How Trump Knows that Continued Global Warming Will Make Earth Uninhabitable 100 Years From Now

By Eric Zuesse – He knows it because his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon — a polymath — was personally involved in proving it. Bannon was brought into a major scientific experiment in 1994 as its “Acting CEO” to find a way that would avoid the experiment’s earlier finding that within a hundred years (i.e., by approximately 2095) this planet will be virtually uninhabitable unless global warming can and will quickly be reversed.

At that time, on 13 January 1995, Bannon was explaining the problem. He wasn’t saying that the experiment’s prior findings had been that death would result, but instead casually discussed those findings, vaguely suggesting that they might have been mere computer simulations, which they weren’t. The lead-in to him was at 2:00 in the video, where Bernd Zabel, Director, Biospheric Operations, speaks: “This experiment gives us the power to measure what happens, like air pollution, different CO2; we can measure here, instead of waiting generations, you can measure that over a six-month period.”

Bannon’s voice then is heard, explaining:

“What a lot of the scientists who are studying global change, and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth’s atmosphere in a hundred years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today [which atmosphere the experiment soon confirmed to be impossible for life to continue, no way to avoid this conclusion]. We have [in a hundred years] extraordinarily high CO2, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane, we have lower oxygen [which gas is, of course, essential for humans] content, and so the power of this place [the hermetically sealed domed-in area] is allowing those scientists who are involved in studying global change, and which in the outside world [outside of their dome] really had to do with computer simulation, this actually allows them to study and monitor the impact of enhanced CO2, and other greenhouse gases, on humans, plants.” 

What he ultimately found there, in “Biosphere 2,” was that no way exists to avoid the conclusion that that assessment he described (planetary death) would be the result of not reversing global warming; so, the entire operation was terminated.

Here’s why it was terminated with no announcement of its devastating finding:

The financier who owned it, Ed Bass, was an oil billionaire and one of the Bass Brothers who soon was (along with his brothers, all of them relatives of the oil tycoon Sid Richardson) to be catapulting George W. Bush into the White House as the #1 global-warming denier (something crucially valuable to the oil-and-gas companies — especially in the U.S. White House).

Ed Bass knew that if he could scientifically establish that global warming would actually not be bad for life on Earth, then his hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar gamble on financing this experiment would return far more than that in PR income from other oil-and-gas companies. Ultimately, he spent $200 million on it before abandoning the experiments. It was a lot of money, even for that billionaire.

Biosphere 2’s calculations from its earlier experimental data had predicted that the plants and animals (including humans) wouldn’t survive without drastic reductions in global-warming gases. Bannon was now the CEO of Biosphere 2, running actually a second and more rigorously controlled round of experiments there, to determine with more certainty what the result would actually be of doing nothing about global warming.

The conditions he described in the video were what the financier was hoping that the new controlled experiment would disprove. (With the lowered oxygen-content, and the far higher nitrous oxide and the high methane, humans could not exist, and fires would rage uncontrollably in global burning, which would lower the planet’s oxygen-content even more.)

The finding of Biosphere 2 turned out to be the contrary to that hope, which was the hope of all the carbon-fuels industries; and, so, the entire Biosphere operation was terminated and nothing was published from it. (That’s similar to what the sugar-industry did with the ‘scientific’ research that they had financed, and what the tobacco-industry did, and what the GMO industry did, and what all industries do: they cherry-pick what they submit for ‘scientific’ publication, and so make ‘science’ a mere handmaiden to propaganda.)

The experiment had been introduced to the public as if it were testing human survival in interplanetary travel. Thus, it was called “Space Biosphere Ventures.” This way, if it failed to obtain the desired result — which is what happened — it could simply be described as having been an unsuccessful experiment pertaining to space-travel.

That’s the way the newsmedia reported, and still discuss, it. Even today, wikipedia, and even ecological sites, and even scientists, give the oil-and-gas industries’ cover-story about it, as if describing it this way were a historical account of the matter; and as if this type of institutional ‘science’ (selective publication and non-publication of scientific studies that are financed by interests which have a financial stake in their outcomes) constitutes real science; the myths thus go on — and so lead us to an “End Times” that will actually result from a denial of science, a mere aping of science. Corrupt ‘science’ is no science at all. It’s just a form of PR. It is a variant of religion (manipulated and faith-based mass-beliefs — mass-propaganda), not of science, at all. Why did even environmental organizations have no curiosity about an oil billionaire’s financing such a costly study of human survival during space-travel? They didn’t think to be at all fishy, that cover-story?

Insiders within the petroleum industry had been concerned since the 1970s that maybe they’d need to stop doing what they were doing, and so Exxon Corporation financed their own research, whose findings in 1979 confirmed those of the existing scientific consensus, at which moment Exxon buried the findings and simply pushed forward with oil-and-gas exploration to find even more carbon to burn into the atmosphere and make even more money for themselves. Exxon publicly contradicted the global-warming consensus, and, like the rest of the carbon-fuels industries, poured millions of dollars into ‘non-profits’ that denied the existence or human causation of climate-change. But all of those studies, both pro and con, were based only upon theoretical models that were based upon real-world data, and Ed Bass in the 1980s decided to fund the first real-world physical micro-model of the Earth’s atmosphere, to find out whether perhaps the situation wasn’t so dire after all — which favorable empirical finding, of course, would be enormously valuable to all of the carbon-fuels industries to promote.

In the period 1991-1995, Ed Bass spent 200 million dollars on this, which was the first-ever series of increasingly rigorously controlled experiments employing a hermetically sealed miniature — a miniaturized physical, instead of merely a computerized, model — of Earth’s biological-and-physical ecosystem. He did it in order to test empirically whether this planet’s ecosystem will improve, decline, or end, if the growth of carbon gases continues on its existing course. Planetary death within a hundred years was found, and therefore the myth continues that these experiments were about space-travel and came to no conclusion; the cover-story prevails, history is suppressed. Myths prevail this way.

Unlike the earlier Exxon-funded study, the one that Bass funded would not be able simply to be hidden from the public; so, that cover-story was invented in order to make possible hiding its finding if the outcome turned out to be other than what was hoped-for.

The likelihood is practically nil that President-elect Trump hasn’t been informed about the actual fact by his chief strategist, who played the key role in the final round of these controlled experiments. Bannon clearly described there the atmospheric issues that were being examined, and they all pertained to global ‘warming’. He was overseeing the ultimate physical-and-biological test about this matter, which is of such crucial interest to oil-and-gas billionaires.

And all of the additional acquired evidence from the Earth’s own biosphere — our planet — has been confirming this, so that our planet has now entered clearly into the end-stage “emergency” from which there can be no exit other than soon a lifeless planet: subsequent events confirming yet further the findings by Biosphere II, by repeating those findings but now on a planetary scale. The Conservative leader of Britain, Theresa May, responded to this by terminating her government’s operation that tracks climate-change: conservatives had held off action against global burning until the process had gotten clearly out-of-control, and now they stop even tracking our accelerating descent into oblivion. On the U.S. Supreme Court the Republicans even terminated President Obama’s only real action against global burning. But the meaningful failures weren’t in the judiciary, but instead in the Executive branch during the entire period after Biosphere 2, including especially the Presidency of George W. Bush (chosen, of course, by the Republican judges), which sealed our planet’s coffin.

Any optimism, after this sequence of events, has to be of a very limited type; but, within that scope, the coming Trump Presidency can reasonably be discussed, as follows:

For a realistic hopeful interpretation of the future Trump Presidency, see this.

For a realistic hopeless interpretation of the future Trump Presidency, see this.

The brilliant pseudonymous journalist and news-commentator “Tyler Durden” posted at his “Zero Hedge” site on November 19th “War Breaks Out Between Neo-Cons And Libertarians Over Trump’s Foreign Policy”, and described in a thoroughly unbiased way the Trumpians’ internal conflict. To boil it down: the “Neo-Cons” want to reduce President Trump’s focus against jihadists, and increase the focus against both Iran and Russia. (Congressional Democrats are, like congressional Republicans, overwhelmingly in the “Neo-Con” camp, though they don’t refer to themselves as being “neoconservatives,” nor any other type of “conservatives.” Hillary Clinton herself was strongly neoconservative though she never said so publicly. She also was pro-global-warming, though she never said so publicly.)

Unlike the issue of global burning (euphemistically called global warming ), Trump is probably ignorant of the issue of U.S.-Iranian relations. He might even be ignorant of the shameful continuation of the anti-Russian Cold War by America after it had ended on the Russian side in 1991. Whether he will act in accord with either understanding (global burning, and/or our wrong alliances and wars) remains still unclear. But at least in regard to global burning, he almost certainly understands the truth: given that his chief strategist is Stephen Bannon, Trump would have to be an idiot not to. Whatever he might say or do about global burning, he can reasonably be presumed to know the truth about that matter, irrespective of whether he knows the truth about history during the past century.

 

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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