(Daily Skeptic)—Although we generally think of climate change hysteria as a quintessentially modern phenomenon, this is not in fact the case. Arrogant, dictatorial, totalitarian political elites have been in love with the same basic idea before – the Nazi Party, for instance.
It has largely been forgotten today, but, as I discovered when writing my new book Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets, the German Nazi Party of the 1930s and 40s believed in climate change too: it’s just that they thought the world was growing inexorably colder, not warmer. Also, unlike political elites today, they tended to think climate change was a good thing, not a bad one: coping with harsh frost and ice would help the Aryan race grow hard and strong amidst the growing frozen wastes of our future ice planet. That would certainly come in handy if they ever tried invading Russia during the winter again.
The actual ‘science’ [sic] behind the Nazis’ own version of climate change is completely different from that of our own day – but, strangely, the social and political effects of quasi-enforced mass public belief in the phenomenon were often eerily similar to the kinds of things we can see going on with our own alleged climate crisis today. Personally, I don’t necessarily dispute the basic idea our climate today is changing (it always has), merely the dubious political superstructure subsequently built atop this initial notion.
The Nazi iteration of the same basic scientific scam – in which Hitler himself was a strong public believer – was termed Welteislehre (WEL), or ‘World-Ice Theory’. Significantly, WEL was billed not simply as an ordinary scientific proposal but a full-blown Kosmotechnische Weltanschauung, or ‘Cosmo-Technical Worldview’ – a comprehensive method of viewing the natural world through a highly distorted ideological lens which merged pseudoscience, philosophy, archaeology, religion, mythology, politics and racism into one heady brew of ‘cosmic cultural history’ containing pure ‘vitamins of the soul’.
WEL was developed by an Austrian engineer-turned-prophet with a truly epic beard named Hanns Hörbiger (1860-1931), who stubbornly refused to accept the existence of stars. Instead, Hörbiger taught apparent stars such as those shining within our own “so-called Milky Way” were actually an optical illusion caused by light from a few genuine suns far away, reflecting off a gigantic wall of planet-sized ice-blocks ringing our entire solar-system like icebergs bobbing upon the ocean of space-time.
Where did these icebergs originate? Billions of years ago, in the Constellation of the Dove, there had been a gigantic super-sun, millions of times larger than our own, orbited by a similarly huge super-planet, layered with ice hundreds of miles thick. As its orbit decayed, this ice-world fell into the super-sun and melted, emitting jets of super-charged steam. The sun then exploded, vomiting forth colossal lumps of super-heated magma which cooled and set solid into the well-loved planets of our current solar-system today. Mars, little more than a giant blob of ice, would one day pass so close to Earth that it would hoover up our atmosphere, rendering it a lifeless orb of snow.
Being perfectly positioned between fire and ice, Earth was presently the only non-frozen world left, a Goldilocks planet. Originally, our solar system had about 30 planets, but the smaller ones had entered into the larger ones’ orbits, becoming frozen ice moons; Saturn’s rings were the shattered remains of one such lunar body. Eventually, all the planets’ orbits would decay until they spiraled into the Sun, making it detonate, and the whole fire versus ice cycle would begin anew.
Huge oxygen clouds were also expelled from the original solar explosion, reacting with etheric layers of latent hydrogen, creating entire oceans’ worth of space water which then froze into those system-ringing space-bergs within the universe’s icy vacuum. Occasionally, one such space-glacier comes loose, floating into our sun’s gravitational field, causing hailstorms on Earth before splashing into the sun, creating a sun-spot, said Hanns.
Meanwhile, our present moon – Earth’s sixth such satellite, apparently – is continually accumulating more and more frozen material on its surface, shed from these passing loose space-bergs, becoming so over-laden it will ultimately sink violently down to Earth. Other smaller ice-moons had hurtled Earthwards thousands of years ago, the last of which, the ‘Tertiary’ or ‘Cenozoic’ moon, had destroyed Atlantis, also causing the biblical Great Flood and Twilight of the Gods of ancient Norse myth. The ultra-high tides caused by the Tertiary moon’s approach and fall had shaped the world’s salt and coal deposits, and all previous theories explaining how such substances were formed were yet more university-born lies.
Hörbiger’s idea, as laid out in a rambling, unstructured 1913 book of some 790 pages, Glacial Cosmology, initially flopped badly, despite his enlistment of an amateur German moon-mapper, Philipp Fauth (1867-1941), as co-author to lace it with plausible-sounding technical language. Embittered, Hörbiger thought jealous non-WEL astronomers were engaged in an unpatriotic Judaeo-Bolshevik conspiracy against the poetic Austro-German soul, so in 1918, observing how citizens had been sold on the First World War via propaganda, the self-declared “German genius” (who, like Hitler, wasn’t even actually German) decided to use the fortune he had accumulated from a special type of valve he had patented from his old engineering days to appeal directly to scientifically illiterate members of the public instead. In short, rather than persuading people of the truth of his ideas logically, he sought to persuade them emotionally instead.
“What agrees with it is right, what cannot be united with it is wrong,” declared Hörbiger of his idea, like all good pseudoscientific ideologues. “Either you learn to believe in me, or I must treat you as an enemy,” he warned one sceptic who argued measurements of the lunar surface proved it far too warm to be covered in miles of ice. As such evidence was irrefutable, it was easier to ignore it and smear opponents as traitorous political adherents of Jewish Physics instead, instrumental data being mere “weapons directed against the spirit of Parsifal”, the legendary Wagnerian knight-hero.
“One Austrian, Hitler, drove out the Jewish politicians,” read one WEL propaganda leaflet. “Another Austrian, Hörbiger, will drive out the Jewish scientists.” Scientific opponents to WEL were now not just wrong – they were evil, just like climate change sceptics today supposedly are in the eyes of many of their more unhinged opponents.
Whilst not actually a paid-up Nazi himself, Hörbiger was a committed pan-German nationalist and exploited growing similar public sentiment to sell his theory via a constant deluge of books, pamphlets, magazines, movies, radio-shows and even a special newspaper, The Key to World Events, which dubiously interpreted recent major news stories as expressions of cosmic ice’s influence upon humanity. When Price Charles deludedly claimed the Syrian Civil War was the direct result of climate change today, he is unknowingly following in Hörbiger’s footsteps.
Over time, Hörbiger essentially formed his own political pressure group; he even had private street thugs, drawn from Nazi Brownshirt ranks, gaining a literal cult following. He didn’t call this private army Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, but such adherents fulfilled a similar function of disrupting public life and persecuting dissenters, albeit in a much more violent fashion than has so far happened with their unknowing activist descendants today.
Cannily, Hörbiger courted Nazi politicians, seeing in them a path to future influence. Following his 1931 death, Hanns’s followers aggressively promoted Welteislehre to sympathetic elements in the SS, correctly seeing that, should the Nazis ever achieve power, as they ultimately did in 1933, they could enforce acceptance of the theory via dubious political means rather than via actual rational force of argument. Sound familiar?
Whether you were a WEL-believer soon became a proxy test for whether you were a good German or loyal fascist, with links drawn between the ‘healthy’ notion of cosmic ice and the equally ‘healthy’ Nazi line that the Aryan people had originated near the invigorating frozen wastes of the North Pole. “Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the WEL is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man,” it was said. World-Ice Theory was enlisted as just more scientific evidence the German Volk really were the cosmic Master-Race; white superiority was quite literally written in the ice-white stars (or space-bergs, if you preferred).
Hitler, smitten, planned to build a gigantic astronomy museum in Linz once he had won the war, the entire top-floor of which would be devoted to Hörbiger, “the Copernicus of the 20th century”, symbolising how he represented the final end-point of the whole science’s evolution, whilst the SS signed a document officially recognising WEL, the ‘Pyrmont Protocol’. SS meteorologist Hans Robert Scultetus tried using the idea for long-term weather-forecasts in his special Pflegestätte für Wetterkunde unit, albeit with little joy.
Just as you won’t get a top job on a ‘socially conscious’ company’s board today without ostentatiously agreeing humanity is about to die out due to the pernicious effects of capitalism-fuelled global-warming, so back in the 1930s it became impossible to gain employment from many German firms unless you agreed to sign a pledge acknowledging cosmic ice was real. After this caused some disquiet, the Nazis eventually gave official advice explaining WEL-belief was not legally necessary to participate in public life – it was just a major advantage.
The appeal of Welteislehre was therefore not based primarily upon outmoded concepts like logic, realism or evidence; instead, there was a politically and ideologically motivated desire for it to be true. In other words, like much of climate change hysteria today, it was purest political religion disguised as science.
It’s no wonder the history of the whole WEL debacle isn’t very well known today. If it was, then our very own contemporary climate change fanatics may have to admit to being in some very unsavoury company indeed. Maybe hectoring little Hitlers like George Monbiot and Greta Thunberg really are ‘Climate Nazis’, as some like to call them, after all?
Steven Tucker is a journalist with the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
