American Elephants

Regular visitors would not be surprised to hear that I am indeed a skeptic about the “crisis” of climate change.  Most people who grew up rural are skeptical.  Dr. Ian Plimer, Australia’s best-known and most highly honored geologist, has also noticed that rural people don’t fall for much of the nonsense.

I grew up in the western foothills of the Rockies, surrounded by National Forest and BLM land.  I have been snowed in, experienced flood, fire and earthquake, -20° weather, killed rattlesnakes, had lightening strike too close for comfort and spent hours staring at the Milky Way undimmed by any lights at all.

When one has experienced weather from 20° below to 112°, you don’t get excited over 1° of warming over a hundred years.  At 20° below, you put on a lot more warm clothes, and when it is really hot, you take them off, get a cold drink and sit in the shade, or go stick your feet in the river.  We adapt. The climate has always warmed and cooled.  We adapt, and the polar bears adapt too.

That said, it is fascinating how angry urban true-believers become when you do not agree that if we do not end the terrible pollution of increasing CO2 we are doomed.

Brendan O’Neill had a marvelous piece in Planet Gore at NRO today.

If a climate-change skeptic suggests that the Sun, rather than man, is responsible for climatic variations he is denounced as evil, a heretic, someone whose words are so foul and twisted that they will be “partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.” In other words, question the environmentalist consensus, and you are endangering life itself — your words are literally poisonous.

Yet when a climate-change activist openly calls for calamitous events and the deaths of thousands of people as a way of focusing our leaders’ minds on the problem of climate change, no one bats an eye. You can fantasize about the outbreak of disease as a means of “reducing the population” or dream about natural disasters (which should be as “traumatic as possible” in order to wake people from their consumerist-induced stupor), and your fellow activists will nod along in agreement. So warped is environmentalist morality that those who raise legitimate questions about politics and science are accused of killing people with their words, while those who actually talk about the need for people to die are patted on the back.

Do read the whole thing. There is an odd kind of hubris involved. We people who are living right now are responsible for everything wrong with the planet, and if only we live in the way of our most remote ancestors, lightly upon the earth, never really touching anything can we redeem ourselves.

You would think that they would be delighted to hear that the earth is not in danger, that CO2 is what we exhale, and that the “greenhouse effect” simply does not exist. But they have deep faith that the world is suffering from the blight of humans upon it, and they and their comrades’ life work is to save it.  Or something like that.  Lighten up, people.