Our criticism last week of people who want to “stop climate change”, as in the Sierra Club’s online yelp “Donald Trump removed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to fight climate change” or the New York Times “Trump Administration Erases the Government’s Power to Fight Climate Change”, is intimately connected to another piece of prize foolishness, the notion that “climate change” is itself the causal force in question, rather than the description of things affected by whatever the causal force is. It’s like saying inflation causes prices to go up: no, the word “inflation” means prices going up, due to whatever caused inflation. The term “climate change” likewise does not refer to a single, solid, unified thing at all, let alone one with some kind of agency, capable of causing things, some dragon we could slay. It’s a description of various statistically significant alterations in weather patterns over, by general consent, at least 30 years, often entirely unrelated in direction and location. It’s the thing caused by whatever caused it, it’s not the cause itself. When people speak of climate change causing the weather to change, as for instance “Climate change is now seen as a significant driver behind the shifting tornado season,” it’s like saying a growth spurt caused a teenager to get taller. They’re not just mixing up cause and effect, they’re treating effect as cause and effect, letting them make intellectually lazy claims to know things that often turn out to be simply made up.

A piece we mentioned last week, recycled by MSN, tried to panic us with “This is what the world could look like in 50 years” and people wandering through desolation in protective suits and gas masks and shrilled:

“As we move further into the 21st century, the evidence of climate change is becoming increasingly clear. In the next 50 years, the world will likely be a dramatically different place, shaped by the consequences of global warming; sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and the loss of biodiversity. While many of these changes are already underway, their full impact will be felt in the decades to come.”

So far so silly only in its projections. But then they got to the idiotic crux:

“One of the most alarming consequences of climate change is the rise in global temperatures.”

No. If you believe in the runaway heating breakdown thingy, then one of the most alarming kinds of climate change is rising temperatures. But you cannot say that the planet getting hotter caused temperatures to rise. Or rather, alas, you can (as for instance in “America’s nature is shifting – and climate change is the reason”) and people often do, as plummeting IQs cause an increase in stupidity.

Likewise, in denouncing the Trump administration for revoking the “Endangerment Finding” re greenhouse gases, something we also dealt with at length last week, the New York Times hissed that:

“A small group of conservative activists has worked for 16 years to stop all government efforts to fight climate change. Their efforts seem poised to pay off.”

It’s wrong in that the government has many climate programs in place and could easily add more if it wanted, as we observed in that other post. But that flaw is superficial, at least compared to that phrase “fight climate change.”

The notion that climate change is an entity, not a wide collection of statistical descriptions of all kinds of local, regional, or continental changes in weather in all kinds of ways, is already junk science. But it’s nothing to the notion that we could track it down, approach it in its lair, “fight” it, wrestle it to the ground, beat its brains out or make it say uncle, and have the weather never change. It’s a deeply embedded, entirely unexamined, and idiotic assumption.

Again, if all they mean is “fight global warming” it is in theory conceivable that we could discover what is causing global warming and try to do something about it. For years we were told the problem was “global warming”. But it was not we skeptics, it was the alarmists, who did a bait-and-switch, around the time there was a long pause in warming, the famous “hiatus”, and went from trying to prevent an actual specific phenomenon whose supposed negative effects they could at least describe to fighting change that was driving change in a changely way of dreaded changeness.