I am not a scientist, nor am I qualified to judge the value of the scientific data now being gathered about the Earth’s climate. I have, however, spent more-years-than-I-care-to-admit advising businesses in matters related to financial, investment and budgetary decisions. Because of the nature of accounting work, professionals usually acquire the mental discipline to find the pertinent facts necessary to justify decisions made. This disciplined mindset tends to sweep aside the murky gray and to reveal situations as black or white, yes or no, up or down.
Until today, I considered myself a climate skeptic, and as a result, I entered into debates on every issue put forward covering unsubstantiated claims and useless proposals from the Alarmist crowd covering such topics as taxing carbon, CO2 levels, oil drilling, renewable energy, global warming, er cooling, and wild projections of our doom as a result of human-caused environmental changes. I was and I remain convinced that there has been no empirical evidence presented that human activity is the cause of changing climate conditions.
Today I reviewed two writings that took my mind above the fray. Now I will no longer engage in idiotic ideological discussions with environmental whackos, those unduly influenced by them and those who will benefit from the implementation of immense unneeded projects. First of all, there is the breathtaking Prologue to Jurassic Park, written by Michael Crichton. The second article is a review of Mike Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree about Climate Change, Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity.
Michael Crichton takes our minds above the magnificent sphere that we live on and reminds us that we are but mere pissants in the scheme of our environment:
You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity. Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land.
Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval. Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years.
Earth has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in Arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. It might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety.
Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears the earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy. It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. Do you think this is the first time that’s happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time.
A hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
Mike Hulme is a UK academic deeply involved with the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which influences the climate policies of governments individually (including the U.S.) and worldwide through the UN. He is among those who has declared that the global man-made warming debate is over. He says that climate change is useful:
“Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”
In other words, socialists like Hulme can frame the global warming issue to achieve unrelated goals such as sustainable development, income redistribution, population control, social justice, and many other items on the liberal/socialist wishlist.
Like the notorious Stephen Schneider, who once said, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts one might have. … Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,” Hulme writes, “We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects.”
These “myths,” he writes, “transcend the scientific categories of `true’ and `false’.”
“The function of climate change I suggest, is not as a lower-case environmental phenomenon to be solved. Solving climate change should not be the focus of our efforts any more than we should be ‘solving’ the idea of human rights or liberal democracy. It really is not about stopping climate chaos. Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change – the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals – to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.”
I have concluded that climate change controversy does not arise from “intoxicating vanity” as Crichton imagined but from political arrogance imposed on us to further the power of the government over the governed; while, at the same time, lining the pockets of the politicians and power brokers. World socialistic tendencies have now become Marxist and the present government in Washington is marching lockstep with this new world order.
anAL GOREtentive
Good post. I wonder how many here have written their Senators in opposition to the Cap ‘n Tax bill that the House passed by two votes.
The eco-whackos try and conflate pollution with climate change, they are not the same.
You can’t get ‘pollution’ from atmospheric CO2, the very stuff of all life on earth, without which all earth’s life would soon be extinct.
But if you really want to, you can direct measure Al Gore’s warm blanket of CO2 around the earth, and when you do, you will find it is nowhere to be found. Yet every known computer climate model predicts it to be there, yet it is not.
We have a saying about computer models, especially those you cannot test … GIGO.
I began my engineering career in the field of space science, we are but microscopic nats riding on a dust spec called earth in the grand scheme of things, what Crichton says.
Great piece gadfly and a great reminder of the late great Michael Crichton. I’m still recovering from his untimely death. Crichton also reminded us that we can’t even get week long weather forecasts correct, consequently, to think that anyone can predict global warming is beyond stupid.
Of course, we should all be good stewarts of the earth, but that’s as far as it goes for me. I’m convinced any dramatic changes are from the sun, and we ain’t gonna fix that!
Sadly nature abhors a vacumn, and GW is now the “new religion.” We are all wired to have obedience to “something.”
If “cap and trade” becomes law, it will be the biggest theft in America right up there with health care.
I agree with you that GW is about power, but it’s also important to note that that power starts with the destruction of America, of which Obama is doing a splendid job so far.
We have an opportunity to observe a psychological phenomenon within the “climate change” debate: the ability of people to be brainwashed.
I know that’s a loaded term, but as someone who has seen the devastating effects that mental illness can have on a family, I have some first hand experience with the subject.
The effects of brainwashing are not readily apparent. The victim is not reduced to drooling, incoherent babbling. If this were the case, then there would be no need for the practice. Watching reruns of soap operas would do the same thing.
The victim of brainwashing has no idea what has happened and is oblivious to the change that has occured in his thinking. He will vigorously defend the suggestions that have been planted, almost to the point of violence when confronted with any facts that contradict them. Logic is disabled along with the capacity to reason. Taken to its illogical conclusion, any and all endpoints of discussion will arrive at the same place: the original premise of the false suggestion.
For example, notice all of the previously-considered-normal variations in weather that are now attributed to “climate change”: warm weather, cold weather, tornadoes, hurricanes, drought, floods, the list goes on. And it’s all your fault.
Those who have been brainwashed bristle at the very notion that they can no longer think for themselves, and will call you all sorts of names for pointing it out to them. However, the sting of truth has the power to wake them up. One day, they might even thank you.
Until then, watch this phenomenon in action and defend yourself against it. Be particularly wary of any politician who believes in “climate change”, for no good law can ever be based on a hoax and a lie. Remove them from office at every opportunity. And be patient with your friends who show the effects. You and your friends will be glad you did.