero agenda, if continued, will shift economic gravity further in an eastward direction eroding imperialist strategic interests. Geopolitical reality will eventually assert itself; forcing the imperialists to confront the limits of decarbonisation, making a policy U- turn inevitable.

Zugzwang

Since 2008, the imperialist economy has stagnated. Coordinated central-bank deficit spending has only delayed collapse. Traditional measures, small regional wars, military interventions, ratcheting up of looting and exploitation, have postponed but cannot resolve the crisis. When faced with the last great crisis of overproduction the solution was the mass destruction of productive forces during World War II. While imperialists drive to war is as strong as ever, the existence of nuclear missiles is all that is preventing a hot World War III.

Today the imperialism economic system is caught in a Zugzwang, a term used in Chess that means that all possible moves are losing.   Every possible avenue of escape from the crisis of overproduction is blocked, or doomed to fail, World War, climate alarmist decarbonisation. To carry on with the imperialist playbook would be to do nothing to address the crisis, and drift into deeper crisis, accelerating economic decline. They have no way out; the imperialist economic system is trapped in a Zugzwang.

There Is a Rational, Pro-Growth Alternative: Socialism

There is an alternative that overcomes all the problems explored above, socialism. A rationally planned socialist economy would prioritise the expansion of productive forces, promoting economic growth, free from the constraints of the anarchy of capitalist production, and reject the idealist speculations of pseudo-scientific climate alarmism, rejecting its decarbonisation agenda with its assault on both industrial and agricultural capacity that leads to degrowth and the logic of Malthusianism.

The logic of destroying productive forces in times of systemic crisis is not new. This passage, published in 1934, as fascism was on the rise, remains strikingly relevant today. It exposes the consequences of shrinking production amid the deepening crisis of overproduction and the imperialist drive toward war. When the imperialist economic system finally implodes, we face a stark choice: socialism or barbarism. In this context, R. Palme Dutt captured the enduring logic of imperialism in crisis:

“Two alternatives, and only two, confront existing society at the present stage of development of the productive forces and of social organisation.
One is to throttle the development of the productive forces in order to save class society, to destroy material wealth, to destroy millions of “superfluous” human beings in the slow rot of starvation and the quick furnace of war, to crush down the working-class movement with limitless violence, to arrest the development of science and culture and education and technique, to revert to more primitive forms of limited, isolated societies, and thus to save for a while the rule of the possessing classes at the expense of a return to barbarism and spreading decay.”
– R. Palme Dutt – Fascism and Social revolution p. 44