Surprisingly, this late in the 2024 campaign, the issue of global warming (dba "climate change"), has been effectively a no-show in the election. No one talks about it, and even when the moderators of one of the debates brought it up, the candidates didn't do very much with it and it was not discussed in any postmortem the next day.
However ... that didn't mean it didn't make me think about the topic. Obviously, I've written about it in this site more than once, but I feel that there is a point I haven't made, or at least haven't written about loudly enough.
The climate-change folks have always appeared suspect to me. They scream at you for not taking them seriously, and let's just say the obnoxious screaming Swedish teenager with Asperger's hasn't done anything to help the cause. Their actions and loud warnings are 100% consistent with what they would do if their only purpose were to stop all progress. Obviously if they really wanted clean energy, they'd be fast-tracking nuclear power plants like crazy which, of course, they're not.
And I've said all that. A few times.
But there is one argument that I haven't really expressed as a core point, as well as a core indictment of the climate-change people and their purpose. It has nothing to do with interpretation of data that the polar ice caps are or are not melting, or pictures of harbors from the 1920s that show sea levels exactly as they are now.
It's really a tenet that I go to religiously when someone passionate about something asks me to pay for something, or give up something, or in some way change my daily life.
What are you trying to accomplish?
Doesn't that seem simple? What is the goal of any proposed action, we have to ask, so that we can rationalize if the sacrifice, payment or change is actually worth it.
The problem is that, when you ask that question, you have to be careful what kind of answer you're willing to accept. For example, if I were in discussion with little Greta, I would ask her my own version of the "What are you trying to accomplish?" question. She would answer the original with something like "We're trying to stop the earth from warming up and destroying life!"
And that answer I would not accept. It's too simple, and leads to follow-up questions which, of course, the left does not like. But I love follow-up questions.
Like for example this one, the very basic challenge.
"'Hey, Greta ... we all know that the earth has had a couple peaks and valleys in temperature in the last 1,000 years. Leif Erikson called Canada "Vinland" because it reminded him of grape-growing areas back in Greenland, Norway and Iceland, where grapes no longer grew 500 years later when the climate was markedly cooler.
"There has been, just in the last millennium, a wide range of temperature patterns that predate any possible influence of human activity. So what specific pattern do you regard as ideal, to the point that any action we take for the purpose of affecting the climate would be to move toward that specific pattern, whether up or down?
"And, by the way, why is that pattern better than any other?"
No one, not at all, ever asks that question. God knows no one ever answers that question. And there's a good reason. The left doesn't care a bit about climate change per se, and whether or not the earth warms or cools a degree is not their concern. Remember that their goal is to seize and retain power, and enlarge government to the point that it controls everything, so if they can control a huge entrenched government, they hold absolute power.
No, what the left gets from arguing climate change is to justify further enlargement of government, not to fix a temperature pattern. So for them to agree that a specific pattern is optimal would be to say that if we were to achieve it, the apparatus that got us there could be dismantled. And the left does not dismantle government agencies. Ever.
That's why you have to challenge climate fanatics with that question all the time -- what is the perfect temperature profile across the earth, and why is that the one? We know, for example, that approximately four times as many people worldwide die from cold-related illnesses or problems than heat-related ones (what -- you didn't know that?). So why, Greta, are we more concerned about the temperatures going up than falling? Is it because none of this is really about the climate?
You'll never get a good answer (if you do, please tell me). To the climate crazies, it's about control, not climate. They won't answer the question because they've never even once asked themselves that, and that's because to them it's not a problem whose solution can be defined.
It's a problem from which they can argue for more power. As it always is.
Copyright 2024 by Robert Sutton. Like what you read here? There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com and, after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around. Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton.
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