The question of when exactly the serious negative effects of man-made climate change hit, are hitting, will hit or will hit even harder continues to perplex friend and foe alike. Thus CTV seethes that “Earth has sweltered through its hottest Northern Hemisphere summer ever measured, with a record warm August capping a season of brutal and deadly temperatures, according to the World Meteorological Organization.” After calling 1.5°C “warmer than pre-industrial averages… the threshold that the world is trying not to pass”, as if the planet had goals, it quotes that famous non-climate-scientist UN Secretary-General António Guterres that “Climate breakdown has begun.” OK, that’s fairly firm. But we keep asking when the consensus holds that the effects of climate “change” become discernible as opposed to background noise. Was it 1980, 2000, or 2020? And when did scientists say this warming had turned into “breakdown”, especially since those fuddy-duddies at the IPCC are still mostly saying they think there might be trouble some decades hence not that we’re already in the process of dying? We just don’t know. Because there doesn’t seem to be an answer, just a lot of finger-pointing.

The Economist apparently agrees with the Secretary-General, panting “Large regions of both the tropical Pacific and the North Atlantic have been running fevers over the past couple of months, with consequences for weather systems around the globe.” So evidently they’re saying the weather is now markedly different from, and, we assume, disastrously worse than, how it was even in the period of “climate change”, let alone while we were merely on a troubling trajectory back in, say, the 1980s. But as we have observed before, alarmists are remarkably cavalier about the when and what of man-made global warming. Just not the why.

Thus for instance the New York Times’ “Climate Forward” huffs that “One of the startling things about the climate crisis is just how quickly we’ve brought it upon ourselves. In a relatively short period of time – just 150 years or so – humans have dramatically heated up the planet, ushering in the Anthropocene.” So have we been heating the planet “dramatically” since 1873? Did the Anthropocene start in 1980, or 2023, rather than some people’s preferred 1950? Or are you just making it up as you go along?

Apparently so. Including another “Climate Forward” piece saying:

“This year’s heat can seem relentless, and appears to be only the beginning of a lifetime of hotter summers. It’s even hot in the oceans. And then there are the wildfires, droughts and floods, which have recently hit the seeming paradises of Hawaii and California.”

So it’s only the beginning, meaning we really hit some sort of tipping point in 2023, in terms of temperature and its weather impact. Or maybe not, since Heatmap insists that:

“You’ve read it before: Insurance companies who wrote homeowners policy are fleeing Florida. Or a big insurance company stopped writing new policies in California. That extreme weather, whether it be wind and storm or smoke and fire, is playing havoc on the insurance market is an old story.”

How old? When did it start? And how can it be about to start again?

In terms of having your lava cake and eating it too on this point, it’s hard to beat “The weather is about to get even weirder” from the Atlantic’s “Weekly Planet”. Though there’s also The Guardian’s “A freakish season of record temperatures, wildfire smoke and the destruction of Lahaina could soon become normal, climate experts say”. And the line from the CEO and “founding publisher” of Greystone, which is publishing a Postmedia book on “Canada’s unprecedented 2023 wildfire season”, that “The sad truth is that the escalation of climate change took centre stage in Canada”.

Never mind him ignoring that the U.S. had a very quiet fire season. The point to savour here is that the “escalation of climate change” lets you say it had already been ravaging the planet or some selected bit of it and was now starting to.

Then there’s the piece via MSN supposedly offering “Everything you need to know about Earth’s numerous ice ages” that starts off:

“Today, our primary climate concern is a general warming of the planet. This climate emergency has already started to have disastrous effects on the planet, from extreme weather events to crop shortages. For humanity, this is truly an existential crisis, and for Earth it is also a dangerous and damaging event. But it’s not our planet’s first rodeo when it comes to extreme conditions.”

So apparently we are, right now, destroying not only ourselves but the entire planet, which is being driven out of its natural and desirable condition, whatever that thing is meant to be.

Then it rants that:

“Ice ages have ravaged the Earth on numerous occasions, completely changing or even eradicating life on its surface and in its oceans. Some, like our most recent ice age, are mild, but others, like the earliest on record, have covered the entire planet in a sheet of ice. While these events can mean the end of life on Earth, the Earth itself slowly heals and rebuilds, even when it takes millions of years.”

Rebuilds? Rebuilds from what? To what? And what possible logic can there be in saying that climate has always been unstable, frequently wrecking the climate, but obviously this time is different because the planet is warming from way below normal to still way below normal?