Left-leaning filmmaker German-Dutch filmmaker Martin Poels has produced some 50 films over the past 15 years.
German-Dutch film maker Martin Poels has come under attack for questioning climate dogma. Image cropped here.
His most recent film is titled Paradogma – a personal journey why true liberty needs heretics, It focusses on current controversial debates such as climate change, and how dissenters are being silenced.
Martin Poels recently wrote: “People who dare to question important themes today, are often silenced or labeled as suspicious and dangerous and that we now find ourselves “in a new era where world views clash and free speech crumbles under pressure to conform.”
German liberty under threat
And because Poels has been critical concerning the state of the climate debate, he has been threatened and marginalized.
German mainstream media has silenced the film, and anonymous threats have been launched against Poels, which show that the topic of climate and energy has become type of religion.
And anyone who questions this religion gets shut out of the public discussion forum.
Nevertheless journalist Jörg Rehmann spoke with Poels after the screening of his film in Brussels at the end of last year:
According to the interview:
Since Martin Poels has become critical about the contradictions of climate science, he has been blocked out by the German media and threatened by green lobbyists and at times called a Nazi.”
In the interview he begins by stating that because the film looks at climate and energy, it is a difficult topic because of the deep political dogma that it involves. “But the biggest problem,” Poels said, “Is that the media refuses to report on it.”
Climate: “forged” consensus that must not be disturbed
Poels mentions that they were successful, however, getting the film shown in 100 cinemas. Overall he calls the subject of climate in Germany a dogma that it is very difficult to criticize. He calls climate consensus something that was forged, and not something that is to be disturbed.
Hostile Greenpeace?
The filmmaker speaks of having received threats from organizations, such as Greenpeace, so much so that he became afraid. He said: “I got a call warning that I should better stop the film, before you really get problems.” He says the call was anonymous, but his understanding was that it came from Greenpeace.
Next Poels describes how some people reacted when the film was shown. He said: “Sometimes there were people who got really aggressive in their talk against me”.
“Shameful” media
He then calls the German publicly funded media’s role in the climate topic “shameful”, as it is clear that the green energy issue is not a topic that is to be questioned nor discussed.
Either you’re with us, or against us
Poels also notes that the topic of green energies can be discussed and criticizesd in Holland, but that it Germany the issue of green energies has become very sensitive and criticism is not welcome “because rescuing the climate is good, and when you criticize it, it means you no longer want to save the planet.” It’s: either you’re with us, or against us. Poels calls this radical mindset “nonsense”.
Corrupted by business interests
Poels sees green energies as desirable, but currently he believes they are a social injustice, as the rich benefit and the poor have to bear the costs. Moreover, they are harming the environment more than they are helping.
The flim also shows that the science is long from being settled, thus contradicting claims often made by alarmist scientists and the media. Poels believes that the science has been corrupted in part by lobbyists “where the target is no longer the target, and that business has become the target itself.” He adds:
For me, that’s one explanation why we are not allowed to discuss it. Because it criticizes not only climate change, but the business behind it.”
Biased media has abandoned its job
For Poels, this corruption by self interest is simply being neglected by the German public media: “There are simply rules within the media that say to talk about climate change uncritically – only positively. That’s a law within the media business.”
In total, Poels believes German journalism has long abandoned it’s neutrality on the topic of climate change and green energies. “It’s only politics.” He comments further:
Not only the science is politicized, but so are the media.”
German media “really frightening”
Poels then says the media are more open in the Netherlands, but finds the situation in Berlin “really frightening”. He agrees that in Germany it’s enough to express skepticism on climate science in order to be labelled a fringe right winger.
He finds it ironic that the media often accuse climate skeptics of conspiracy theories, but at the same time subscribe to the conspiracy theory that oil companies helped fund his film.
Academic arrogance
In the area of academia, Poels says overall the film has been received positively and openly by most students, but that professors have composed themselves arrogantly and simply dismiss the film’s content offhand after viewing it. One example, Poels cites, is how one professor simply dismissed a critical student – who had challenged the professor – as “a student who still had a lot to learn”.
Energiewende at a dead-end
In summary Poels agrees that the German Energiewende has reached a dead-end and that the establishment is no longer capable of learning lessons.
Historically, that all sounds familiar.
He is spot on about the climate “consensus” been forged.
Just about everything to do with climate “science” has also been forged.
Hence the green’s outrage at someone they thought was on their side telling the truth.
How very scientific of you, man of science.
Telling the truth? Who is saying that this is the truth? You? Why?
You any evidence that it isn’t the truth.
Sorry, I forgot. You don’t do evidence
Newminster, this is not how scientific discussions usually work. You can’t just say “everything has been forged” and then demand evidence that it hasn’t.
Read this.
http://lavoisier.com.au/articles/greenhouse-science/climate-change/climategate-emails.pdf
Read this:
https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/solutions/fight-misinformation/debunking-misinformation-stolen-emails-climategate.html
And this:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Climategate
We’ve investigated ourselves and discovered that we did not engage in any wrongdoing. Nothing to see here.
Sorry, but these defenses (which I’ve read several times before) are laughable. William Connolley’s write-up on Wikipedia is wince-worthy considering his activism. There is no skepticism for the believers. Why would they be trying to conceal their data from FOIA if there was nothing to hide?
“Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were” …. “Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures – another way of ‘correcting’ for the decline, though may be not defensible!”
And don’t forget, B&t, it isn’t even really about “Climate Science.” Never has been.
http://www.cfact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/ottmar.png
Oh yeah, don’t forget that one-world leftist people suppressing government, robbing skeptics of their freedoms 😉
Ironic that the Greens should be accusing Poels of being a Nazi, given the relationship between those philosophies.
I wonder if those who demonstrate such unreasoning anger realise that, in the long run certainly, they do their creed more harm than good. Why, people will ask, do they need to be so angry and offensive if what they are claiming is correct?
Hey, if it doesn’t involve death threats or bullet holes in buildings, it’s unAmerican.
Thanks Pierre
Godwin’s Law? Is that really a Nazi reference or am I reading this wrong?
“…Martin Poels has . . . been blocked out by the German media and threatened by green lobbyists and at times called a Nazi.”
Just who are you being critical of here, SebH?
He isn’t. They are. But you want US shut up?
Ive got it figured out now. There are two SebHs. One is a real person, and the other is a chatbot. You can tell because the chatbot is the smarter of the two. It never would have made such a stupid mistake. 😉
As I have said DNCWTRT
Yes, B&t, especially since he/she/it/whatever has the emotional age of a child, with a mental age that isn’t a whole lot older (often not even that).
[snip – this and other comments of yours have been deleted due to spamming/trolling. Please don’t get the idea that this is an all-you-can-comment forum and that you run the place here. -PG]
It’s a many to one situation here, of course I am going to have to write a lot more comments than any one individual on your side.
So i am not allowed to reply to questions or comments that are about me? Got it!
In the future I will try to limit myself to one comment per article just saying “you are wrong” in a capitalized letter abbreviation. Ok?
Exactly, therefore Godwin’s Law applies. Thank you for confirming this …
And Bitter&twisted has nothing more to say than whatever DNCWTRT means.
The radical mindset is nonsense” My thoughts exactly.
However mistaken, dogmatic and abusive the propagandee, the propagandist is worse. He’s fully conscious of what he’s doing, and we ignore his long-term purpose at our peril.
Here he is:
http://leftexposed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2014-Senate-Billionaire-Club-Report.pdf
SebH wants to shame us into not calling them “Fascists.”
Oh, yeah. Eco-fascists are just a bunch of normal folk who only want to save the planet. But don’t you DARE criticize them for what they get wrong.
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2014/11/13/climate-deniers-must-be-jailed-or-killed/
When they really are Fascists Godwin’s Law is moot.
You make me laugh, Yonason. Thank you. So being called a denier reminds you of the Holocaust and therefore you guys find it offensive, but you have no problem with comparing people you don’t like with fascists/nazis. Great comedy stuff 😉
You have no idea what fascist means, have you? Also by that logic I can call you a denier and pseudoskeptic, because that is what you “really are”. Great that you established that for us. Now back to being polite to each other and not playing the victim all the time. Can you do that?
Martin Poels is not alone. Eco-fascists harass all skeptics and businesses they label as a threat to their ideology. Here they are bribing corrupt attorneys general to do their illegal and unethical dirty work.
https://cei.org/AGclimatescheme
Fascists want to take away personal liberty.
“To retain an inhabitable earth we may have to compromise the eternal vicissitudes of democracy for an informed leadership that directs.”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/03/eco-fascists-don-their-jackboots.php
Fascists put those who disagree with them in concentration camps, or kill them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120123023608/http://toryaardvark.com/2012/01/18/green-environmentalist-wants-eco-gulags-for-climate-change-deniers/
Violent imagery directed at those who disagree with them is a common Fascist tactic.
http://www.joabbess.com/2010/10/02/franny-armstrong-blows-reputation/
Today, one thing they do is try to disrupt their opponents’ discussions of the issues, as they have done in the past. (Just look at the mess one of them tries to make of Pierre’s blog.)
http://jonjayray.com/sabt.jpg
So Martin Poels should not have been surprised by the Left’s reception to his work. Maybe now he knows who his friends aren’t, and never have been?
A review of Poels’s film typical of many:
“Unfortunately Poels has no clue how to distinguish fact from fiction, and by his own admission he has no interest in making that distinction. As a result the documentary offers a mix of basic scientific insights, plain falsehoods, and misleading statements regarding climate science. As an unwitting viewer you are left utterly confused –cued by Poels’ facial expression at those times- how to reconcile these seemingly opposing viewpoints. Creating confusion was apparently his objective (as he acknowledges on his website), but it makes for a surreal experience if you know you’re being fooled. I think spreading falsehoods is doing a disservice to the public, as I’ve said to Marijn Poels during a radio-debate (in Dutch).” – Bart Verheggen
I listened to the debate – it wasn’t much of a debate – it was an attempted Verheggen character assault on Poels by way of mockery.
But the film won an independent film award in Germany, anyway.
Canada’s government needs to dramatically change how to think about our energy future. The benefits of fossil fuels in terms of human flourishing need to be weighed carefully against the environmental impacts of fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are directly responsible for our present high standard of living. Where there is access to cheap reliable plentiful energy from fossil fuels we see life expectancy increasing by more than 40%, an eradication of starvation and malnutrition, and people are no longer living in the grinding poverty present in most of human history. Therefore it is anti-human and immoral to restrict access to fossil fuels by means of carbon taxes or other punitive carbon policies. Source: Reference A.
A summary of the best available climate science is as follows: The historical and geological record suggests recent changes in the climate over the past century are within the bounds of natural variability. Human influences on the climate (largely the accumulation of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion) are a physically small (1%) effect on a complex, chaotic, multicomponent and multiscale system. Unfortunately, the data and our understanding are insufficient to usefully quantify the climate’s response to human influences. However, even as human influences have quadrupled since 1950, severe weather phenomena and sea level rise show no significant trends attributable to them. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose. As a result, rising levels of CO2 do not obviously pose an immediate, let alone imminent, threat to the earth’s climate. Source: Reference B.
Fossil fuels drive economic growth and jobs. Fossil fuels provide more than 80% of the world’s energy demand and will continue to do so into 2050. Renewable energy can only provide a small percentage of world energy. Proposals under the Paris Agreement to drastically reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions would devastate Canada’s economy. Reducing GHG emissions to 80% less than 1990 levels by 2050 implies that living standards would be reduced to that of the 1800’s. Source: Reference C.
Given there is no evidence to support anthropogenic global warming as a result of the use of fossil fuels, and, given that access to cheap plentiful reliable energy is necessary for humans to flourish, and, given that drastic reductions in fossil fuel use would devastate Canada’s economy, Canada’s Carbon Policy should be to:
a. Remove Canada from the Paris Agreement. Its a really bad deal for Canada.
b. Abolish Carbon taxes.
c. Abolish punitive carbon policies intended to thwart the use or development of fossil fuels and the bringing of them to market. Promote fossil fuels.
d. Stop subsidizing renewable energy projects such as wind and solar. They are not reliable, are very expensive, and are not plentiful on any order of scale.
e. Fund pure unbiased climate research that is independent of UN IPCC as a means of due diligence. Climate change is a natural cycle that we need to better understand.
References:
A. Summary of the book ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ by Alex Epstein
http://industrialprogress.com/fossilfuels/
B. Amicus Brief to Judge Alsup presiding City of Oakland vs BP etal. Climate Science Overview 2018. Happer, Koonin, and Lindzen
https://www.sealevel.info/Happer-Koonin-Lindzen.pdf
C. ‘Energy and Prosperity’ 2017 Presentation Slides by Roger Bezdek http://americafirstenergy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/1B-Energy-and-Prosperity-Bezdek.pdf
Suggested Reading
Books
‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’ by Alex Epstein. ISBN 978-1-59184-744-1
‘Evidence Based Climate Science’ Edited by Don Easterbrook. ISBN 978-0-12-804588-6
‘Climate Change – The Facts 2017’ Edited by Jennifer Marohasy. ISBN -10: 0909536031
Science Papers
‘Harmonic Analysis of Worldwide Temperature Proxies for 2000 Years’ 2017 Lüdecke and Weiss.
‘Grand Minimum of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to the Little Ice Age’ 2013 Habibullo Abdussamatov. ISBN 978-5-44690-122-7
‘Reinforcing the double dynamo model with solar-terrestrial activity in the past three millennia’ 2017 Valentina V. Zharkova et al
‘Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei’ 2017 Henrik Svensmark et al.
‘Sea Level Manipulation’ 2017 Nils-Axel Mörner
Data
NOAA Mauna Loa CO2
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html
Atmospheric Transmission. Robert H Rohde prepared this figure for the Global Warming Art project. It shows CO2 absorption spectrum is fully saturated.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atmospheric_Transmission.png
UAH Satellite Global Temperature Anomaly – 0.13C per decade and flat since 1998
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Historical Changes in Atlantic Hurricane and Tropical Storms – No Trend
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/historical-atlantic-hurricane-and-tropical-storm-records/
National Forestry Database Forest Fires – No Trend
http://nfdp.ccfm.org/en/data/fires.php
Global Average Absolute Sea Level Change 1880 – 2014 – No change in trend 1 – 2 mm/y
https://datahub.io/core/sea-level-rise
The IPCC makes a strong case for countries to ignore their doomsday cage-rattling. The costs they say we must pay are $41 trillion over the next 17 years. No wonder the U.S. said no thanks. The U.S. reduced emissions far more than any other country even without this “commitment”:
https://capitalresearch.org/app/uploads/AEI-Chart-with-2017-CO2-Emissions.png
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-08/scientists-call-for-2-4-trillion-shift-from-coal-to-renewables
IPCC: “The world must invest $2.4 trillion in clean energy every year through 2035 and cut the use of coal-fired power to almost nothing by 2050 to avoid catastrophic damage from climate change”
“Proposals under the Paris Agreement to drastically reduce fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions would devastate Canada’s economy.” – Kenneth
Yup. That’s their plan in a nutshell.
Ken, thanks for an excellent comment. However I doubt that lack of familiarity w the science you present is the reason that Canadian lawmakers go along w this catastrophic hoax.
The energy behind this program is not mistaken thinking or mistaken “science”. It is oligarchic politics.
Behind the Green Mask:UN Agenda 21 by Rosa Koire.
https://www.corbettreport.com/un-agenda-21-exposed-with-rosa-koire-video/
The means by which oligarchs control (and are hidden behind)
the green movement is given in detail here:
http://leftexposed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2014-Senate-Billionaire-Club-Report.pdf
No, it would not. Getting off fossil fuels doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to use/consume energy anymore.
Also, $2.4 trillion per year is 3% of the global GDP. The US spends more than 3% on their defense, Russia over 4%, the world on average about 2.2%. The US spends 17.2% of their GDP on healthcare, 5.9 percentage points more than Germany. Get that system efficient and the US can more than pay for their fossil fuel exit. And so on.
I am not saying this isn’t a large effort that has to be made, but don’t act like it would devastate the economy (it’s money invested in the economy!).
Correct. We can still burn wood to keep warm during the winter. And we don’t need petroleum-based products like plastics or steel as we “get off” fossil fuels. Nor do we need these…
https://www.innovativewealth.com/inflation-monitor/what-products-made-from-petroleum-outside-of-gasoline/
And what if we don’t agree that it’s worth it to spend that kind of money on a “problem” that largely exists in modeled projections but not in the real world? What if the proposed costly solutions actually hurt the environment and destroy habitats more than doing nothing does/would?
Why? In what country are you living that hasn’t invented heating with electricity or methane yet?
You can produce those things without burning fossil fuel, eletric arc and blast furnaces have been already invented.
Again, not a burning petroleum kind of thing AFAIK. Also, emissions aren’t completely forbidden since all those “plans” suggest negative emissions to reach those goals anyway.
Says the frog sitting in the kettle not complaining about the slightly warm water yet. I know it is hard for you to trust in models, instead you trust in curve fitting and extrapolating the resulting periodic functions into the future.
I am sure you can get a lot of people to say that they don’t agree with other sciency stuff. Would you let people vote on how to best do rocket development?
Is that a modeled projection? 😉
Everything we do somewhat hurts the environment.
Correct. We can still burn wood to keep warm during the winter.
SebastianH, you live in Europe. Wood burning (which raises CO2 emissions and allegedly contributes to warming) for heating purposes has grown exponentially in recent years. This is news?
—
http://biomassmagazine.com/articles/15008/a-shifting-market
“In 2016, nearly 29 million metric tons (MT) of wood were manufactured globally. The EU produced close to half that, at 14 million MT, meeting 65 percent of its domestic demand of 21.7 million MT in 2016. The remaining 35 percent was mostly shipped from North America, with small amounts from other areas, including Russia. … According to the European Biomass Association’s annual report, of the 21.7 million MT of wood pellets consumed in the EU in 2016, 61.7 percent was used for heat—residential (42.6 percent), commercial (11.8 percent) and heat from combined heat and power (CHP). (7.3 percent). Power plants consumed the remaining 38.3 percent.”
—
And what if we don’t agree that it’s worth it to spend that kind of money on a “problem” that largely exists in modeled projections but not in the real world?
Oooh. So you believe we’re on the cusp of catastrophe (getting boiled to death). What would be the reasons behind this presumption of yours? The staggering 0.39 of a centimeter added to sea levels from the Greenland ice sheet since 1993? The steadily increasing sea ice in the Southern Ocean? The 1.4 mm/yr sea level rise during 1958-2014?
It is not news. However you suggested to heat only with wood, haven’t you?
What?
No. I didn’t write only with wood. I didn’t use that absolutist word. And wood burning is not carbon neutral even though the EU has declared it to be so.
Oooh. So you believe we’re on the cusp of catastrophe (getting boiled to death)
In what way is the frog-gets-boiled-to-death-as-the-temperatures-around-it-rise-catastrophically unclear? Did you not write “Says the frog sitting in the kettle not complaining about the slightly warm water yet” in response to my question “And what if we don’t agree that it’s worth it to spend that kind of money on a “problem” that largely exists in modeled projections but not in the real world?”
I wrote: “Getting off fossil fuels doesn’t mean that you are not allowed to use/consume energy anymore.”
You wrote: “Correct. We can still burn wood to keep warm during the winter.”
This implies using only wood for heating purposes.
You quoted that EU is producing most of the wood that gets burned here. Are you suggesting it doesn’t grow back as fast as it gets burned? So no “global greening” in the EU?
It’s fascinating to me that you convert this analogy 1 to 1 into reality (boiling water = catastrophe). And with other analogies you can’t see a connection 😉
No, we are not running into a boiled to death catastrophe. I used the frog in warming water analogy/metaphor to illustrate that you don’t want to do anything to lessen humanity’s influence until the effects become more pronounced. It might be too late though to do anything that significantly changes the outcome by then.
No, it implies no such thing. The EU has declared wood burning as carbon neutral and thus it is “getting off fossil fuels” to heat one’s home with wood, which is increasingly how EU homes are heated. Is wood-burning the only way homes are heated? No. I neither wrote or implied (or thought) that. You just made it up. Again.
The point I was making was this: we can “get off fossil fuels” to produce electricity and heat our Western homes, but “getting off fossil fuels” does not necessarily mean we are lowering our CO2 emissions. Wood burning increases CO2 emissions…and yet the EU has made the calculated decision to declare they are carbon neutral anyway. I would think you’d have a problem with increasing CO2 emissions to heat homes in Europe. Do you? Or is it OK to increase CO2 emissions as long as we “get off fossil fuels”?
https://www.nrdc.org/resources/european-imports-wood-pellets-green-energy-devastating-us-forests
Since 2013, media and local groups have investigated and documented the devastating impact that European demand for wood pellets is having on forest ecosystems in the Southeastern United States. These investigations provide critical insight into the supply chains for pellets exported by Enviva, the largest wood pellet manufacturer in the United States and key supplier to top European utilities, such as Drax Power in the United Kingdom and Dong Energy in Denmark.
In a new investigation (February, 2017), local groups found that mature hardwood forests were cut down to source Enviva’s new wood pellet mill in Sampson County, North Carolina. The images from this investigation, which follows similar investigations in 2014, 2015, and 2016, again expose the unsustainable logging practices being used to provide biomass to Enviva (i.e., clear cuts of wetland forests). They also spotlight the vast quantities of whole trees and other large-diameter wood—biomass feedstocks known to be high-carbon—entering Enviva’s supply chain.
The results portray a disturbing pattern: a significant proportion of Enviva’s pellets are produced using trees and other large-diameter wood from native hardwood forests. Multiple independent, peer-reviewed, and governmental studies have determined that these feedstocks increase carbon dioxide emissions, not reduce them, even compared to fossil fuels like coal. Yet, European Union policy still considers all biomass incineration to be “carbon neutral”, and fails to require utilities that burn biomass to account for their carbon emissions at the smokestack.
Why “is”? This was about the future. OP wrote “Reducing GHG emissions to 80% less than 1990 levels by 2050 implies that living standards would be reduced to that of the 1800’s”
In the context of this thread I interpret your reply as you suggesting that we burn wood to heat ourselves in 2050 instead of fossil fuel.
It doesn’t increase emissions when you grow back what you burn. Heating everyone in 2050 with burning wood will probably impossible at the slow rate wood is growing back. I don’t know why you imagine that burning fossil fuels will get replaced by burning wood. Just use electric heat pumps or methane stored from excess summer power generation (Power2Gas).
So you build up a straw man (wood burning increases CO2 emissions) and then use it trying to guilt me into a corner 😉 Wow!
How is Europe responsible for this? I don’t know if there is yet a policy to only buy wood pellets from sources that manufacture them in a sustainable way, but they maybe should if even the US is not capable to save their forests from being chopped down from heat wanting Europeans 😉
Anyway, you seem to imagine that getting off of fossil fuel is somehow impossible. It is not. And you don’t need to replace fossil fuels with 100% wood either.
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