Climate Change - It's not about the Lightbulbs!

After trying to research this issue in order to explain it to others, I've found myself taking what looks to most like an extremely unpopular position: I'm not sure that the climate is particularly changing, I'm not sure that changes are being caused by humans, and if they are, I'm not sure that they would have the devastating consequences to the planet that are being predicted. This attitude makes me a great anomaly among the environmentally-conscious.

Don't get me wrong - I'm by no means justifying the modern industrially-civilized lifestyle; there's got to be something inherently evil and extremely unsustainable about pumping hundreds of millions of years' worth of mineralized carbon out of the ground, through a bunch of industries and cars, and then up into the sky. However,  the climate of this planet is an unbelievably complex - and large - thing, and I can't seem to imagine it as a delicate, fragile egg being crushed under the relentless wheels of industrial development, and definitely not something being offhandedly wasted by our individual personal lifestyles. Hear me out.

The information that we as a society have been getting about the climate crisis is heavily filtered through mainstream media. This means that there has necessarily been political spin put on it. The mainstream media cannot help but do this, because the mainstream media are owned by corporations, who pretty much own all politicians and all public opinion. It's a systemic bias, not a personal conspiracy by some specific evil group out to control the world. There might be evil people involved - that's entirely up to your own subjective opinion to decide - but the system itself is what determines the collective opinion about what is happening to the climate and Homo colossus' role in the situation.

First I'd like to point out that all the usual mythology and fear-mongering of our society is just as present in climate change discussions as anywhere else. This is not the single example in all of history in which humanity collectively wakes up, smells the forest fire, and decides en masse to behave altruistically for the good of future generations and the rest of the Community of Life. As with all other issues brought to our attention through the communications of our culture, the climate change discussion is tainted with a huge amount of scare tactics, exaggeration, linear projection, and, of course, the offers to help you help the situation by asking for your money. In other words, the issue has been usurped by marketing, just like everything else in our society.

This aspect of the climate crisis is the reason why I have to be careful what I say here. Not only will I have Al Gore and the likes on my case, I will apparently have thousands of scientists, the vast majority of environmentalists, and even the Catholic Church breathing disapproval all over me. I've got enough kidney problems, thank you.

Everyone who is screaming "We must do something now!" is also screaming "Give money to my organization! Buy my Energy-Star appliances! Back my political party!" Think about that for a minute. Remember Al Gore's film, in which there is one scene after another of him traveling in first-class comfort all over the planet, staring contemplatively out the window of his private jet or chauffeured limousine, trying to think of a way to get all of humanity to stop being such a bunch of wasteful jerks.

The bigger tip-off to the real agenda underlying what looks to me like propaganda is this: there is no useful advice given about how to stop climate change. First the information scares us half to death, and then at the very, very tail end of the communication, we are told to:

• change our light bulbs
• buy a hybrid car
• spend more money on tuning up the car we've already got, if it's a newer, compact car
• support organizations that educate women in poorer countries
• give money to organizations that save the rainforest, and
• write to politicians

That last one clinches it for me: as though politicians actually read the stuff their electorate sends them! Hahahahahaaaaa

Frankly, if doing more of what we have already done for hundreds of years (buying the other product instead of this product) has suddenly become the solution to global problems, then I have really been snowed. Until this miracle is demonstrated to me, though, I'll stick with common sense. My sense tells me that I am absolutely not getting the whole truth, or necessarily a significant part of the truth, about human-caused climate change.

I think it's a great distraction from what really needs to be done to solve global problems.

The Fallacy of Climate Projection
It was only a few decades ago that Edward Lorenz at MIT made the astonishing discovery that the climate (and, as it turns out, every other natural system) is extremely complicated. Lorenz discovered that a very tiny change in a complex system could, over time, accumulate through feedback loops to become a very significant change, indeed. He could hardly believe it, and his peers couldn't believe it at all. They called it "the butterfly effect," saying that his findings suggested that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the planet could create a hurricane on the other side of the planet. This observation, to them, was obviously nonsense.

You see, to scientists of the sixties - and indeed all modern scientists have been taught this and tend to believe it by default - a small change at one end of a system should result in a small difference at the other end of the system. Newton's laws show us that the world is reducible into very simple terms of action-reaction, force, momentum, etc. This idea of feedback loops turning a small change into an ever-spiraling larger change that might eventually crash the whole system ...well, that's just chaotic. The "new physics" was left to the loonies and the mathematicians, while the rest of the scientists got real jobs creating new drugs, foods, and fertilizers, new kinds of cars, and more boring curricula for school children.

For the most part, scientists are still not seeing the climate system as the massive complex that it is - they're too busy trying to freak everyone out enough to get us to listen to (and fund) them. We're seeing thirty years of snowballing panic, in which two underlying assumptions remain completely unchecked: 1) human wickedness is the cause of climate change, and 2) now that it's started we are absolutely screwed.

Much of the climate scare is the cumulative result of a small change that was introduced into our cultural system back in the 70's: the idea that carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels was increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which must have some kind of effect on something. The "greenhouse effect" was deduced. It was later determined to be an incorrect analogy, but the idea had taken hold. This small conceptual change (the idea of carbon dioxide causing the greenhouse effect) introduced into the system of our culture has, over about 35 years, accumulated to become a global climate catastrophe that will destroy the entire planet by the following means:

• our wicked ways may have set up a runaway greenhouse effect, like on Venus, in which more climate warmth will destroy all the ice on the poles and free up all the frozen methane in the tundra and at the bottom of the ocean, which will mean there is nothing left to cool the planet down and there will be even more carbon in the atmosphere, which will lead to even more climate warmth
• simultaneously, by melting a large amount of ice into the ocean, we may have stopped the Gulf Stream ocean current that keeps Europe and the eastern half of North America from being perpetually frozen over. So in addition to the runaway greenhouse effect, or instead of it, we're going to plunge both sides of the North Atlantic into an ice age
• because all the ice on the planet will be melted (from the greenhouse effect), the oceans will rise several metres, putting much of the continental mass of the planet under water, including most of the biggest cities in the world.
• the oceans, which are absorbing much of the carbon from the sky, will become acidified (carbonic acid), which will kill almost all life in the oceans, which will kill much of the life on the land.
• Because the planet will be so much hotter, there will be terrible droughts and areas that are currently fertile for growing human food will become deserts.

I ask you this: how in the world will changing our lightbulbs and driving hybrid cars prevent the small-but-accumulating change in atmospheric carbon levels from feeding back, over time, into these massive (and contradictory) catastrophes? Clearly the situation calls for much, much more effort than that. (Especially since these efforts could actually have the opposite effect on the problem)

The Climate Panic is a Distraction from the Real Problem
Come on, everyone, we all bloody well know that the environmental crisis is being brought on by the relentless corporate-industrial machine that sucks in and devours all the "resources" of the planet. We know that it's the big machine, and not our own tiny little choices to use plastic instead of cloth bags, keep the car running at the drive-thru window instead of shutting it off for two minutes, or check the proper little box on the voting card.

Underneath, we also all know that it's unreasonable for any of us to voluntarily drop our ecological footprint by 70%, let alone expect everyone in North America and Europe and Asia to do so just because of a guilt or scare campaign from political forces that we delude ourselves are acting in our best interest. Yet this is what is called for to prevent these horrendous outcomes. The screaming gets louder, the plea for change gets more plaintive, but all we can do is change our damn light bulbs and aspire to a nice new hybrid car. Better get an even higher-paying job, everyone.

So, since all of us changing our lifestyles overnight is a pipe dream, and since we somehow got that Harper government again (Dion or Layton would have fixed the climate problem, dammit!), we are doomed to the climate crisis being unresolvable. We might as well give up entirely. Since the climate crisis is the only real environmental issue now (you don't hear much about wetland destruction anymore, do you?), then there is nothing left to be done. It's time to give up, raise our kids as best we can (to get good jobs, so they can buy hybrid cars), and just wait for the end.

In addition to encouraging us to drop the ball on the basic causes of global problems, what an excellent distraction this has become from the literally millions of alternatives that brilliant human minds have come up with. What is the point in growing your own garden or planning for a financially-independent future when it's all going down the toilet in the next decade or so? What is the point of boycotting industrial polluters, buying local, or looking after your family's health, if the game is pretty much lost?

Why are you even reading this? Go entertain yourself with a happy television show.

Climate Science
I'm a scientist. Do you believe everything I say? Would you believe someone else who began their argument with "Laura says..."? When you are reading anything that justifies itself with the statement "scientists say..." imagine that the scientist is me. Then take everything after that with a grain of salt, especially because it's all so very scary. We need to remain clear-headed enough to live useful, meaningful lives.

Here's what the media claim scientists say:

• the level of carbon in the lowest part of the atmosphere has increased from around 310 ppm (parts per million) in the 60's when scientists started measuring it, to around 385 ppm nowadays.
• increased carbon levels in the atmosphere, all caused by industrial output, vehicle exhaust, and destruction of carbon-absorbing forest cover, is believed to be trapping solar heat in the atmosphere instead of letting it radiate back out to space at night.
• this higher carbon level in the atmosphere is higher than  calculated levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the past two hundred thousand years.
• the carbon level in the atmosphere is expected to keep going up and up because our population is going to grow by another 50%, and global consumption of oil and other fossil fuels is going to go up on a per-capita basis.
• as the atmospheric carbon level increases, the temperature will continue to increase, and because of a positive feedback loop that is now irreversible (scientists say), the temperature will continue to increase even after the population stops growing and we all start using renewable energy. Therefore, there will be massive upheavals in all ecosystems and all species will suffer, and humanity may become extinct.
• the whole thing is a really big threat to the economy.

Then there are bits of information that we rarely hear about. These are the complicating factors that make it very hard for me to piece together the story about what will happen with the facts that are generally presented:

• in geological history, atmospheric carbon levels have been two or three times and possibly orders of magnitude higher than they are now. This was the time of the dinosaurs, when the planet was extremely lush - not desert-like, and not all underwater.
• the climate scare does not discuss a single negative feedback loop, and focuses only on a single positive feedback loop (the carbon level is rising, which will warm the planet, which will release more carbon). We are trying to see this as a linear system instead of a complex system!
• In fact there are dozens of negative feedback loops such as increasing atmospheric carbon leading to increased forest growth; decreasing oil supplies leading to decreased carbon emissions; changing weather contributing to a leveling off of the food supply, leading to population stabilization; increased atmospheric energy leading to greater evaporation of ocean water at the equator leading to greater deposition of snow at the poles; increasing temperatures creating more evaporation, leading to more clouds, leading to less atmospheric warming; and many more.
• ocean levels have been rising for centuries without submerging islands and coastal areas.
• apparently, since the 1970's the Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctic ice sheets have ceased to retreat, and have started to grow. Which scientists do we trust on this one?
• the intensity of hurricanes across the Atlantic - as well as all other storms - has apparently been decreasing for several decades. Again, whose data do we accept?
• global climate activities and the atmospheric carbon levels seem to correlate perfectly with solar storm activity. This makes sense, since in actuality all heat (all energy in fact) on the Earth is solar. It has been proposed by scientists that atmospheric carbon levels rise following increased solar activity. Our solar system has apparently been heading into a large interstellar storm for several decades.
• average global temperatures do not correlate well with atmospheric carbon levels (despite Mr. Gore's pretty presentation).
• the temperature has been considerably warmer than it is now, even during the present geological epoch. Apparently, we're just now coming out of a cool period.

There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of scientific articles that support the idea that climate change is not necessarily catastrophic, and that it's not all caused by human activity. However, the point I'm hoping to make here is only this:

I hope that I have demonstrated that point.

Changes to the climate interact with and amplify or mitigate the real basis of the global environmental crisis. That basis is the relentless growth and destructiveness of industrial civilization, piloted by a soulless corporate profit machine. We are all brainwashed into believing that we, as individuals, are doing this through our cumulative lousy behaviours. We all believe that we must support this machine, because it supports us.

Worst of all, we mostly pretend this machine doesn't even exist.

By funneling the growing fear about environmental devastation first entirely into the climate change question (away from habitat destruction, overconsumption, invasive and genetically modified species, and pollution), we have been given a bone to chew on. Every time we get the slightest bit concerned about any of the converging crises, the system says "Yes, but really we must worry about the climate, it's the most important. Come and chew this bone some more." Because of our brainwashing, we do.

In public perception, climate has become the only issue anymore, and we've been given simple "solutions" for the problem of climate change. Those solutions include habitat destruction, overconsumption, genetic modification, and pollution - but in slightly different ways than "we" were doing them before.

All in all, we've been suckered again. The corporate profit machine wins, by selling outrageously-expensive fluorescent lightbulbs and hybrid cars. Everyone else in the entire Community of Life loses.

Please take what you hear with a grain of salt, look for the underlying motivation behind what you are being told, and focus your attention on doing the things that you were born to do, instead of being swayed by a media campaign to get to you to do what economic forces want you to do.