If you pay close attention to things going on in the world in a very general way without getting involved, you begin to notice patterns that reflect something else going on under the surface of it all, a script that features a consistent narrative which moves to some far off climax that never comes. This weekend the big push was on to remind us all that Climate Change was a thing and anyone who wasn’t fully onboard was dangerous. Not being fully onboard and somehow unaware of the danger I posed, I decided to put aside my already well founded disbelief and look at their P.R. one more time, for old time’s sake.
Still waiting.
According to Jonathon Amos, Science Reporter for the BBC in San Francisco, when this article was written, “Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.”
However, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (what? I know, right, the NSIDC, those guys are good!) “Arctic sea ice extent for April 2019 averaged 13.45 million square kilometers.”
Did you catch that? That’s a 9.32 million sq kilometer increase in less than 12 years.
And all the ice was supposed to be gone six years ago. But if we point out that they’ve been wrong- or worse, using false data to support their “dramatic forecasts”, we’re the bad guys? This morning on NPR they spent a good twenty minutes trying to walk their audience through the process of identifying a “climate change denier” and how to correct their beliefs. It was chilling, pun fully intended. Then, browsing through the news aggregators today this interesting article pops up in half a dozen feeds-
“Using moral clarity to counter defeatism around the climate crisis.” That’s an interesting approach to scientific facts; moral clarity. Where does that come into the picture and whose morals, if you don’t mind us asking?
1) Isn’t it alarmist to talk about the potential extinction of the human species?
It’s true that we don’t precisely know how this will all play out, but the evidence is overwhelming that the climate is already dangerously unstable, and extreme weather will be increasingly deadly to us and other species. “Our house is on fire,” as Thunberg put it, “I don’t want your hope. … I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day.”
Wow. Just wow.
To be fair there is probably an underlying problem here that goes beyond alarmist rhetoric, that’s par for the Climate Change course.
Fake data. Hysterical predictions. Angry foreign children.
What’s not to believe? I think the extremely late Spring, the really long cold winters and record setting snowfalls, the rapidly expanding ice fields must have sent them all into a tizzy and this week marks their Spring offensive, like McClellan perpetually camped on the banks of the Rappahanock waiting for the precise conditions that never seem to happen. And so they make them up.
GIGO, baby, GIGO.
A week ago I was standing in the lobby of the local Post Office chewing the fat with a couple of other older guys when one of them made some disparaging comment about “global warming” and what he was going to do the next time some snowflake (we all laughed) spouted off. As if on cue a stretchy pants and ballet shoes wearing guy with a lumberjack beard and man purse shot back with one of those lilting up-talk ripostes that the reason it was so cold- it had snowed the previous night, mid-May- was because of global warming and then flounced out the door in a huff with his Land’s End catalogue clenched in his thin, white fingers. There was a pause for a moment and then a simultaneous eruption of laughter from everyone in the lobby. It felt cathartic, liberating. No one believes the lies anymore unless they’re dressed like a mime.
I don’t know if the climate is cooling or warming and I don’t believe anyone really does. The ones who preach it the most have skin in the game; politicians, NGO’s, think tanks and celebrities. None of them actually change their own behavior, though. They all still fly around on jets from one Climate Change summit to the next, drive around in armor plated cars, use electricity, eat foods flown in from halfway around the globe in every season, expecting someone to take care of their trash every week without ever really contemplating just how much of it they produce.
They have plenty of great ideas on how to fix the climate beginning with our complete and total subjugation to their initiatives and demands. We are not only obligated to pay for it- whatever it is supposed to be- but embrace it enthusiastically, triumphantly and eagerly all the while living in a panicked fear of a two degree change sometime next century. Who wouldn’t get on board that train?
I do know that whenever they write an article about something I know well, like maple syrup,
they lie, lie, lie in an effort to point the fickle finger of fate at anyone who doesn’t know any better, claiming that the changing climate is going to kill off maple production anywhere south of the arctic circle despite year after year after year of increased production wherever maple syrup is made. Not one man I know who produces syrup around here has seen any kind of change in the past century, but none of them listen to All Things Considered. And that’s only one small peep back through the panopticon, there are plenty of others that different specialists in different fields notice based on their experience. If something is true, you shouldn’t have to tell lies to promote it. Climate Change is the proverbial hammer and the population are the nails. But lately the nails are telling the hammer to pound sand.
What I will state is that it is impossible for large number of people to heed the advice of people who live like poobahs, ignoring every dictate they wish to impose. Some may be genuine- though it is doubtful based on the fraud and intimidation used to promote their agenda- but most are not. You cannot bring real change with fake data and you cannot lead without being an example.
The climate is changing, it always has and it always will, but it isn’t supposed to be a cash machine for wealthy elites jet setting around the globe to their confabs while the dirt people eat petri dish chick-ain’t.
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