We find ourselves obliged, by irritation if nothing else, to devote an item in this newsletter to the ridiculous phrase “stop climate change”. For instance MSN tells us, drawing on a story in The Daily Digest to which they do not link (especially annoying since MSN links tend to expire), that “If climate change doesn't stop, this will be our world in 2050”. Which is a statement of almost paralyzing idiocy. On the micro scale, what they mean is that if sea levels rise dramatically the oceans will be a lot higher. But “climate change” is not a term that necessarily means “the seas rise massively”. It means, by common convention, any statistically significant change in weather somewhere over at least three decades. So it could be any number of things, including more drought, or indeed very gentle sea level rise, or another glaciation, and if it is any of these things, it won’t submerge Washington, DC or Quebec City even if some activist outfit had AI draw a picture of one very specific, and overwrought, vision of how climate might change. But the macro point here isn’t that their specific projections are ludicrous, though they are. It’s that, as we’ve said before but apparently must now shout, climate has always changed and it is not going to stop changing. It is not “deniers” but alarmists who deny this fundamental reality, including when they babble that governments could make it stop. And if you really think the weather has not changed, on a small and large scale, near your house and far far away, since the invention of rain, you know nothing and should not say it. [Read more.]
If you’re the sort of person who prefers AI to human thought, we did a search for “stop climate change” and the Google “AI Overview” chirped:
“Stopping climate change requires urgent, systemic, and individual action to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, primarily by eliminating fossil fuel reliance and embracing renewable energy. Key actions include transitioning to wind and solar power, improving energy efficiency, switching to electric vehicles, and reducing meat consumption.”
Canada’s Suzuki Foundation, under the heading “Top 10 things you can do about climate change” with the actual URL being “https://davidsuzuki.org/what-you-can-do/top-10-ways-can-stop-climate-change/” urges citizen-activists to get active in their cities because:
“In Canada, municipalities have influence over about 50 per cent of our emissions. And with about 80 per cent of people living in Canada living in cities, it’s important - even crucial – that we focus on their potential to help stop climate change.”
Just say no to weather! You will notice that it is stunningly vacant not only because they think we can prevent weather from ever being different (and apparently think it never was different until Henry Ford or perhaps James Watt, not having heard of ice ages, we suppose), but because they use “climate change” without specifying the type, direction or intensity. They’re against it and do not know if it is a man or a horse.
As is Greenpeace UK, which advises the addled that “The main ways to stop climate change are to pressure government and business” to abolish fossil fuels, build windmills, take a solar bus, block drafts in your house, eat vegan and have less stuff especially plastic and all that there. Some of which may be good advice and some of which may not, but none of which can possibly “stop climate change” because climate has always changed, not always in bad ways, and it certainly wasn’t us until very recently.
It’s even climate change if a place has long cycles of more and less rain around a stable average, if the cycles are three decades or more. Who wants to stop that or, even more crucially, really thinks they could if they did want to? Yet this unresisting imbecility is everywhere. The “Citizens’ Climate Lobby” asks “How can we stop climate change?” and does not reply “Don’t be a dolt” but instead offers the usual remedies (some of which, like protecting forests, we do think worthwhile but not because it will mean weather goes static). And on and on and on it goes.
It’s like politicians promising change, and if, pressed for a bit less vagueness, promising changely change where things are different. But as Thomas Sowell asked years ago in his very aptly titled Is Reality Optional?:
“Is there anything more mindless than the endless repetition of the word ‘change’? Does it make any sense for grown men and women to be either for or against ‘change’ in the abstract? The word covers everything from Hitler to the Second Coming.”
Likewise being against “climate change” in the abstract is inane. If you’ve been having drought that’s killing the begonias, and it rains a bit more, it’s actually good. And who cares if it gets 0.01 degrees warmer in Indiana, or ever so slightly windier in Patagonia, over 43 centuries? The only logic to the position, and we use that word as generously as possible, is that any kind of change in weather is hideously unnatural, immediately catastrophic and our fault. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
It’s bad if climate changes, good if it stops changing, and we can stop it. You must be mad.
Now perhaps you will throw these people on the mercy of the court by saying that, as that Citizen’s Climate Lobby thing appears to, they use “climate change” and “global warming” interchangeably. Thus they go:
“Can we reverse climate change? Yes, it is possible to stop, and even reverse, global warming if we take serious action.”
But if you mean warming why don’t you say it? How mentally lazy are you? Or how concerned that if you get specific people might take issue with the amount, type and seriousness of warming? (There’s another big issue here, which we will address separately next week, the notion of “climate change” as a concentrated, dastardly causal force not a disparate collection of often unrelated or only very loosely related phenomena, as for instance snow in Mongolia in winter versus wildfires in Brazil in summer.)
Even “global warming” is not nearly as concrete an entity as alarmist language often suggests. Not only are temperatures very different in different parts of the planet, as the old gag about declaring a man with a sunburned head and frostbitten feet comfy on average illustrates, but they are changing in different ways at different speeds in uncoordinated fashion.
Still it might, in principle, be possible for the planet to stop warming, and it might be good if it happened. But to stop climate change is not possible. And to “reverse” it is even more foolish, since an area getting wetter or drier, warmer or colder, windier or less windy, is all climate change. Making the Atlantic have more hurricanes, assuming we could and wanted to, or the UK get less rain, wouldn’t “reverse climate change”, it would just cause more of it. Beware of anyone, especially an activist, who’s never tried to think any of this stuff through, because it probably indicates a much larger mental habit of not thinking.
A piece peddled by MSN, for which this time we were at least able to locate the original, only tries to panic us with “This is what the world could look like in 50 years”. Yeah. Unless it doesn’t. It has people wandering a hellscape in hazmat suits and gas masks. Probably not a sustainable lifestyle. But according to them:
“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.”
And we were briefly relieved, slightly, that it didn’t contain the exact phrase “stop climate change”. But it did contain the idea, proving it’s not just a verbal tic, it’s something that comes from deeply held deeply flawed ideas. It insisted in “arise, ye prisoner of carbon pollution” style that:
“By embracing sustainable practices, investing in clean energy, and addressing the root causes of climate change, we can ensure a more resilient and equitable world for the future.”
Equitable? How did that one get in there? But never mind. The point is the notion that we are capable of “addressing the root causes of climate change”. Which is a windy way of saying we’re making it change, and by ceasing to make it change we can cause it to stop changing. Because if the root cause were, say, continental drift, or solar fluctuations, we couldn’t “address it” except to say “Hello distant massive process over which we have no influence, how are you today?”
Look. We don’t know what the world will be like in 50 years, or 500, or whether humanity will already have perished in any number of ways including manufacturing AI robots that believe all the alarmist rhetoric on which they were trained and proceed to address the root cause by killing us all. But we do know this: the climate will have changed because it always has and always will until the planet is consumed by the sun or, just possibly, freezes so solid that stasis is achieved. If the latter, it won’t be the triumph fools seek, stasis being infamously not the cause of death in organic systems but a description of it.
