So I’m half watching the Oscars and Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. And then we were all browbeat over how we need to do all sorts of things to help the environment. I do find it ironic (Ironicals of Narnia?) that we’re being browbeaten by celebrities who make a lot more money and who will take private jets around the world about the environment and our “climate crisis.” And there’s the ceremony, the big limousines, the diamonds (De Beers must be happy)… I could go on, but it just makes me angry.
Listen folks – Mother Nature is a rude motherfucker. But I do have a few thoughts:
1) We don’t have enough evidence of a determination of climate change, regardless of global warming or global cooling. Al Gore says one thing, the UN says another, climatologists say another thing.
2) Is this climate change normal? There’s natural variations in temperature, along with cooling and warming circles. The sun doesn’t put out a static amount of energy. So how can we accurately know this is normal variation or it’s way out of whack?
3) Are humans causing it? Hell if I know. We need a nice scientific breakdown of what we’re producing by species, producing naturally and figure out the sources and what percentage.
4) If it turns out that we are causing global warming/cooling, then we need to be prepared to reexamine our thinking and beliefs towards everything to combat the issue. And it’s ok to think about this in a cost/benefits model.
5) If the “solution” costs trillions of dollars and millions of jobs, we need to make sure that we’re doing the right thing first instead of throwing money at a problem that may or may not exist.
Let’s take something like DDT. You’re not going to be able to find any evidence about it causing cancer or vampirism or something along those lines because there is none. But it’s banned because… hell, a really stupid reason (I blame Rachel Carlson). So people are dying of malaria to the tune about a million a year. Most of those can be saved, but we’re unable to do anything because of laws that were put into place based on emotional responses to false data.
I’m not advocating doing nothing. I’m advocating thinking about what we’re doing. It’s ok to have an emotional response to things. I don’t want to see people get hurt or species get harmed, but potentially serious problems require serious solutions that are based on evidence and rational thinking.
