Climate change ... who doesn't believe it? Crazy fools and science deniers ... right?
It seems like it's become the new religion, the new orthodoxy, that must be accepted and believed as gospel and preached to all.
Is it OK to be skeptical?
I think the problem is that "climate change" is such a vague, nebulous term. What does it mean exactly?
The simplest idea that most people hold to is that the climate is changing, specifically that it's getting warmer, and that it is the result of human action.
Remember when it was called "global warming" instead and people would laugh when there was a cold spell and the believers would become agitated claiming they were confusing "weather" with "climate"? Have you noticed now how local weather events are taken to be evidence of global warm..., erm, I mean climate change? If anyone suggests they are confusing weather and climate they are called a denier. Hmmn.
But it's serious isn't it? We only have 10 years to save the planet. Yeah, that's been claimed since the 1980's. It always seems to be 10 or 12 years - short enough to be alarmist, long enough to be forgotten when it doesn't happen.
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
Remember an Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore? Is the inconvenient truth that hardly any of the predictions have come to pass? But still we have people making the same claims.
The fact is that the climate is a complex system and is always changing - it's never been stable, it's just that our short existence gives us a view that it's static, in the same way that mountains are just there - stable and immovable. We've been in a relatively cold period for some time so a rising temperature isn't really unusual. The question is whether it's going to be catastrophic and whether humans are responsible and can change it.
Where my skepticism comes in is that the issue always seems to come down to people waving their arms shouting "doom and woe, the sky is falling ... unless ..." and then the demands for money. Somehow, it's OK if pollution happens, as long as money changes hands, usually in their direction.
We have politicians applauding themselves for reaching agreements like the Paris Climate accord. Did you know some of the agreements were for countries to raise their levels of pollution?
Trump and the US are derided for pulling out of it but have been one of the countries who have cut their emissions the most - investing the money in clean energy because it makes economic sense in a capitalist system. Bribes, fines and levies are loved by socialists but don't solve any problem, they just perpetuate and subsidize inefficiencies.
Some species can't adapt or can't adapt fast enough but that has always been the case. While the portrayal in the media may be that Polar Bears are dying out and the forests are disappearing, the reality is that the Polar Bear population is higher now than 20+ years ago and there have been millions of Sq Km's of forest added in no small part due to carbon levels going up - oh yeah, that pollution that we hear about is also known as "plant food" and what used to be way higher when the earth supported more lush life and vegetation.
For us, a warmer climate means more growing areas vs a colder climate which could mean the most productive farm lands, that feed most of the population, becoming permafrost.
There's a lot to discuss but I don't think anyone is overjoyed with the idea of pollution - we like to see nature and natural habitats, to have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. But often that is conflated with climate change.
I'm becoming more skeptical because the more you find out about the media headlines, the more it seems like spin. The data often doesn't back up the headlines or has been manipulated (with retractions never given the same coverage) and the figures such as "97% of climate scientists agreeing that climate change is real and man-made" turn out to be as fictitious as the stats that women only get paid 70c for what a man get's paid a $1 for.
Why do the climate + pollution charts always start around the same time? Because if you go back, you see the correlation is less convincing - the temperatures have gone up before at the same time as carbon emission but then came down again. Some of the past data has been changed - newspaper headlines of record temperatures in the 20's are now no longer reflected in the temperature histories.
Here in Canada Trudeau has added a carbon tax which is becoming a serious burden to many and it's not done a single thing to reduce pollution or climate change. In fact, the biggest polluters are exempted from the whole scheme. So how serious is the problem really if it's OK? Is the world really in peril?
It's looking more and more like a huge scam. Change my mind.