Did you hear about the back-to-back hurricanes that recently wrecked havoc on the state of Hawaii? No?
What about the hurricane that devastated Tallahassee, Florida? Scratching your head about that one, are ya?
Certainly you know that a windless hurricane is responsible for the massive flooding that struck New Orleans this year. You didn’t know that?
What about the wild fires that have been burning in California. Those are unprecedented, right?
Well, you would know about those things if you were to read the latest climate hysteria in the Rolling Stone article Climate Change Is Here: Inside the Summer of Hell and High Water.
According to the article, it isn’t just that the overall climate has gotten warmer. It’s that harsh weather is the result of mankind’s activities, which is why the article ends with a promotion of a carbon tax.
Are the wild fires in California unprecedented? No, not really. What is unprecedented is the increased human population in the parts of California that are prone to wild fires, a fact that is mentioned in the article.
What about all that rain that struck Tallahassee and New Orleans? Why should we think that such weather events wouldn’t have occurred naturally?
The climate alarmists may be correct in saying that planet Earth has warmed. However, they haven’t exactly explained just how one is to know whether a weather event is all-natural or induced by human activity.
Plenty of alarmists simply don’t know just how extreme the climate in North America was before white men discovered the continent’s existence. They are basing their conclusions on a rather narrow timeline.
How narrow? Well, the National Weather Service itself wasn’t established until 1870.
Climate alarmists have even been in denial about the Medieval Warm Period, a global climate phenomenon that took place before the Industrial Revolution.
Oh no, we can’t have an all-natural period of global warming to be a part of climate history. If people knew just what Mother Nature has done in the past, then they might expect Mother Nature to repeat herself without mankind’s help.
Folks, let’s cut to the chase. Yes, the climate in North America has become warmer since Europeans began settling in North America. We might quibble about how much warmer that it has become, but we don’t really know what the climate future holds for us.
The alarmists who claim to know certainly aren’t willing to bet on their beliefs. As John Tamny writes in Forbes magazine, “Michael Mann and the rest of the climate alarmists at the very least owe the rest of us a date in the future (whether tomorrow, next year, or fifty years from now) when, if their predictions don’t materialize, they’ll admit to having been hysterical about something that was never really a problem.”
Tamny is correct in that the professional alarmists need to make specific predictions about the climate, or else they appear to be stoking the flames of hysteria in order to keep the government-grant money flowing to them.
No, the professional alarmists aren’t working free of charge. Their livelihood depends on them convincing lawmakers to keep funding their research. Nothing says “Fund me!” like saying “Fund me if you want to stop a disaster from taking place.”
What if the professional alarmists can’t stop Mother Nature? What if they can’t accurately predict what Mother Nature will do in the future? Their egos would end up be stroked by politicians without any meaningful return on the tax dollars spent.
No, one cannot eliminate the possibility that mankind’s activities have influenced recent extreme weather conditions. At the same time, one cannot eliminate the possibility that Mother Nature didn’t get any help from mankind when producing those weather events.
According to the Greek philosopher Socrates, the height of wisdom is to say, “I do not know.” How about we say, “I do not know,” when it comes to what distant weather events will come our way. Then, let’s prepare for any extremes.
Sure, we should do all we can that is feasible to minimize our carbon footprint. However, we would be fooling ourselves if we were to think that a carbon tax in the USA would make a measurable impact on the global climate. That would be like thinking that cows all over America would stop farting if the cows in California would do so.
Global climate isn’t limited to one state or to one nation. The air that we breathe circulates all over planet Earth. We can’t fence it in.
Besides, the world’s supply of fossil fuels won’t last forever, despite the people who think otherwise. Eventually, the carbon issue will go away on its own accord. Then, who will we blame for Mother Nature’s behavior, the cows?
Oh, wait. They are already doing that in California.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that the climate has warmed. The problem is that people want to dictate what Mother Nature does or doesn’t do. For some odd reason, people have convinced themselves that the climate shouldn’t be changing, when the climate has been changing for as long as there has been a climate.
People insist they should be able to control Mother Nature. They might be able to fool Mother Nature into thinking that margarine is butter, but they can’t fool her into keeping the climate in such a way that people deem to be suitable.
People want an unchanging climate like they want a free lunch. They aren’t getting either. So, they are stomping their feet, and Mother Nature is laughing in response.
By the way, here is something else to think about:
Also, a new climate study published by Nature magazine is coming under fire by climate scientists.
