Should we weather the weather whatever the weather?

This is an image of a TV reporter ‘struggling’ to stand during a hurricane whilst two guys casually stroll by in the background.

In terms of the media presentation of the “climate crisis” it says it all, really.

The same thing happened with covid. Governments and the media were hell-bent on proclaiming what was a low to moderately serious, newish, respiratory pathogen to be an “unprecedented” existential threat that, without any shadow of the merest scintilla of doubt, required us to shut down the entire planet.

And walk one way round supermarkets.

Or to prevent us from buying toys, because these were identified early on to be the leading cause of super spreader events

Pushed by our governments and media and the Big Tech owners of social media (of course I’m not suggesting any collusion or applied pressure here to those fearless warriors of truth - not at all, how could one possibly think that?) against whom no dissent was tolerated, we seemed to go insane. Except for a happy jaunt round a baffling socially-distanced one way system, kids could not go outside to play, and then when they finally got to the toy section of the supermarket - all they could do was to look at what they could not buy.

If you can look at this picture and not think this was a response bordering on the psychotic, then I don’t know what to say to you.

Why were governments so keen to ‘big up’ the danger, to engender this largely psychotic response?

It is this facet of the covid farce that probably gives me most pause for thought because I find it difficult to properly explain in anything but somewhat ‘conspiratorial’ terms. Even the massaged ‘official’ data never warranted anything like the extreme response we saw. At the start of the ‘pandemic’, in the UK at least, there were measured statements, calming statements, “do not worry too much” kind of statements, issued by politicians and government scientists. Seemingly in the blink of an eye these were replaced by deranged covidbatshit crazy hysteria woo. I still don’t really understand why.

It is almost unquestionable that had we simply done nothing¹ (also known as “business as usual”) we would now be in a far better place health wise and financially. But we (the collective ‘we’) decided that the absolute best response to a virus for which the median age of death was higher than median life expectancy was to shut down the entire planet. And to stop us from sitting on park benches².

The demented and hysterical reaction to covid still lives on in a proportion of the population whose brains seem to have been irreversibly broken.

The parallels with the attempts to whip up climate hysteria are all too obvious.

Yes, we may have overdone things with covid, but THIS time it’s REALLY bad, world-ending kind of bad, be scared, be terrified, stop using electricity, or your cars, or eating meat, or breathing out all that carbon dioxide, or farting. You can trust us THIS time, we wouldn’t be misleading you on something THIS serious, would we?

Please forgive me if I’m somewhat sceptical, Mr Government lackey. You managed to turn a mild to moderate disease (which did kill a small percentage of unlucky and vulnerable people, sadly) into something from a horror movie - and everything you did made things worse. So, I’m not just going to believe everything you say about the ‘climate’ without question, if that’s OK with you?

What’s that you say? “Follow the Science”?

Oh, right. I’d best do that then, should I?

The “one way” science of covid? That kind of science? It was ‘one way’ in more senses than one, wasn’t it?

I don’t know very much about the ‘science’ behind climate change. I suppose it’s time I tried to at least learn a little bit of it. But, but, but . . .

The exaggerated claims and the bonkers media articles have actually had quite the opposite effect. I am more distrustful of The Message™ now than I was before. In the same way, I used to be very trusting of vaccines. When you see such obvious nonsense as this

there can only be one legitimate reaction. What are they trying to “sell” me here?

One interesting feature of the pantodemic was the seeming inability of journalists and commentators to ask pertinent questions. It’s the same with climate change. I don’t know the science, I’ll admit that, but I have some questions. Lots, in fact.

The standard climate narrative basically amounts to bad humans, bad gas, bad planet.

We’ve been doing unspeakably evil things like eating, and heating ourselves, and travelling, and the planet is paying the price for our iniquity. Or so the story goes.

Things are, it is said, getting bad. If we don’t do something, and soon, we’re all doomed. That’s the message they are really, really, really, really, pushing. But, as we saw with covid, the ‘rules’ they want to impose on us (to save the planet, or whatever) don’t really apply to them.

Politicians are very good at saying all sorts of shit that they think you want to hear. It’s not really about doing, or saying, what’s right - it’s about getting voted in. They will, of course, use the excuse that if they don’t get voted in, they can’t change things for the better - but we don’t really believe that do we?

And so much better if there’s a crisis looming - and they can be seen to be the ones doing something about it.

The whole climate thing raises so many questions. I don’t know the answers to them, but they’re certainly not being properly addressed - and if “climate change denial” becomes an issue of ‘misinformation’ that must be censored (or even criminalized or labelled as ‘terrorism’) these questions will never be properly addressed.

The central ‘fact’, or article of faith perhaps, is that the planet is warming.

Is it true? Possibly. I might even say probably. But first of all, I want to know what this actually means.

It refers to the average temperature of the planet. The ‘average’ temperature of the planet? You what?

How is this measured? How did it used to be measured? How accurate are today’s measurements compared to those of 50 years ago? How much of the historical record is inferred from other data?

What does it even ‘mean’ to determine the average temperature of an entire planet?

An average is really a very crude statistical parameter (not entirely useless) that needs some caution in its interpretation. For example, suppose I have 4 temperature stations and in the year 2000 they record the following temperatures: (30, 30, 30, 30) as an average for the year (another average here). In 2020 they record an average yearly temperature of (31, 31, 31, 31). We would say that in two decades the average temperature has gone up by a degree.

But suppose the measurements were as follows
2000 : (30, 30, 30, 30)
2020 : (29, 29, 29, 37)
The average temperature has still gone up to 31, but now we have 3 locations which have cooled a little, and one location with a significant increase in temperature. Are we justified, in this instance, of saying that the ‘temperature’ is going up?

I’m sure the scientists studying this are fully aware of these kinds of issues - but I want to know how they’re accounted for, and how they come to the conclusion they do.

OK, so we accept the premise that, maybe, the planet is warming in some sense.

What is causing this? The standard narrative is that it’s the activity of humans, specifically their grubby little carbon footprints, that is the culprit. How do we know this?

Can we see a correlation in the data between increased ‘carbon’ emissions and temperature rise? Not that correlation should be mistaken for causation, of course, but it’s a start. Can we see a similar correlation in the derivatives here? An increase in the rate of carbon emission should be linked to an increase in the rate of temperature rise.

If human activity is a factor here, how big of a factor is it? Is it a minor perturbation on a natural variation, or is it almost wholly responsible?

The answer here, as far as I can currently tell, is determined from sophisticated models of the climate. Models are not, despite the largely fictional modelling of covid, the evil tool of despotic governments. They can be really useful things. But the more complex a model is, the more caution needs to be exercised. Models can be awesome, but they need to be checked, re-checked, and checked again, against the data. And then, before that glass of brandy at bedtime, check the buggers again.

The record of success and accuracy of future predictions for climate modelling is not great. It might be slightly better than the predictions from covid modelling, but then taking LSD and jumping on a calculator whilst fighting off pink-haired dragons and singing a Sam Smith number would have produced a more accurate prediction for covid.

OK, so we give in again, and say that humans are just carbon-spewing devils who are responsible.

Is the gradual warming of the planet by a degree or two actually a bad thing? And why?

Just because things change does not mean that this change is necessarily bad. How, and why, have we decided that a small rise in global temperature is such a catastrophe?

An extra degree (or even two) in the UK would be most welcome indeed.

Here the answer is usually in terms of things like more unstable weather patterns, more serious extreme weather events, the change in the great oceanic currents or global wind patterns, and the possibility of reaching some kind of ‘tipping point’ in which things run out of control in some horrible positive feedback loop.

Maybe. I’m going to need a bit more convincing though.

These are just some of the ‘starter’ questions I have.

You can see the clear parallel with covid here. We’re being told that if we don’t take extreme measures things will get really bad.

We’re investing like crazy in unstable, unreliable, and stupid solutions in an attempt to ‘reduce’ our carbon footprint, because bad gas = bad planet. Yet the obvious, and sensible, solution to our energy needs - nuclear power - is barely mentioned. If you’re really worried about the carbon emission from using fossil fuels as a means of supplying our energy requirements, then nuclear is the way to go. But, instead, we want to stick millions of fuck-awful windmills in every little corner of our green and pleasant lands and scour the landscape with solar farms.

I can’t make any of it make sense. The proposed ‘solutions’ to the supposed ‘crisis’ are unworkable, and dumb as a bowl of blancmange.

What we’re doing as a ‘response’ to the climate crisis is on the same level as having one-way systems in supermarkets. Useless and bonkers.

I’m going to try to learn a bit more about climate change in the coming year (provided we haven’t all been eliminated by a bad dose of climate change) and so my view may change, but at the moment, to the tune of a well-known Christmas song

It’s beginning to look a lot like covid

1. And I’m not suggesting that doing ‘nothing’ would be an optimal response, either - just better than what we actually did by a country mile.

2. And then to try to coerce the entire planet into getting injected with some rushed and experimental Goo which we now know didn’t work - but that’s a whole other story. Of course, the whipping up of a wholly unnecessary psychotic level of fear works as a great driver for getting lots of people lining up for the clot shot, but that’s probably just entirely coincidental, isn’t it?