George Rebane
‘Climate change’ is one of the unfortunate labels that a nation dominated by dumbth uses to simplify and therefore profoundly misunderstand a very complex process that is made even more confusing through the injection and overarch of political ideologies. The hoi polloi are salved and saved from all this confounding by being taught that science is a singular absolute, and that ‘science is settled’ on climate change. There is nothing that will change such minds outside the opinions of their chosen political betters who insist all credible scientists warn us that earth is headed for a thermal catastrophe unless we quickly adopt a set of draconian public policies, enforced by a bigger government, that must needs change our fundamental lifestyles. Assessments and evidence that contradict such consensus science are loudly sourced to flat-earthers, creationists, and others categorized as intellectual troglodytes.
When the semantic onion is peeled back, climate change is really the short label for preventable man-made global warming (PMGW), about which you shouldn’t bother your little head as long as you concur with the new laws, regulations, taxes, and fees required to ‘prevent climate change’. Climate change is also the perfect and only storm that must not be wasted on our road to a global Agenda21 (q.v.). However, the rest of us know that –
1) earth’s climate change is perennial and ongoing;
2) the greenhouse effect is real and greenhouse gases (especially CO2) in earth’s atmosphere are constantly varying, and have done so over broad ranges for eons;
3) earth’s carbon cycle is poorly understood at best;
4) humans do contribute an unknown proportion to atmospheric CO2;
5) the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and ‘earth’s temperature’ is an unknown dynamic process;
6) the temperature of the earth is a number produced by any of many algorithms, and then politically selected for public consumption;
7) our understanding of the dynamics of weather and climate are poor and a work in process, definitely not ready to support public policy making;
8) general circulation models (GCMs), cobbled together to generate and support weather and climate predictions, are many in a field of ongoing research, and are intensely politically mediated for use in public policy making;
9) today’s GCMs barely work for predicting near-term weather, and are useless for predicting long-term climate changes;
10) earth’s weather and climate are large-scale, complex chaotic processes, the long-term predictions of which today are not possible to any degree of usable reliability, and for several technical reasons having to do with physics and computability, such usable reliability may never be possible;
11) the presented evidence for PMGW has been demonstrated to be fraught with fraudulent manipulations and interpretations of historical and topical measurements along with ad hoc estimates, and there is no evidence that the claimed climate change is preventable;
12) the overwhelming ‘thousands’ of the UN’s IPCC scientists, who have neither the expertise nor understanding of things outside their own narrow disciplines correctly, make no such claims, especially when it comes to the workings of any of the GCMs du jour that incorporate their particular inputs for making predictions in the large;
13) all of the above has also been communicated by a body of competent scientists and engineers who are both beholden and not beholden to politically correct government grants.
For some time now the climate change debate has been politically polluted beyond any reason-based redemption or resolution. Instead, it meticulously mangled by the media before being resolved in the public square through the vicissitudes of an ephemeral and mostly fluid public comprehension, one that expresses itself variously in the nation’s ballot boxes. Democracy at work indeed.
For these reasons I remain a skeptic about PMGW, and treat all new information as a Bayesian. To characterize people like me as 'not believing' in climate change immediately extinguishes further discussion and debate. Such accusations are invariably either agenda driven or simply ignorant.
(The portents are more compelling for a near-term episode of global cooling. Perhaps the politicians will respond when we witness, say, a couple of years of a crop-killing June frost on the Great Plains.)
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