The Patriot Post® · Cutting Through the Climate Fog
Of course, hot days in July and August are nothing new. Those of a certain age might recall growing up without air conditioning. True, our fond memories aren’t always accurate (we also remember walking miles to school, uphill both ways), yet somehow we lived through it and we loved summer anyway.
But today it seems that everything is controversial, and weather is no exception. And for context, I must also point out that the summer of 2023 is shaping up to be exceptionally hot, breaking records in many places. It is one more reminder (as if we needed reminding) that steadily warmer summers are a manifestation of climate change, a very real and serious matter.
We might be inclined to take that serious matter more seriously if media coverage were more balanced. Several off-balance examples caught my attention in the past couple of weeks:
A sub-headline on a Washington Post news article noting that this summer’s extreme heat has environmental policymakers very worried.
Political commentary to the effect that despite the record-shattering heat, Republicans still do not believe that climate change is real.
Widely covered pronouncement from the scientific community that three days last week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) were the earth’s hottest days in 120,000 years. (Yes, 120,000 years!)
My immediate thoughts about worried policymakers: Mother Nature couldn’t care less about them or their policies. There is an enormous chasm between climate change policy (ours or the world’s) and the weather that shows up on our doorsteps — and in some cases, they’re not connected at all.
Despite the trillions of dollars spent or pledged to battle climate change, we’ve not even nudged the needle. That should be no surprise to anyone. Those massively complex computer analyses that have convinced us that man-caused emissions of greenhouse gases pose an existential threat to the planet also tell us that our very ambitious (and thus far unachievable) emission-reduction targets will produce, at best, a barely detectible decrease in global warming.
One example: Our government-mandated transition of the entire automobile industry and supporting infrastructure to electric vehicles may in fact lead to sweeping changes in Americans’ car choices, driving habits, and personal finances, but it’s unlikely to produce even slight changes in the occurrence of forest fires, the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, or summer temperatures anywhere. Our own analyses tell us so.
Regarding belief in climate change, just about everyone with a pulse (GOP included) acknowledges its reality. What some of us deny — with very good reason — is the efficacy of the climate change agenda advocated by the Left. It’s unaffordable, drives cost of electricity up and availability down, and achieves little or nothing in return.
And the recent scientific assertion that this summer’s high temperatures were the highest in 120,000 years is, in my view, an embarrassing — and very telling — indicator of the mind-numbing hubris of those upon whom we rely for guidance in environmental matters.
The point here is not to throw cold water on the climatological studies conducted by scientists around the world. Theirs is a necessary and challenging endeavor. But it’s hard to buy into precise assertions about daily temperatures more than a thousand centuries ago when produced by the same analytical methods that consistently fail to predict what will happen next year. Worse, my own skepticism hit the flashing red light zone when one of the leading proponents of the recent analysis asserted, “We know exactly what the problem is, we know exactly how to fix it, and we have all the solutions we need.”
No. Wrong on all counts. That kind of unwarranted confidence in computer analyses can get us in big trouble.
Here’s what we do know. We know that over its lifetime, our planet has gone through both extreme cooling and extreme warming cycles, at times becoming barely habitable; we know that man-made emissions, and particularly the combustion of fossil fuels, since the Industrial Revolution (only two centuries ago) has contributed to global warming; and we know as well that factors unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions, such as changes to earth’s orbit around the sun, have also caused global warming.
We know that there are now nearly eight billion inhabitants on this planet (that’s about 100,000 for each human who lived on the planet 120,000 years ago) consuming food, sharing our natural resources, and relying on electrical and other energy sources. We know that we must wean ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels — but at the same time we must find the energy and resources needed to support all eight billion people.
And we know that our long-term survival will hinge on our ingenuity, resilience, and capacity to adapt to whatever curveballs Mother Nature throws at us.