Headlines hyping Snowzilla, Blizzard for the Ages, Snowcalypse, and such, make for good press and can be quite descriptive, but hyperbole seemed less necessary when I was a youth in the 1960s. And winter weather, even big snowstorms, seemed like just another opportunity to enjoy the outdoors. (Like so many in the DC and NYC area did last month!) It never occurred to us kids to politicize such events. But today, many in the younger generation (that is, significantly younger than me) seem to know how to make political hay out of flakes of snow.
The D.C. area endured a big weather event in January — more than two feet of snow in places and high winds… blizzard conditions! Weather so severe it reminded me of the kind of storm events much more common decades ago in the Northeast. Oh well, it is the middle of winter after all. Sometimes the white stuff falls, and falls hard.
For the champions of climate catastrophe, selective “unique” events like this recent blizzard translate into “extreme weather” surely brought on by manmade climate change.
Championing the claim of meteorological mayhem from people pollution is convenient for two reasons. First, it’s so hard to prove or disprove the long-term cause of any particular stormy episode; and second, every weather event is “unique,” so the mundane becomes the spectacular simply by designation. And, naming a storm (like Jonas) doesn’t make its genesis, development, and trajectory any more familiar.
In reality, the climate has not changed much over the years — at least not much for the promoters of global climate doom. Yet the disaster-monger tactics have changed somewhat, their hysteria has increased a bit, and much more money and politicking have been devoted to their dubious cause. The August 3, 2015 release of the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and the United Nation’s late 2015 Paris climate confab are two of the most recent cases in point. But regardless of high-level machinations, the climate keeps operating as usual, changing in its substantially natural way.
No matter, trusting in the claims of climate catastrophists continues big time! After all, in essence what are far-ranging outlooks of global climate conditions — especially those fine-tuned for local areas? They are at best educated guesses by purportedly really smart people, and as such require trust by lesser entities, including other really smart people who don’t have advanced degrees in climatology.
So, it comes down to trust, and the fact that people will believe what they want to believe, or are compelled to believe.
Yet, what if there are some really intelligent, independent, scientifically-minded folks out there with some impressive credentials, a lot of real world experience, and a dash of objective common sense who question the ability of those other purportedly really smart people to be so utterly certain of their own prophetic powers? Would the input from the really intelligent, independent, scientifically-minded folks have any value in a free society, especially a society required to pay the bill for an enormously expensive gamble that the purportedly really smart people actually know what they’re talking about?
And, we certainly are paying the bill. The federal government alone has poured billions of our tax dollars into research directed at substantiating preformed conclusions that humans are responsible for disastrous climate change and that increased carbon dioxide (“carbon pollution”) produces only bad effects. Mounds of money are used to prop-up wind mills and solar collectors in the hope of averting an airy adversary in the form of increased severe weather events. In addition, a boatload of our cash floats efforts to “educate” of the public and students from grade school through graduate school on the culpability of people for climate catastrophe.
Like the giant financial institutions, the “climate-industrial complex” — as former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency senior analyst Alan Carlin and others have dubbed it — has now supposedly become “too big to fail.”
But, are we investing wisely? Are there bigger issues out there in the real world that demand our serious financial attention and compassionate focus — issues that pose a bigger threat to humans and the ecosystem than some potential uptick in temperature levels or increase in snowfall depths? Two big threats topping the list are terrorism and abject poverty, both quite destructive to people and the planet, both within the means of our nation to greatly alleviate.
I am just one professional of the likely thousands that work in the atmospheric-science and related fields every day that see tremendous distortion by the news media, environmentalists, politicians, and even governmental bodies like the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of what is and is not known about the earth’s climate. So, I and many of my colleagues continue to challenge the final-form science of contemporary climatology foisted on an unsuspecting public. We advance arguments and insights not as partisan broadsides, but as continued pleas for more open-mindedness and tolerance in a discipline that absolutely necessitates such conditions for its optimal performance.
Be careful not to be blown away by severe winter weather or snowed under by an arrogant atmosphere of climate catastrophe. The bottom line is this: rather than spinning public perception by calling dramatic weather events products of humans living comfortably, as climate catastrophe champions do, authentic science requires that making unsubstantiated pronouncements is antithetical to professional practice. No amount of wintertime blizzard, political-year bluster, or endless consensus conceit will change that.
Anthony J. Sadar is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and author of In Global Warming We Trust: Too Big to Fail (Stairway Press, 2016).
