Someone Owes Me a Calamity or an Explanation

Has anyone heard that, maybe there's no such thing as man-made climate change?

And I'm not talking about "Global Warming". That old name was abandoned a while ago in favor of something much more inclusive. Something that allows us to be blamed for not only the heat but for the cold as well. Now we are at fault if it rains too much, and if it doesn't rain enough.

Except that maybe we're not.

This issue is something I've been thinking about for a long time, but what finally prompted me to interrupt our riveting blog posting with a public service announcement, was the news a while ago of "Climategate".

For anyone who may not have heard - and if you haven't, that in itself may be cause for alarm - this all originated when some unidentified whistle-blower inside the Climate Research Unit in Norwich, England released over a thousand personal emails and pages of computer source code to the Internet. These emails, who's authenticity has not been contested, are correspondence between a number of prominent climate change scientists discussing amongst themselves, and their American counterparts, how to hide findings that didn’t support their claim that the earth is warming. They shared how to perform statistical tricks to manipulate the data, and plotted to discredit other scientists and journals that opposed their views.

And since then, Phil Jones, the director of the unit has admitted in an interview that there has been no statistical increase in the Earth’s temperature in the past 15 years.

What?

These are the same guys who gave us the famous “hockey stick graph” that shows an exponential, runaway train of planet-killing heating. And now they are saying that there has been no statistical increase in the past 15 years?

That's not the only thing that has come unraveled. The UN's Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (one of the largest bodies of international scientists ever assembled) reported that the glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear within 25 years. It turns out that what they meant to say was that the glaciers would be gone in just 340 short years. They claim that in writing the report they mixed up the year “2035” for the correct date of “2350”. Unfortunately, not one of the authors thought, “uh, that doesn’t sound right”. I'm not a scientist but that seems like kind of a big difference, doesn't it? It's baisically mistaking: "this is a disaster that my great grandchildren's great grandchildren will reap", with, "this will happen to me before I pay off my mortgage". How do you mix those up?

I'm sorry, but that excuse ranks up there with Jackson and Timberlake trying to tell me that it was a "wardrobe malfunction". Giving such a ridiculous excuse is almost more offensive than the act they're trying to excuse, because it communicates so eloquently: "we think you are literally stupid enough to believe this."

Perhaps there should have been cause for alarm when Al Gore won the Nobel Prize, instead of a nun who's only accomplishment was saving the lives of thousands of innocent children from Nazi-occupied Poland.

Now of course there are still thousands of scientists who haven't been tarnished by this scandal who believe that made-made climate change is still very real. But it needs to be remembered that there are also thousands of scientists who believe the opposite. With something as complex as the entire planet's weather, I would actually expect that there wasn't an easy answer. But supporters of the climate change THEORY have actually said things like, "the science is settled" and "the debate is closed". That should probably be cause for alarm because saying that any issue is closed for debate or study, is a perfect example of the antithesis of science and scientific method.

Climategate is being called the greatest hoax in our history and the fact that it isn't getting much attention in North American media should probably be cause for alarm.

I need to pause this rant and explain that I am not supporting or condoning any of the horrible things that we as people are doing to the environment every day. In our family we do whatever we can; we compost, we recycle, our neighbors sometimes try to put their garbage in front of our house because as a family of six we still produce less than one bag of trash each week. We used a compact car even when we were a family of five although the commercials told us we needed an SUV.

Like everyone else, I'm concerned about the environment, particularly the tons and tons of plastic that has been accumulating since the 1960's and is even finding its way to our coral reefs. The other day I found some girly exfoliating body scrub product in our shower. All of those little scratchy bumps that make you feel like you are getting cleaner? They're actually tiny pieces of plastic - and this in a product who's only function is to get washed down the drain! Where the freak was David Suzuki when I was having my shower? This stuff is not a natural substance, it is not beneficial to any lifeforms, and it doesn't break down into anything other than smaller pieces of plastic - meaning that almost every single pound of plastic produced in the past 50 years is still somewhere in the environment. (this would be a good place to talk about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other Oceanic Gyres but this post is going to be plenty preachy as is)

If anything, this whole gong show (first time I've used that term in our blog, I think) has only harmed the environment. Labeling CO2, a trace gas necessary for all life on Earth, as a pollutant has distracted the focus from "real-life"-pollution. Sometimes the best intentions can be so misguided, they are actually destructive. Like hybrid vehicles with little green leaves on the bumpers but 100lb batteries in the trunks, and life-of-vehicle energy costs that are actually higher than their non-hybrid equivalents. Or the recent proposal in the EU to reclassify oil palm plantations as "forests". This means that biofuel production (with all its feel-good marketing) could legally and 'legitimately' replace "real-life"-forests (watch for the little green leaf at the pump).

The thing that really gets me though is how government, who has been courageously struggling to get by on just half of everything I make, is considering becoming even more involved in my life and is working at inventing further ways to tax me. Corporations aren't actually taxed, they just collect them - the cost of their taxes is passed on to the consumer in the price of their goods and services. Some estimates place the cost of these "embeded taxes" as high as 1/3 of the price of everything we buy. (OK, that was a major tangent)

What I meant to say about government is this: the "pollutant" that they've appointed themselves to regulate, happens to be what my children exhale each time they take a breath.


And that... has me alarmed.


- C