For all the complexities of climate change, there are some core areas and key contentions that must be the starting and ending point of the argument. And thus we’re very pleased (and slightly jealous) to see that the Heartland Institute has created a “Climate at a Glance“ website that offers quick summaries of key issues and arguments from carbon taxes to coral reefs to consensus to droughts to tipping points and on. Check it out.
The handy sheets, readily downloadable as PDFs, offer bullet-point summaries, facts, charts and, crucially, links to relevant documents for further research. And yes, pointing out that, for instance, there has been no increase in hurricanes and the IPCC doesn’t claim there has, that the U.S. recently had its longest recorded stretch without a major hurricane and so did Florida, doesn’t exhaust the discussion. But it is the beginning of a useful conversation since, as the comments on our own website show all too well, alarmists very often take an “extreme weather has increased, case closed” approach to the complexities of climate. The first step in exploring the complexity is to get them off their simple but wrong talking points.
Once you do, there’s an exciting and sometimes disquieting world to explore out there. Including the very real possibility that climate is too complex to model and hence to predict and that even if it does something drastic like, oh, start another glaciation, we won’t really know why it did it let alone how to stop it. But there’s also something fairly simple at the end.
Virtually all the alarmists’ talking points are wrong, especially the ones that combine maximum simplicity with maximum scariness. And so when you’ve been on that long and complex journey through the weeds, and fires, floods, droughts, crop failures and other such supposed consequences of man-made global warming climate change thingy, you emerge with something reassuring.
We’re not destroying the planet, and we can cope with much that results from a climate that continues to change as it always has, and we should focus on environmental problems we can fix because they actually exist.
Thanks for alerting me to the Climate at a Glance website. I've added it to my website's list of links to climate realism sites. Unfortunately alarmists are alarmists only because their minds are solidly closed and they refuse to listen to any information which might puncture their tiny belief bubbles. If they were capable of thinking rationally and scientifically, they would not be alarmists. Naomi Seibt is a great example for people to follow. She started out like most of us, assuming that scientists are experts and would never make any untrue statements. Then she started to do some research and realised that we are all being lied to about the true climate situation. If most people would follow her advice of "Don't panic, THINK!", the Climate Change boogeyman would evaporate.
"The first step in exploring the complexity is to get them off their simple but wrong talking points."
The first assumption in the base of the CAGW edifice is: fossil fuel emissions build up in the atmosphere and more CO2 traps more heat in the atmosphere. It is erroneous. When Hermann Harde published his 2017 paper explaining his analysis falsifying this assumption he was answered with more assumptions then his reply was censured. When Murray Salby taught about this error he was fired and his research records were confiscated. It seems the trick is to convince "them" their talking points need to stand scrutiny or be modified till they can but they, so far, seem willing to ignore the data and the work challenging their assumptions.