Originally published on www.sayerji.substack.com
The Missing Context Behind the World's Most Powerful Narrative
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Climate change is real.
So is ecological devastation.
Forests are being erased. Soils are being stripped and poisoned. Rivers are mined, oceans industrialized, and entire ecosystems sacrificed to short-term extraction and geopolitical ambition. To pretend otherwise is delusion. The Earth is under extraordinary pressure, much of it driven by industrial excess, regulatory capture, and the global outsourcing of environmental harm.
But the story now being told about climate change--the story that shapes global policy, financial markets, and moral identity--is still profoundly incomplete.
It is incomplete not because the damage is imaginary, but because the diagnosis has been narrowed to a single variable. Geological deep time has been removed. The biological role of carbon dioxide has been pathologized. Complex ecological destruction has been collapsed into carbon accounting. And a planetary emergency rooted in land use, biodiversity loss, pollution, and extractive economics has been reframed as a molecule-management problem.
This is not an argument against environmental stewardship. It is an insistence on it. What follows is a call for missing context--the kind that restores ecological realism, honors the Earth as a living system rather than a ledger, and resists the substitution of technocratic control for genuine planetary care.
The Erasure of Deep Time
From the non-biblical perspective, the Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. In that view, human civilization--the entire arc of agriculture, cities, empires, and industry--occupies the final milliseconds of this planetary clock. And so, to evaluate climate through the lens of a single century is to diagnose a patient's health based on one heartbeat.
The geomythologist Randall Carlson has spent decades studying the geological record, and his work offers a corrective to the chronological amnesia that pervades contemporary climate discourse. As he explains:
"Climate has always oscillated--violently, dramatically, and without human intervention. Ice ages have come and gone. Sea levels have risen and fallen by hundreds of feet. The Medieval Warm Period saw vineyards flourishing in England and Norse settlements in Greenland. The Little Ice Age brought crop failures and famines across Europe. These are not anomalies--they are the rhythm of a living planet."
The IPCC's first assessment report in 1990 included a temperature graph showing these natural oscillations--the Medieval Warm Period prominently visible. By 1996, that graph had been replaced with the now-famous "hockey stick," which flattened a thousand years of climate history into a near-horizontal line, making the 20th century's warming appear unprecedented. This wasn't fraud--it was a framing choice. But framing choices have consequences.
The must watch interview segment below is guaranteed to open and deepen perspectives that the mainstream media and discussion has all but eliminated.
Carbon Dioxide: Pollutant or Substrate of Life?
In the contemporary narrative, carbon dioxide functions almost exclusively as a villain--a pollutant to be sequestered, taxed, and eliminated. This framing obscures a more fundamental truth: CO₂ is the primary substrate of photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into the chemical energy that sustains virtually all life on Earth.
This inversion has not gone unnoticed. A widely circulated meme satirizes modern climate fanaticism by observing, "You are the carbon they want to eliminate." While hyperbolic, the point it gestures toward is serious: among the hundreds of thousands of known toxic chemicals that pollute ecosystems and degrade the biological substrates that regulate climate, institutional attention remains conspicuously fixated on carbon dioxide--often to the exclusion of far more ecologically disruptive agents.
But facts are facts. The Pleistocene and Holocene epochs--the geological periods spanning roughly the last 2.5 million years--represent the lowest atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in approximately 600 million years. During the last glacial maximum, carbon dioxide fell to around 180 parts per million--perilously close to the ~150 ppm threshold below which C₃ plants (including most trees, shrubs, and staple food crops) cannot photosynthesize.
To put this in perspective: for most of Earth's biological history, atmospheric CO₂ existed at concentrations of several thousand parts per million--during periods of extraordinary biological flourishing. The Cambrian explosion of life occurred when CO₂ levels were approximately 7,000 ppm. The Carboniferous period, which produced the vast coal deposits we now burn, saw levels closer to 1,500 ppm.
Pre-industrial CO₂ stood at approximately 280 ppm. Today it hovers around 420 ppm. This represents an increase, certainly--but an increase from historical lows to levels still far below the planetary baseline across deep time.
This reductionist framing of carbon dioxide as a singular planetary villain has produced a cascade of policy distortions. It has also crowded out legitimate scientific debate about CO₂ saturation effects, plant-mediated carbon cycling, and the diminishing marginal warming impact of additional atmospheric CO₂. For readers wishing to explore this evidence in greater depth, see The Demonization of CO₂: Challenging the Prevailing Narrative and Saturated Science: New Study Challenges the CO₂-Climate Narrative, which examine how biological feedback loops and atmospheric physics complicate the simplistic emissions-equals-temperature story.
At the same time, an entire class of anthropogenic atmospheric interventions--including large-scale weather modification, stratospheric aerosol injections, and other geoengineering schemes--remains largely absent from mainstream climate discourse, despite their direct relevance to observed anomalies in both cooling and warming patterns. The fixation on carbon emissions functions, in part, as a discursive cover that obscures these engineered influences on weather systems, because acknowledging them would complicate the prevailing reductionist model. For an evidence- and historicallly anchored review of covert and overt weather-modification operations and how they are framed relative to climate science, see Are We at War with the Weather? The Thin Line Between Science and Conspiracy.
None of this negates the reality of warming--or the possibility of dramatic cooling events--nor the need for thoughtful environmental stewardship. But it does suggest that the moral panic surrounding carbon dioxide--the framing of this molecule as an existential pollutant--may be historically illiterate, biologically incomplete, and politically convenient, especially when it comes to neosocialist agendas.
From Science to Moral Economy
At some point in the past three decades, climate science crossed a threshold. It ceased being a descriptive enterprise--an attempt to understand how Earth's climate systems function--and became a normative framework: a moral economy that dictates what must be believed, what can be questioned, and what must be done.
Models hardened into mandates. Projections became prophecies. And uncertainty--the lifeblood of scientific inquiry--became taboo. The IPCC's reports, originally designed to summarize research for policymakers, evolved into something closer to scripture: texts whose conclusions could be cited but not interrogated.
This mirrors a pattern visible in other domains. In conventional medicine, symptoms are often treated as enemies to be suppressed rather than signals to be understood. Fever is fought with antipyretics. Inflammation is attacked with steroids. The body's adaptive responses are pathologized rather than interpreted. The same logic now governs our relationship with the planet: variability itself has become intolerable.
The Enforcement Apparatus
When a narrative requires enforcement, it has likely exceeded its epistemic warrant. And the climate narrative now has an elaborate enforcement apparatus.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization that first gained prominence during COVID-19 by identifying a "Disinformation Dozen" allegedly responsible for catalyzing global vaccine skepticism, has expanded its mandate to include climate. Its 2024 report, "The New Climate Denial," is instructive--not for what it reveals about deniers, but for what it reveals about the boundaries of permitted discourse.
The report acknowledges that outright denial of climate change has become rare. Most people accept that the climate is changing. The "new denial," according to CCDH, consists of questioning:
- The severity of climate impacts
- The efficacy of proposed solutions
- The reliability of climate models
- The incentive structures driving climate policy
- The motives of the climate movement itself
In other words: the existence of climate change is no longer the battleground. The new heresy is questioning the models, doubting the policies, or examining the money. This is remarkable. In any functioning scientific enterprise, questioning models is called "science." Examining incentive structures is called "sociology of knowledge." Doubting policies is called "democracy."
But in a moral economy, such questioning becomes denial--and denial requires suppression.
This pattern--the expansion of impermissible inquiry--suggests that what is being defended is not science but narrative coherence. And once narrative requires enforcement, monetization is never far behind.
The Financialization of Fear
In 2020, Desirée Fixler became the Chief Sustainability Officer of Deutsche Bank's asset management arm, DWS. What she found there would ultimately cost her the job and illuminate the architecture of contemporary climate finance.
Fixler discovered that ESG labels--Environmental, Social, and Governance designations that increasingly determine which companies receive investment--were being applied without verifiable data. Sustainability reports, she testified, functioned as legal fictions: documents that satisfied regulatory requirements while describing assets that had never been audited against the criteria they claimed to meet.
This was not an isolated case. A multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem has emerged around climate compliance: consultants who certify sustainable practices, agencies that rate ESG performance, lawyers who structure green bonds, and regulators who mandate disclosure. At each node of this network, fees are collected, credentials are issued, and legitimacy is conferred--without the underlying claims being systematically verified.
The World Economic Forum has been explicit about its ambitions. Climate is not merely an environmental issue to be addressed; it is the justification for what Klaus Schwab calls "stakeholder capitalism"--a reorganization of the relationship between corporations, governments, and citizens that would subordinate democratic accountability to technocratic management.
Whether one views this as visionary or dystopian, the financial stakes are clear: climate has become an asset class, carbon a currency, and sustainability a compliance regime worth hundreds of billions annually. It also provide a powerful justification for globalist, totalitarian, biopolitical control of the world's citizenry. The question of whether the climate is changing has been absorbed into a much larger question: who benefits from the answer?
Within this financialized framework, even biological life is increasingly treated as a problem to be engineered rather than a system to be understood. One of the more revealing examples is the promotion of methane-reducing vaccines for cattle--an initiative publicly championed by Bill Gates and framed as a climate solution. This approach abstracts ruminant animals from their ecological role in grassland regeneration, soil carbon sequestration, and nutrient cycling, reducing them instead to emissions units in need of pharmaceutical correction. Rather than addressing industrial land misuse, monoculture feed systems, or soil degradation, the focus shifts to technological "hacks" that preserve existing extractive models while signaling climate virtue. For a detailed examination of this proposal and its underlying assumptions, see Cows and Carbon: Scrutinizing Bill Gates' Methane Vaccine Scheme and Misleading Climate Claim
Regeneration Requires Context
None of this suggests that Earth requires no stewardship, or that human activities have no consequences, or that we should be indifferent to ecological degradation. Quite the opposite.
Earth is a self-regulating, adaptive system--not a fragile mechanism requiring technocratic management. The microbial mats that emerged 3.5 billion years ago created the conditions for complex life by transforming the atmosphere itself. Forests and oceans exchange carbon in cycles that dwarf human contributions. The planet has survived asteroid impacts, magnetic pole reversals, and mass extinctions. It is not fragile. It is resilient beyond our comprehension.
Humans are not external to this system. We are expressions of it--participants in a planetary metabolism that includes us whether we acknowledge it or not. True stewardship emerges not from fear of the planet but from humility before its complexity; not from models that reduce Earth to variables but from reverence for processes we barely understand.
The conversation about climate need not be a choice between denial and compliance. There is a third path: inquiry. Genuine curiosity about how this astonishing planet actually works. Transparency about who benefits from the policies being proposed. Humility about the limits of our models and the depths of our ignorance.
Climate change is real, with the primary anthropogenic and geologic drivers of that change have nothing to do with carbon, per se. But a story told without context is not truth--it is leverage, and a pretext for.
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