When I was a child growing up in the 60s and 70s, I remember TV commercials and Public Service Announcements saying that using aerosol spray cans was creating a hole in this thing called the Ozone layer. More specifically, Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) emitted by spray cans, refrigerators and air conditioning. None of us had any idea what an Ozone layer was but we were told that without it, life on earth was not sustainable. That is to say, something as simple as a hole in this thing represented an existential threat to life on earth. An invisible, existential threat that nobody understood but for some reason nobody questioned either. Ever notice how the existential threats we’re told to be afraid of are always invisible and unconfirmable by the average person? We’re told to just ‘trust the authorities’ and give them more money and more power and they’ll keep us safe. So, in a quest to be seen as socially responsible and cultural heroes by the politically correct, some made a commitment to make drastic, unprecedented changes in their daily lives. For example, instead of spray can deodorants, they started using roll-ons. Yep, solid roll-ons, they believed that roll-on deodorant was the solution to an existential threat to life on earth.
Fast forward 50 years and – like von Braun and other former Nazis recruited by NASA – you don’t hear much about the hole in the Ozone layer anymore. Actually, you don’t hear about it at all, I doubt anyone younger than 40-years-old has ever heard of it. Did roll-on deodorant really save life on earth? That’s a pretty big deal isn’t it? Why weren’t we told the threat was over? How do we know it really is? Did it just disappear? Radio silence for decades now, almost as if, almost, it was never really a threat in the first place. There are those desperate to preserve their culturally heroic reputations by conjuring up an explanation as to how the existential threat to life on earth was not only real but was successfully averted, saved by political policy and roll-on deodorant.
They’ll massage your mind with logical fallacies and appeal to your emotions and your sense of the ‘greater good’ in order to persuade you of the potency of government control on preserving life on the planet. They’ll try to convince you that since there was a problem with the Ozone and the government implemented policies and now there’s not a problem anymore, then clearly it was because of the political policy. It’s the old lions and rose petals parable. If you put rose petals in front of your door, they will keep the lions away. The fact that you haven’t seen any lions since you started putting the rose petals out proves it was the rose petals keeping the lions away. Correlation and causation fallacy writ large but good enough for the weak of mind and constitution.
Regardless, like all politicized issues, the hole in the Ozone lost its celebrity status and wasn’t getting the job done anymore so it was unceremoniously replaced by a newer, shinier, more comprehensive threat called ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ and the whole thing started over again. ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ means human activity – namely using carbon based or ‘fossil fuels’ — is causing the planet’s average temperatures to get warmer and since the 1980s we’ve been told the new threat is the melting of the polar ice caps. If the polar ice caps were to melt, the sea levels would rise by 20 feet and much of the current land masses would be underwater. Florida, Hawaii, Maldives even NYC would no longer be there. This was back in the 1980s. Fast forward 40 years and the seas haven’t risen, everyone’s fine and real estate development in Florida exploded over the same time period. Insurance companies have actuaries who are experts in calculating risk and for the past 40 years they’ve never advised a client against real estate development in Florida due to melting polar ice caps, and they were right, Al Gore and the politicians were wrong again, or more likely just outright lying again. Al Gore owns numerous mansions consuming tons of ‘fossil fuels’ per year and flies to ‘climate summits’ in a private jet. Even so he won a Nobel Peace prize for his outspoken policies to fight this new existential threat that even he doesn’t seem to believe in and which appears to not exist.
Anyone who’s ever done scientific research knows that you need to be able to mathematically model the system you want to analyze. You have to know billions of variables and how those billions of things interact and affect one another. Then you have to be able to collect unbiased data on all those variables and run it through the model. There is not a person on the planet that can model the global environment like that much less find the data for it. The complexities of the environment are simply unknown and the data for it all doesn’t exist. New species of animals, plants and other natural phenomenon are being discovered every day. Things scientists thought to be true for hundreds of years are being proven wrong. Even if it were possible to build the model and collect the data, it would take decades to run the models and as soon as a new species or plant or natural phenomenon were discovered, the model would have to be rebuilt, new data collected and it would have start all over again. Any models the ‘researchers’ claim to be using are grossly insufficient and the data is grossly incomplete.
That’s probably why the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) felt the need to fudge their data and fabricate results for the politicians to use in support of their political policies. Then they were stupid enough to send emails to one another about what they did which is how they got caught. The IPCCs unprofessional and unethical tactics is why some respected atmospheric scientists have quit the field. Dr. Judith Curry, for one, was head of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Georgia Tech University for years. Well written, published and respected in her field and a former member of the IPCC. It was her time working with the IPCC that opened her eyes to the fraud being perpetrated for political expedience. Instead of compromising her professional ethics for prestige and money like so many others had done, she was one of the many whistle blowers to come forward and expose the scam. For honoring the truth in science and protecting her professional and personal integrity, she was fired from her position at Georgia Tech and ostracized by the scientific community. If there really is an existential threat to the planet, then why the need for censorship of dissenting voices? Why are respected scientists considered a threat?
Then there’s the ‘Great Plastic Patch’ that we are told is in the Pacific Ocean choking off sea life and disrupting ‘keystone’ species and ecological processes. Ask to see pictures of it and you’ll be told that’s not possible because it’s made up of ‘micro-plastics’, microscopic particles of plastic too small for the human eye but believe us, it’s there. We’re told that trees and forests are being destroyed for wood and paper and need to be replenished by man. As if trees don’t reproduce on their own as they’ve done for millions of years. There are trillions of trees in the world despite humanity, not because of it. Governments are subsidizing Electric Vehicles (EV) as if electricity is harvested from lightening or Thor’s hammer and not produced by electrical generators that use carbon based fuels. EVs are for cultural heroes, virtue signalers who ostensibly appear to be morally and socially superior but who, in reality, are false prophets.
False prophets because “Man-made global warming” and all the other politicized environmental issues have become a fully functional religion. There is not even ordinary evidence of this supposedly extraordinary phenomenon and all the doomsday prophecies have failed to materialize but, like with any religion, the faithful still believe. They sit outside day after day, year after year, in the sun, under blue skies, with green trees and chirping birds, lamenting how man is killing the planet while they enjoy all the natural benefits the planet has to offer just as people did 40 years earlier. Literally nothing has changed, if anything the planet is greener and healthier. Of course they’ll tell you again that it’s because of government policy and carbon credits and the like. The same correlation and causation fallacies and appeal to emotions because that’s literally all they have. They have no real evidence, they couldn’t have.
The religion of environmentalism has succeeded in indoctrinating people to believe that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a poisonous gas which must be eliminated when in reality it is an absolute necessity for life on earth. Plants consume CO2 and covert it to O2 (oxygen) via photosynthesis. Without CO2 all life on the planet dies. Commercial greenhouse farmers buy CO2 generators to increase the yields of their plants. There is no limit to how much CO2 plant life can consume and covert to O2. The more they consume, the larger they grow and the more oxygen there is. The blinding irony of the ‘green movement’ which campaigns for zero carbon emissions is that carbon fuels are the green fuel and zero carbon emissions is the existential threat, the exact opposite of what the cultists would have you believe.