We have been conditioned with the belief that human activities are increasing the incidence of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which is the prime cause behind global warming and climate change. We are also led to believe that science is predicting that the consequences of this will be catastrophic to the earth and threaten our very existence.
Most of what we read within the mainstream media today, and hear from politicians, has the above assumptions embedded within the various narratives. Government policy towards carbon emissions and renewable energies reflects these beliefs, as hard cast scientific and moral truths.
The public is continually told that the vast majority of the world’s “scientists” are in general agreement about man-made global warming being the cause of climate change, and the potential damage it will do to the earth. However, the reality is that there may actually not be more than a couple of hundred people in the world who really understand the science of climate change, and are experienced and qualified enough to make a valid scientific opinion.
The public are confused more when proponents from both sides of the debate put their views forward using statistics, information, and arguments that are convincing. Many of these stalwarts on both sides make a living through the speakers’ circuits, turning the global warming and climate change debate into an entertainment spectacle. What makes this even more sinister is the vested interests some of these parties represent.
Climate change models are built upon limited sets of assumptions which make them far too simplistic for the task of making accurate predictions about global warming. There is no generally agreed theory that explains global warming and climate change in existence today.
No model can predict changes in temperature and lay out climate change scenarios with any degree of accuracy. However the earth has warmed up much less than what most global warming models had predicted.
The opinion of Nobel Prize winner James Lovelock, the creator of the GAIA hypothesis, reflects the above. He was quoted as saying, “The problem is that we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books ‚Äì mine included ‚Äì because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.”
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring also predicted that all the birds would be killed through the use of DDT during the 1950s and 60s ‚Äì a prophecy that never happened.
Alarmism clouds scientific judgement and this is very much the case in the global warming and climate change debate.
Global warming and climate change cannot be considered a ‘settled science’, as it is portrayed today. The truths about the matter are still yet to be understood.
First it must be understood that global warming and climate change are not interchangeable terms. Global warming concerns the rise in average temperatures across the globe. Is this really occurring? And, how much is humanity actually responsible for this phenomenon?
These are very interesting scientific questions where there is a diverse range of scientific opinion today. We still require answers to tackle the second part of the equation, climate change.
We know that climate change is occurring on a continuous basis. We also know that climate change also changes habitats. How we tackle climate change depends upon answering questions about global warming.
However, climate change is not just an earthly phenomenon, it is an interplanetary one. Climate change may have more to do with solar energy, than with man-made CO2 emissions. This is only an observation, but if this observation has some validity, then the whole ‘science of climate change’ is about to enter a new paradigm of explanation in the next few years, just as quantum replaced Newtonian physics concepts just a century ago.
The evolution of science is not being factored into the global warming debate, and this is the biggest mistake being made at the moment by global warming proponents.
If humankind is not influencing global warming through greenhouse gas emissions, then the real issues at hand are completely different. The issue is not about abating global warming, but more about the changing habitats and environment humankind faces in the future.
The destruction of the forests, animal species going extinct, the creation and growth of unsustainable cities, water management and the pollution of the earth’s oceans, and the application of non-renewable energies, and not to forget poverty, migration, and population growth, are the real issues that must be engaged by humanity. Humankind must learn how to adapt to a continually changing environment. This means both natural and human induced changes. This is where the real crises exist.
Climate change will destroy some societies on one hand, but nurture others on the other hand.
We have to learn to understand how the earth is a cradle for humankind. And then importantly, how we must exist within this cradle, in a coexisting manner.
Charles Darwin’s message was not about survival of the fittest, but one of co-existence. Darwin’s hinted the solution in the concluding paragraph of his The Origin of Species where he said: “It is interesting, a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborate forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
Carbon emission controls and other political solutions will not solve any of our real problems.
Some Inconvenient Truths
We don’t really understand the science of climate change, and can’t even say for certain whether the world is going through a period of global warming due to the multitude of factors and influences involved.
Over the last decade or so, the influence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) on global temperatures is just coming to light. The PDO is a cycle of different sea circulation patterns that changes over a 30-year period. A number of scientists believe that this PDO phenomenon is vital to our understanding of global warming and climate change, although we are still in our early years of understanding how the phenomenon really works. According to Dr Roy Spencer, the PDO phenomenon can be used to explain Artic ice melting over the last 30 years. The PDO phenomenon can also explain why Antarctic ice is actually increasing.
Some scientists are even claiming the world is heading into another ice age right at this moment.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) only exists within the earth’s atmosphere in trace amounts, at around 380ppm. It is an important nutrient for flora, a building block for all life on earth. CO2 being an invisible gas will not hold onto and trap heat within the earth’s atmosphere. Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas, which primarily evaporates from the oceans and is responsible for both reflecting and trapping heat within the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is not a poisonous gas, and higher concentrations are actually beneficial to plant life on this planet.
The global warming issue is full of opinions, as we don’t know the facts today.
The Fallacy of Control
We also live with the fallacy that humankind has the power to fix any global warming problem. This is in the light of the success the world had in limiting chlorofluorocarbons in refrigerants and aerosols, in eliminating the hole in the ozone layer back in the 1980s. This belief that we as humans can control the environment is arrogance in the extreme.
The proponents of global warming would have the world belief that it controls its own destiny in terms of being able to control the environment. Is this living in true reality?
When we connect morality with truth, inquisitions, purges, and clampdowns on the unbelievers usually occur. This is where some global warming proponents can take us back to the ‘dark ages’ of science and understanding, to where the earth was once flat.
Perhaps the last words of this article should be left to the Canadian limnologist David Schindler, who said: “To a patient scientist, the unfolding greenhouse mystery is far more exciting than the plot of the best mystery novel. But it is slow reading, with new clues sometimes not appearing for several years. Impatience increases when one realizes that it is not the fate of some fictional character, but of our planet and species, which hangs in the balance as the great carbon mystery unfolds at a seemingly glacial pace.”
