Author: Mae Cornes

Photo Courtesy of: Guy Mitchell

In 1996, a mechanical engineer named Guy Mitchell began to build machines that did what machines are supposed to do: convert energy into motion. He understood mechanics and physics not as abstractions, but as the application of forces you could see in the operation of equipment. He built his company, Mitchell Industries, on those principles, crafting overhead cranes and automated equipment that served industries on which modern economies depend.

Decades later, long after he started that company, Mitchell found himself staring at a different kind of machine – one not of metal and hydraulics, but of narrative and influence. It was the global engine of climate discourse: governments, corporations, global investment banks, media, and academia moving in synchrony around a single, dominant story of human-caused global warming. As he looked closer, the engineer saw a system that no longer seemed driven by the laws of thermodynamics, but by the laws of money.

“When you’ve spent your life solving physical problems, you recognize when a model no longer fits reality,” he has said. “The science should lead the politics, not the other way around.”

Following the Science or Following the Money?

Mitchell’s book, Global Warming: The Great Deception, is not a polemic against environmentalism. It is a treatise on method – on how we claim to know what we know. His argument is simple but unsettling: climate science, as practiced in policy circles and global summits, has strayed from the scientific method that built every bridge, factory, turbine, and reactor modern civilization relies upon.

He frames his inquiry like an engineer troubleshooting a system failure. The variables, he argues, have been tampered with—not motivated by the desire to follow science, but rather the pursuit of economic incentives. Political systems reward consensus, not skepticism. Science has been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness..

investors reward compliance, not dissent. According to Mitchell, this has produced a culture where predictions masquerade as proof.

“Scientific truth,” he writes, “does not require consensus, it requires replication.”

Mitchell suggests that the loudest voices in the climate debate are often the most financially entangled. Politicians who demand rapid decarbonization, he observes, are frequently backed by funds and lobbyists positioned to benefit from subsidies, carbon credits, ESG-linked capital flows and political contributions. The result, he argues, is a feedback loop of moral panic and monetary gain – an engine that burns not oil, but outrage.

The Science Beneath the Noise

Mitchell’s grounding in mechanical engineering and physics informs his critique of climate modeling. He argues that many global climate projections rely on assumptions that violate the first principles of thermodynamics, spectroscopy and quantum mechanics. Temperature records, he contends, are often inaccurate and manipulated to portray a scenario of global warming that does not exist. Complex models fail “back testing”; they produce a prediction of historical results that differ from actual measured data. The thermodynamic systems that affect the temperature of various locales around the Earth are too complex and interconnected to model.

That view has made him an outsider in both scientific and political circles. Yet Mitchell does not cast himself as a revolutionary; he sees himself as a repairman. His aim is not to dismantle climate science but to recalibrate it, to return scientific inquiry to its empirical roots.

“The scientific method is not about belief,” he says. “It’s about testing, failing, revising, and testing again. When dissent becomes heresy, you no longer have science—you have pseudoscience and adherence to political dogma.”

What distinguishes Mitchell’s argument is not its defiance, but its tone of pragmatism. His concern is less ideological than structural: when models fail, policies built on them fail harder. The consequences, he warns, will not fall on investors or think tanks, but on ordinary people facing higher costs for energy, food, and industry.

Already, the numbers suggest strain. In 2025, the International Energy Agency reported that renewable energy intermittency led to increased grid instability in several developed economies, forcing governments to spend billions on emergency reserve power. These are not failures of innovation but of overconfidence in assuming political will can replace physical law.

A Moral Reckoning in the Age of Data

Mitchell’s dissent is part of a larger moral question, one that cuts across ideology. What happens when science evolves into pseudoscience and becomes a weapon of regulators and legislators to accomplish certain ends? Individual freedoms suffer. What happens when virtue signaling turns into policy? His critique touches a nerve because it echoes a deeper cultural fatigue: the sense that even science, the last shared language of modernity and the representative of truth, can be corrupted for monetary gain.

Mitchell does not deny that the Earth’s climate is changing; it has changed since the beginning of time. However, Mitchell demonstrates that those changes are the result of natural influences, not the anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. He disputes the reduction of complexity to certainty and the

replacement of inquiry with an agenda. His call is not for denial but for humility, the intellectual humility to admit what cannot be modeled, and the moral humility to resist turning uncertainty into policy theater.

For Mitchell, the stakes are not ideological but civilizational. “Energy drives everything, such as the production of goods and services, food, transport, and communication,” he says. “When you distort that foundation with flawed science, you don’t just risk the economy. You risk the standard of living and truth itself.”

The Engineer’s Burden

There is a quiet poetry in Mitchell’s defiance. The same mind that once calibrated machines to function within microns now urges a recalibration of global reasoning. His insistence on method over movement recalls an older kind of faith, not in politics, but in the pursuit of truth.

Whether history vindicates or condemns him, his voice reminds us that science is not a sermon to be memorized but a practice to be endured, a relentless questioning of even our most comforting certainties. In that sense, Guy Mitchell is not rebelling against science at all. He is following it further than most are willing to go.

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