The Art of Politics

Climate Of Fear

An ill wind blows... much of it hot air...

Each day brings new challenges, new opportunities, and any more, new proof of man's destruction of the fragile planet we reside on. Case in point - it now appears our air may be getting too clean for our own good. But what should be apparent is that the hysterical claims of environmentalist activists have muddied the waters and the debate to a point where everything is in a haze.

For a while, there was a tendency to construct evidence to argue for a linear trend - there was a direction, a symptom, and a fate awaiting us. Early on, scientists warmed us of the dramatic global cooling the earth was about to experience. Certain, they were, of this trend, verifiable, and surely with anthropic causes - we were driving too many unclean cars, using too much deodorant, being a general nuisance to Mother Nature. Claims were made of impending glacialization and a new Ice Age. Reaching a fever in the late 60's and the 70's, we were sure to be wearing parkas in the Panhandles soon. Except - they were wrong. Temperatures stopped falling, and started rising.

Which, of course, brought us to global warming. Now that temperatures were rising, discounting global cooling, they provided a new pony to ride, global warming. Oddly, the same factors responsible for our impending frostbound gloom were now the same factors responsible for global warming - cars, Secret anti-perspirant, secret anti-Earth pollutant clans.

Except the data still doesn't always match up. Record highs here, record lows, drought, abundant rainfall, spring-like winters, snow in April... and new concepts like global dimming threaten to overturn the entire agenda.

The solution? Simple. Now, you hear not claims of global cooling, or global warming, but merely climate change. The benefit to those promoting this concept is - any deviation is proof, all changes from expectation can be couched as proof under one overarching, overbroad term. Too warm today? Climate change. Too cold? Climate change. Snow melting? Climate change. Too much snow? Climate change. Hurricanes? Climate change. Drought? Climate change. Why move the goalposts yourself when with a fuzzy concept, Mother Nature does it for you?

Every day, somebody seems to experience a record high temperature - or a record low. This might seem remarkable. Except... there are 365 chances at a record every year, and as most places haven't been taking the temperature reliably for more than 100 years, you should EXPECT, just from the tiny sample size over the predictive range, to get at least a handful of records every year. And let's remember what this record is - the most extreme temperature humans have recorded during a one hundred year period, on a planet with a climate history of a billion years. Do you REALLY think yesterday was the hottest this spot on the planet has ever seen? Or just that YOU'VE seen?

Global climate change as a legitimate serious subject strikes me as much a mythological pursuit as any moonbarking done by the earliest homo sapiens - an attempt to comprehend in limited, anthropic-bound terms an almost unlimited, infinitely complex system. While we grapple with how much heat load is carried by my Speed Stick, the enormous rock we inhabit is tilting, moving, changing it's orbit ever so slightly, influencing the amount of solar energy the planet receives from that giant, glowing ball in the sky, the one thing that really influences just how warm it is in Fairview.

I'm not sure why we are so fascinated by our own observations - as if changes in the earth's climate are both unique to us and our time, and furthermore only due to our presence.

Let's also be clear that human activity certainly influenes our immediate environmental surroundings - simple logic dictates accepting this fact. The city of Phoenix is a heat island that remains over 100 degrees well into the night - midnight. Looking across Los Angeles is like staring into a bowl of pudding. Lakes dry up from river diversion or overuse. Yet on a global scale, these are the tiniest of occurances. When discussing something as large as changing the temperature of the entire planet, we rarely entertain the notion that we aren't driving it, instead just along for the ride.

Look at the long view - say, here. Most people looking at that graph can see the trend. Is it just possible that we are not the masters of our demesne, rather that the demesne retains mastery over us?

Being a proponent of a clean environment is it's own merit - cleanliness does not need the threat of hazardous waste to be a virtue. More efficient automobiles, with cleaner engines, make sense without the threat of Hell on Earth. Efficiency always makes more sense than inefficiency. Being a steward of the environment doesn't require scaring the Hell out of everyone.

Posted by MEC2 at April 9, 2006 11:27 AM | TrackBack