Message To a Climate Skeptic
Reader and climate skeptic Jim Kalergis writes:
I spent well over 100 hours studying “climate change” and came away with this: There’s science, and there’s SCIENCE. Climate Science is where the medical profession was back in the good old days of the leaches and blood-letting. Anybody who tells you they have a sufficient understanding of the forces responsible for climate to predict future climate is pissing on your leg and and looking for another billion in government grants. Climate science is so corrupted by politicians, click hungry media, and special interest groups, that it shouldn’t be given much weight in making policy decisions. It’s a huge mistake to shut down communication on a subject with ad hominem attacks, refusals to hear all arguments, threats to one’s livelihood, etc. The answer is always more communication, not less.
A few comments:
Jim appears not to like ad hominem attacks, but seems not to understand what he’s written here is precisely that, leveled against thousands of scientists all around the globe, who have spent their entire careers (considerably more than 100 hours) working hard to understand this phenomenon and prevent what almost all of them see as impending catastrophe. I happen to know many of these people personally largely through the process of conducting interviews for the four books I’ve written on the subject and environmental issues more broadly. On their behalf, I take great offense to this gross generalization that impugns the integrity of every single one of them.
The last year that wasn’t warmer than the 20th Century average was 35 years before 2020, in 1985. The probability that this could have happened at random is 1 in 2^35, or 1 in 34,359,738,368.
The interesting thing about science is that, paradoxically, it’s virtually always wrong. Yes, it’s the only human endeavor that’s always improving, but think of how few things we believed 500 years ago that we still hold true today. No one is asserting that climate science has its arms completely wrapped around this subject. In fact, new findings are emerging every few days. Unfortunately, most of them suggest that we’ve underestimated the rate at which global temperatures are warming, and, at the same time, we’re discovering more negative effects that this warming is having on the human population, and the entire collective ecosystem of Earth.
