No one denies the climate is changing …

A popular attack by liberals is to accuse someone of being a “climate-change denier.” Like many of their claims, it’s baseless.  Worse yet, it’s disingenuous. 

Nobody with any sense at all denies the climate is changing. The science is pretty clear.

The reason why the climate is changing – or what we can realistically do about it – is where reasonable people can disagree. 

It’s also where unreasonable people with an agenda use snapshots out of time to advance their causes. Right now, it’s global warming melting the ice caps, raising ocean temperatures, and paradoxically causing droughts and floods as well as extreme heat and cold. 

In the 1970s it was the threat of global cooling, leading to an imminent ice age, crop failures and mass starvation around the world. That even made the cover of Time Magazine. 

That’s why activists switched to “climate change” from global warming or cooling; every time they did their doom and gloom about the planet cooling down or heating up, Mother Nature threw a curve and made them look like idiots.  We had record cold when we were supposed to be warming and record heat when we were supposed to be cooling. 

I remember not long ago when protesters in DC urging Congress to act on measures to curb global warming found themselves holding their event while a blizzard raged.  Awkward. 

I’ve made the point before about the difference between correlation and causation. Correlation is when things appear to be connected; causation is much tougher to prove. You can correlate just about anything – the rise of automobiles and world wars for example – but that doesn’t mean automobiles caused those wars. 

The point here is simple. It’s easy to confuse things that seem to coincide with what’s really causing something to happen. In terms of Earth science our knowledge of why the global climate fluctuates from decade to decade, or century to century, is very limited.  For all of our science we still can’t accurately predict weather from week to week or season to season, much less in years to come.   

We have fossil records dating back millions of years showing alternating cycles of warming and cooling.  But scientists really don’t know why or how the climate could shift so much, back and forth. Some blame volcanic eruptions; others blame meteor strikes, but the simple truth is that the Earth is a very complex biosphere.  Our weather, our climate is influenced by everything from solar flares, the pull of the Moon, shifting tectonic plates, changes in the Earth’s tilt, and the fact that Earth’s surface is largely covered by oceans with their own scarcely understood patterns that affect the weather. 

Consequently, I find most climatology assertions from climate-change activists to be about as revelatory as looking at a rock outside my window:  if the rock is wet, it’s raining; if it’s dry, it’s not raining; if the rock throws a shadow it’s sunny; if there’s no shadow it’s cloudy.  

I guess that makes me an expert, too. 

Trust me I believe in science.  But it annoys the Hell out of me when people claim “science” proves their point when, in fact, it proves just the opposite. 

In reality you cannot prove a negative hypothesis.  In other words, you can’t prove that something will never happen. You can look at probabilities and say something is likely or unlikely based on the information you have right now, but that’s still speculation only as valid as your facts.    

And that’s the crux of the matter with climate-change Cassandras. They base their predictions on things no one fully understands, measured over a ridiculously short period of a few years.  Then they conveniently ignore all the other possible factors that don’t agree with their foregone conclusion that man is solely at fault.  

It’s important to know that humans have only been around for about 200,000 years or less. That’s not even a nanosecond in geologic time. It’s a real stretch to draw a straight line between the rise of humans and climate change, especially since there were numerous Ice Age events long before modern humans arrived and after, too.  Scientists have also determined that glaciation occurs naturally about every 40,000 to 100,000 years, with or without humans, for example.

Humans may contribute to global warming over a short time, but historically – according to scientists – global warming and cooling happens naturally, with or without us. 

That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to limit greenhouse gases and pollution, but whether the planet gets colder or warmer is largely out of our control. Especially since the United States is a relatively small part of the overall problem, even if you believe that this is all about greenhouse gases.  We could cut our CO₂  and other emissions to practically zero but the rest of the world – like China and India in particular – will continue to burn coal and pump out pollutants in far greater amounts than us. 

The climate-change activists don’t like to admit that, because they actually have other agendas. Much of the climate-change mania masks much deeper motives.   

As Rahm Emanuel so famously said: never let a crisis go to waste. Apparently this applies to invented crises as well as real ones.  

So what’s really behind the whole climate-change confederation?

First, there are the alternative-energy activists who hate fossil fuels of any kind. They’re frustrated because in the 70s they predicted we’d run out of oil and natural gas, and we haven’t; in fact we’ve found much more oil and natural gas. So then instead of prices of fossil fuels soaring because of their predicted scarcity, making alternative energy more attractive, prices have fallen because of abundance, while alternative energy costs remain higher.

They are the same ones trying to block the Keystone Pipeline because it might bring down oil prices even more and continue our dependence on what they see as the enemy of renewable energy.  But they can’t say that out loud.  So they blame fossil fuel use for a large part of global warming because combustion releases carbon dioxide. (So does burning wood to keep warm in their Earth-friendly cabin off the grid, but no matter.)

The reality is they want solar and renewable energy forms to prevail for philosophical, not scientific, or economic reasons. They despise oil companies. They hate utility companies. They dislike manufacturing businesses of any kind.  Their mantra is that all of these cause pollution by burning or using byproducts of oil and coal, which leads to a greenhouse effect, which leads to global warming. 

Now that there’s an abundance of cheap, clean-burning natural gas, and major manufacturers and utilities are switching from oil and coal to natural gas, they are beside themselves.  So they’ve decided to blame mankind in general, but Americans in particular.

Next there are the one-world, redistribution-of-wealth types. They want us to give our money to less developed countries to help them use more environmentally friendly (read: solar) forms of energy.  In short, they want more developed nations to pay less-developed countries because, well, we have too much money and they don’t have enough. 

Of course, what they overlook is that developed nations have been trying to help less developed nations for decades with abysmal results.  Most often our aid goes into the pockets of whatever head-man or dictator and never gets used for its intended purpose.

Unless you consider building palaces in the middle of the jungle, or buying limousines and private jets for the tyrant du jour boosting economic development.

Finally, there are the craven opportunists like Al Gore.  Al made an even bigger name for himself by making a documentary that would have made Thomas Malthus blush with its prediction of imminent global disaster. With edited footage and a reckless disregard for the facts Al made it appear that all life on Earth would essentially cease to exist because of manmade pollution.

Now, what Al failed to disclose in his award-winning film was that he was heavily involved in profiting off what’s known as cap and trade – where companies would buy the right to pollute from companies that reduced their pollution. So he, too, had a hidden agenda. 

Al’s no stranger to hypocrisy.  He continues to speak out on the perils of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels at speaking engagements he gets to in his private jet.

To sum up: the climate is changing, and always will.  But exactly why, and what to do about it – if anything – is too wrapped up in pseudo-science and hidden agendas to be taken seriously. It’s reminiscent of the religious fervor that greeted the year 1000, when zealots believed the world would end, or, perhaps, Christ would return to launch a new age. Either or.   

Or, as happened, neither.

In terms of predictions about climate change, I’ll keep looking at the rock outside my window.

It’s never let me down.