It’s time to drop in my 2c on the topic of the moment: climate change.
Not happy with definitions like “the climate is what the weather is usually like”, climatologists have defined climate as something more like this:
The average weather measurements over a 30 year period
This is an amazing definition, because it forgets that weather is a continuous phenomenon. This means that the climate is a continually changing target, because weather does not follow an entirely predictable pattern. The weather would have to be entirely predictable for the climate to remain constant by this definition. The definition of climate incorporates climate change.
Now, it is a matter of straightforward observation that over any period of time the weather is almost completely unpredictable. If you want to know the weather tomorrow with almost as much certainty as the forecasters, you can:
- look out of the window: what is the weather like now
- look at your journal: what was the weather like last year
If the weather tomorrow is not like the weather last year, then maybe something is up … but what could it be?
This brings us to: climate change.
The climate, she is not what she used to be. Of course, the climate has never been what it used to be – but don’t let that bother you — that the random numbers representing weather trend upwards and downwards for no particular reason, depending on what particular measurement you are looking at. We’re talking about climate change here. The fact that there has never been climate stasis is irrelevant. What matters to the mathematical geniuses is that there’s a change now.
In case you don’t know, to be truly paranoid about climate change, you have to believe in evolution. True believers in evolution hold that for millions of years carbon has been “safely” accumulating in fossils. They don’t believe anything about where it came from so that it could accumulate in fossils. All that they know is that burning all that carbon is going to put that carbon back into circulation. When they think of a coalified pine tree being burned in a power station, they are filled with trepidation that the ancient spirits of evolution will be angered by this travesty of carbon gasification. They know that the angry carbon, once released, will smite them with vengeance and something truly random and unpredictable could happen. They have read the tea leaves and other trace elements in the ice cores, and of course, it has shaken them to their core.
If you do not currently believe in evolution, you may be interested in figuring out if you can derive evolution as a conclusion from climate change, since belief in climate change is a natural by-product of belief in evolution. Perhaps it works both ways? Maybe if you believe strongly enough in climate change, you can use that to justify belief in evolution.
If you don’t believe the carbon has been building up for bzillions of years, then the prospect of getting it back into the atmosphere is really not so scary. The plants sucked it up in the past before they were buried. There’s nothing stopping new plants from sucking up the new CO2 and converting it back into solids: they can grow a bit taller and broader — like the bigger and taller plants we see in fossils, and the happy plants grown in a controlled atmosphere.
And here is the answer to climate change:
Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.
So we’re done with global cataclysm then. Sorry folks, nothing to see here. Please move along.
Of course in political terms, climate change is a English conspiracy: they have nothing better to do than talk about the how dull the weather is. As the dying gasp of the British Empire, they want the whole world to talk about the weather.
