Cunningham, who was part of the Apollo 7 mission to the moon, addressed about 200 residents from the area in and around Gliwice, Poland, at the John Paul II Center on Dec. 12. The event was co-sponsored by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., and Poland’s Globalization Institute Foundation, a local think tank.
Instead of listening to political figures who are circulating misleading and inaccurate information, the public should carefully consider what the scientific data actually says about carbon dioxide emissions and the human contribution to those emissions, which are very small, Cunningham told audience members.
“What bothers me about this topic is just how accepted this is to the public,” Cunningham said. “They just believe what they are told by public officials and they don’t realize that if you look at the data it shows there are hundreds of different factors that contribute to temperature.”
While “global warming alarmists” make the claim that if CO 2 levels rise to 800 parts per million it could have devastating consequences, Cunningham told audience members that his experience with Apollo and his familiarity with other manned space programs demonstrate that the claim is nowhere close to reality. There was an alarm system on his Apollo mission that would go off if CO 2 levels began to reach levels that would have compromised the atmosphere for the astronauts, he explained. But this alarm would not go off until CO 2 levels reached 3,000 parts per million, which happened only once during his 11-day mission, Cunningham said. The space shuttles also had CO 2 alarms, as does the International Space Station, and those alarms are set for much higher rates of CO 2 than what existed for Apollo, he said.
The forum in Gliwice took place just a few miles from where the U.N. was holding its 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or COP24.
Craig Rucker, the president of CFACT, also took part in the forum in person in Gliwice. He was joined by Marc Morano, the publisher of the ClimateDepot.com website, which is a project of CFACT.
Rucker told audience members that there are two competing ideologies at work where environmental policy is concerned — one he described as free market environmentalism and other as the U.N.’s philosophy of sustainable development.
“The green vision of the U.N. is one of a planet that is about to be burned up and destroyed,” Rucker said. “They view the world as finite pie one where every piece that is eaten leaves one less for another person down the road.”
Rucker warned against the anti-population mindset of the U.N., which he said could lead to very economically damaging policies that do nothing to improve the environment. Rucker also made use of slide presentations that showed pollution declining in areas that were economically prosperous. He held up Pittsburgh as an example of where the environment had improved even with a rising population.
“What bothers me about this topic is just how accepted this is to the public,” Cunningham said. “They just believe what they are told by public officials and they don’t realize that if you look at the data it shows there are hundreds of different factors that contribute to temperature.”“What bothers me about this topic is just how accepted this is to the public,” Cunningham said. “They just believe what they are told by public officials and they don’t realize that if you look at the data it shows there are hundreds of different factors that contribute to temperature.”
The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly made the case that catastrophic climate change is imminent and that human emissions are largely to blame. The latest in a series of reports from the IPCC was released in October. But a competing report from an international network of climate scientists challenging the U.N.’s findings was also released in Katowice during the COP24 conference.
In an interview after the forum, Rucker said the competing report from the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change contains valuable data he hopes will find its way into wide circulation. But he also called on the Trump administration to have its Treasury and State Departments respond to a FOIA requests asking it to release information providing insight into Russian funding of environmental groups for the purpose of spreading propaganda against fossil fuel use. These FOIAs have been active now for at least several weeks and could provide more insight into how environmental activists have been operating as foreign agents for Russia and China.
Some information about the relevant FOIAs can be found here, here, and here.
“There are some true believers in the Trump administration, but they are up against the swamp in Washington and they don’t want to isolate themselves,” Rucker said. “Still, they should release any information they have about the relationship between Russia, China, or another foreign power that has close ties with green activists. If we are concerned about Russian meddling in our elections in the U.S., then shouldn’t we be concerned about Russia meddling with our energy policy? What the media reports as science, is really propaganda in many instances. Certainly, the Poles understand the problem of Russian propaganda.”
Kevin Mooney (@KevinMooneyDC) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an investigative reporter in Washington, D.C., who writes for several national publications.
