BREAKING BOUNDARIES: THE SCIENCE OF OUR PLANET

BREAKING BOUNDARIES: THE SCIENCE OF OUR PLANET is a Net-flix documentary about the research of environmentalist activist Johan Rockstrom of Swe-den, who says that the man-made effects of global warming, production of carbon dioxide or CO2, ocean and freshwater pollution, and air pollution are reaching a tipping point of global destruction. BREAKING BOUNDARIES is a superficial, deceitful and abhorrent example of mendacious environmentalist hysteria, but a couple of its solutions at the end, especially the idea of planting millions or billions of new trees, seem profitable and reasonable.

Narrated by British environmentalist Sir David Attenborough, the movie identifies nine areas of planetary threat systems, including such things as climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, land surface converted to cropland, freshwater pollution, and other forms of pollution. Rockström and his team of environmental scientists say all these systems threaten the survival of the planet and the human race. They also claim that some of these systems are exceeding or approaching tipping points of no return.

To prove Rockström’s assertion, the movie identifies various problems besides pollution, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. These other problems include global warming, increased production of carbon dioxide or CO2, loss of ice in Greenland, destruction of the Amazon rainforest, loss of coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef along Australia, massive wildfires in Australia in 2019-20, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The movie presents these problems in a scary, emotional way, but all of them are based on unscientific falsehoods and exaggerations.

In 2009, a whistleblower showed how the scientific establishing was manipulating and destroying the evidence about global warming, as depicted in a series of emails between 1999 and 2008 from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Great Brit-ain. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international and national environmentalist groups used the fudged numbers to predict that the world’s temperatures will rise to catastrophic levels. In addition to fudging the numbers, the CRU totally ignored data showing that, in the Middle Ages, there was a spike in temperatures, followed by a period called the Little Ice Age (about 1600 to the early 1800s AD). What the emails showed was a series of “fraud, lies and cover-ups,” says Cap Allon in “How Did the Global Warming Scam Survive ‘Climategate?,’” (Electroverse, June 16, 2021, https://electroverse.net/how-did-the-global-warming-scam-survive-climategate/). Environmentalists and many politicians, governments and international groups continue to promote the fraudulent theory of global warming, even though temperature data since 1999 now shows that temperatures have remained stable, and have even cooled slightly (Neil L. Frank, “Caring for Creation: A Book of Good Intentions but Poor Science,” Cornwall Alliance, Feb. 10, 2017, https://cornwallalliance.org/2017/02/caring-for-creation-a-book-of-good-intentions-but-poor-science-2/). Thus, in reality, Earth’s temperatures rise and fall in cycles, driven by the cycles on the sun, not by carbon dioxide or CO2 as environmentalists and this documentary claim. In fact, 90 percent of the Earth’s warming since the Little Ice Age is due to water vapor, not CO2, says Dr. Frank in the above article. “CO2 is only 0.40 percent of the atmosphere,” writes Frank. Finally, Frank adds that a study of climate reports found that more than 1,000 peer-reviewed studies challenging the theory that man-made CO2 causes global warming were published in Europe and Asia, but not published in U.S. professional journals. Meanwhile, the shift toward green energy in Germany, away from nuclear power plants, has been an utter disaster.

In 2019, Greenland lost a record 530 billion metric tons of glacial ice, but that still only amounted to 0.02% of the Greenland Ice Sheet, or 530 kilometers out of 2.58 million cubic kilometers (Joakim Book, “Playing Fast and Loose with Numbers,” Cornwall Alliance, April 23, 2021, https://cornwallalliance.org/2021/04/playing-fast-and-loose-with-numbers/).

The documentary’s claims about the Amazon, deforestation of the Amazon and the threat of soy farms and cattle ranches are also false. According to Dan Nepstad, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Amazon, “The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration so it’s a wash. The Amazon produces a lot of oxygen, but so do soy farms and [cattle] pastures” (Michael Schellenberger, “Why Every-thing They Say About the Amazon, Including That It’s the ‘Lungs of the World,’ Is False,” Forbes Magazine, August 26, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/08/26/why-everything-they-say-about-the-amazon-including-that-its-the-lungs-of-the-world-is-wrong/?sh=34314ad95bde). Soy farms and cattle ranches are not the problem, Nepstad says. Forest fires during years of drought are the bigger problem. “For $2 million a year we could control the fires and stop the Amazon die-back,” he adds, however.

The documentary claims that, currently, one million out of eight million plants and animals are threatened with extinction. In the last 40 years, however, there have only been two ex-tinctions per year (Gregory Whitestone, “New UN Report on Looming Mass Extinctions Exposed in US House Testimony,” Cornwall Alliance, May 25, 2019, https://cornwallalliance.org/2019/05/new-un-report-on-looming-mass-extinctions-exposed-in-us-house-testimony/). Also, in reality, only about 1.8 million species have been identified in reality. Finally, contrary to BREAKING BOUNDARIES, there is no longer a bee crisis. It abated in 2011 when people identified the problem to be disease, pesticide and pests. The crisis has been solved, and honey bees are at their highest level in the United States in years.

In addition, there is no tremendous threat from ocean acidification, according to Cliff Ollier, Honorary Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. (Cliff Ollier, “Ocean Acidification Is a Myth,” The Saltbush Club, May 4, 2019, https://saltbushclub.com/2019/05/04/ocean-acidification/). In reality, the ocean is less alka-line, but not acidic. He also says that carbon dioxide or CO2 actually increases the growth rate of most or even all ocean species. It is also essential to the survival of coral reefs.

Furthermore, coral reefs are not dying because of man-made global warming. Not only does recent scientific research show that coral reefs can thrive in warmer waters, it also shows they can thrive when volcanic activity releases more CO2 into the oceans (see Kenneth Richard, “New Study: Coral Reefs Thrive Near Acidic Waters (pH about 6.0) Where Seafloor Vents Emit up to 95,000 ppm CO2,” NoTricksZone, March 30, 2020, https://notrickszone.com/2020/03/30/new-study-coral-reefs-thrive-near-acidic-waters-ph-6-0-where-seafloor-vents-emit-up-to-95000-ppm-co2/). So, even though extreme warmer weather can indeed destroy a significant part of a coral reef, the alleged link to man-made global warming has been refuted, as shown above. Furthermore, contrary to this documentary, the most recent report on the Great Barrier Reef by AIMS, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, found that there’s the same amount of coral reef today as in 1995! In fact, the AIMS report discovered only about 8% of the Great Barrier Reef had suffered from the higher temperatures generated from a prolonged El Niño event in 2016-17. Also, a recently reported survey of coral reefs on the opposite side of Australia in the three coral atolls that comprise the Rowley Shoals found that a long marine heatwave in December 2019 only killed about 10% of the reefs instead of the estimated 60% that had been bleached (“No Evidence for Dramatic Loss of Great Barrier Reef Corals,” Science Under Attack, Nov. 30, 2020, https://www.scienceunderattack.com/blog/2020/11/30/no-evidence-for-dramatic-loss-of-great-barrier-reef-corals-66).

As the documentary reports in an emotional segment, wildfires in Australia in 2019-20 were pretty bad. However, they still pale in comparison to devastating wildfires during 1974-75, 46 million acres compared to a whopping 290 million acres in 1974-75. Also, since 1975, the devastation of Australian wildfires has steadily decreased. In addition, the record heat wave experienced by Australia in December 2019 was accompanied by a cold wave in India and devastating floods in East Africa. All three of these events were caused by “a phenomenon called Positive Indian Ocean Dipole,” not global warming or man-made climate change, according to Vijay Jayaraj, an expert in environmental science (see Vijay Jayaraj, “Record Heat and Cold Expose Climate Alarmists’ Bias,” Cornwall Alliance, Jan. 8, 2020, https://cornwallalliance.org/2020/01/record-heat-and-cold-expose-climate-alarmists-bias/). As with the recent wildfires in California, the Australian bushfires are be-ing caused by arsonists and by environmentalist activists, who have forced governments to stop the removal of combustible material in Australia’s bush country as well as in California’s forests. Conclusion? Carbon emissions and global warming are not the problem!

Most obnoxious of all, perhaps, BREAKING BOUNDARIES blames the COVID-19 pandemic on deforestation, destruction of wildlife habitat and climate change. Of course, we now know that the virus started in a lab created by the Chinese Communist government doing virology and biological warfare research, and partially funded by the federal government’s U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases run by Anthony Fauci. The Chinese government did little to prevent the manufactured virus from infecting people around the world. Contrary to the pompous words of the documentary’s narrator, Sir Da-vid Attenborough, the COVID-19 pandemic has NOTHING to do with the physical state of the planet and its ecology, much less the human race’s treatment of them.

To sum up, the documentary’s broad claims about global warming, CO2 production, coral reefs, loss of the rainforest, biodiversity, mass extinction, wildfires, and loss of Arctic ice in Greenland and elsewhere, are wrong. BREAKING BOUNDARIES is clearly promoting a false humanist, environmentalist agenda fueled by an unscientific political ideology.

That said, the movie does make a good case about agricultural pollution of freshwater, such as the agricultural pollution that the Baltic Sea has suffered. It also offers a couple solutions to the phony “existential” crisis it conjures. First, it says human beings can start by increasing their efforts to eliminate waste, apparently through more recycling. Second, and even better, it says we can build millions if not billions of more trees, including more trees in agricultural areas. The other solutions the movie offers, however, such as reducing carbon emissions and reducing alleged global warming by eliminating fossil fuels are clearly based on faulty science. In this light, it’s very telling that BREAKING BOUNDARIES nowhere advocates nuclear power as the best way to reduce carbon emissions and, thereby, reduce global warming. The omission of nuclear power shows, more than any other thing, per-haps, that the radical environmentalist activists in BREAKING BOUNDARIES are mis-guided, deceitful phonies.