Mention climate change, global warming, or other related terms and you are likely to find someone nearby who strongly agrees with you.
Mention climate change, global warming, or other related terms to someone else nearby and you may discover they disagree with you, but they are not as vocal about it.
These terms are almost as divisive as the feelings about President Trump – for and against.
A question: Should we worry about climate change or global warming?
Before answering that, we need to consider something else.
Climate change has clearly occurred in the past. The earth has been extremely warm and extremely cold at different times.
There are a couple of very different belief systems about climate change today. One is that climate change is a natural occurrence, driven by factors such as solar activity, volcanic activity, and extraterrestrial impacts. The other is that humans are the cause of our current change.
Which is it?
We don’t know. But the answer is that probably both are contributors in our time. We don’t have enough good overall data to be certain.
At this point in our political climate, funding seems to favor those who predict drastic warming and catastrophic consequences. We’ve heard reports that scientists who feel differently can’t get papers published in peer-reviewed journals and can’t get grant money to perform their research.
One thing which worries us is that when the people claiming climatic doom and gloom have made predictions, their predictions turned out to be wrong. These range back to Paul Ehrlich and Al Gore. Even James Hansen, the former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the strongest proponents of climatic catastrophism, has been wrong in his predictions.
Models are only as good as the human programming and the data we give them. If the systemic belief is that something will happen, the models will tend to show that. And we clearly have a systemic belief in this case. If necessary information is not put into the model, then the model cannot be correct.
There is an astronomical model that our moon was created by the collision of a Mars-sized body with the earth billions of years ago. It is only a model. But we’ve seen astronomers who appear to accept this model as fact. There is no solid evidence, and even some conflicting evidence. For some reason the conflicting evidence is ignored or gets intentionally suppressed.
The same thing could be happening with climate change.
People have been brainwashed by educators, politicians, and others to believe what they want them to believe. And those beliefs might be wrong.
These models have preyed on people’s fears. They could be just another “end of the world” projection.
What seems to us a reasonable thing to do is get a group consisting of both open-minded believers and skeptics together for an honest discussion.
These people, supposedly experts in the field, could examine the models, making sure the models considered all possible relevant variables.
Some skeptics we’ve heard claim that the current models don’t account for solar activity, and they don’t account for increased volcanism around the world. If these claims are true, then the current modeling believers have some work to do.
It would be nice to get this resolution so we better understand reality, not some possibly invalid hypotheses.
But to get back to our earlier question.
Should we worry about climate change or global warming?
No.
“What?” many of you are now wondering.
Why not, if it’s such an important consideration for our future?
Well, we promised controversy.
The reason we don’t have to worry about global warming is because some other coming changes that are beyond our control will happen in the interim between now and when the predicted climatic catastrophes are to occur.
There will be 1) a major impact from an external object, 2) a great period of earthquakes and volcanism, 3) a major solar change, or 4) something else that will overcome anything humans are capable of.