By Richard Enos | Collective Evolution
In Brief
- The Facts:The notion that the planet is warming at an alarming rate due to an increase in man-made CO2 emissions is not nearly as proven by real science as the politicians, lobbyists, and activists would have you believe.
- Reflect On:Can we recognize the patterns used in consensus-building and perception-building of global issues to help us discern between truth and deception?
I believe that it is now a firmly established fact that Western Industrialization has been harmful to the planet. Ecosystems have been disrupted, species have become extinct, the soil has been degraded, and our water and air have become polluted in ways that we know for certain are harmful to human life and to life on the planet in general.
Human beings of conscience have long petitioned our leaders to make changes, and in the obvious absence of any meaningful actions on the part of our governments and industries to stem the tide of pollution and degradation, our planet has continued to suffer.
The impact of Western Industrialization on ‘climate change’ is a bit of a different animal. Since Al Gore’s presentation of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ back in 2006, the argument was made that Western Industrialization through the use of fossil fuels was creating a “greenhouse effect” in the atmosphere and, if nothing was done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions–and most importantly CO2 emissions–then the planet would experience cataclysmic disasters threatening all forms of life on the planet.
Naturally, many people of conscience applauded the revelations and vowed to support initiatives that sought to reduce carbon emissions in our society. The only problem–and it still remains today–is that there is no way of proving that increased CO2 levels cause global warming.
With all the proven and clearly demonstrable negative environmental effects of Western Industrialization, we should be looking with a Spockian eyebrow into why it is only CO2 emissions that continues to get the lion’s share of attention from politicians, activists, and lobby groups. It would also be helpful to examine why these groups try to convince us of the virtual certainty that CO2 is the culprit of our climate woes, and dismiss any alternative views as coming from ‘deniers.’
The 97% Line
The famed line that ‘97% of Climate scientists agree that Climate Change is real’ is often bandied about in mainstream discourse by those with an agenda to hit the fossil fuel industry (and as a consequence, the general public) with a carbon tax or a global emissions trading scheme.
Let’s put aside the question as to whether the 97% figure was arrived at by using biased statistical methods, and just focus on the statement itself. Its supreme vagueness makes it difficult to discount–by design. When it speaks of ‘Climate Change’ is it to be taken literally (i.e. that the climate changes over time)? If so, then one could probably not argue the obvious and expect that 100% of scientists would agree. Climate Change itself is observable and has been recorded throughout our history. There are warming trends and cooling trends over long periods of time.
The phrase that used to be used was ‘Global Warming,’ however, in recent years some small but clear signs of a cooling trend have made the term ‘Global Warming’ too easily negated, so the switch was made to ‘Climate Change.’
But what the ‘97% phrase’ literally means is not as important as what proponents of carbon reduction schemes want the public to think it means: They want you to think it means that 97% of scientists believe that the scientific evidence PROVES that CO2 emissions are the MAIN cause of Global Warming (a.k.a. ‘Climate Change’). The honest truth is–scientists DON’T KNOW.
What The Science Really Tells Us
We are led to believe that there are only two groups of scientists, two ‘camps’. One is the group of scientists who believe that CO2 emissions are the MAIN cause of Global Warming, while the other group doesn’t believe that CO2 emissions cause Global Warming. The latter group is labeled ‘Climate Deniers’ (again, a meaningless, pejorative term that literally means that some scientists don’t believe in climate).
In actual fact, the vast majority of climate experts, actual scientists who conduct the studies and analyses, fit somewhere in a very ‘inconvenient’ camp in the middle and see trends, signs, and a host of broad correlations across many variables, but recognize that they don’t have the ability to certify whether or not CO2 or even greenhouse gases as a whole have a significant impact on Global Warming. And we don’t have to cherry-pick our justification for saying this from so-called ‘climate deniers’ either. We can go straight to the documentation of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientists which the United Nations brought together to essentially find scientific backing for the idea that mankind and our current dependence on fossil fuels is causing the planet to warm at such an accelerated rate as to threaten human existence.
In the IPCC documents, we can see how tenuous the link between climate change and CO2 emissions are, in their findings entitled ‘Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis.’ Here was one of their recommendations:
Explore more fully the probabilistic character of future climate states by developing multiple ensembles of model calculations. The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible. Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system’s future possible states by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.
In other words, there is no way of doing ‘experiments’ within this system in which the effects of CO2 are isolated and measured. There is no way to create a simulation of our climate and study the impact of CO2 on climate under laboratory conditions. The suggestion here is that the best that can be done is to create a host of different models based on parameterizing the variables and then creating a probability distribution of projections of the weather going forward. In other words, a weak ‘maybe’ is the best that science can actually produce with the climate system in terms of the effects of rising man-made CO2 levels.
Nonetheless, the models used by the United Nations ALL have the built-in bias that rising CO2 levels have a significant impact on warming. And as a consequence, these models have predicted far greater warming of the planet that is actually occurring year after year.
