I & I Editorial BoardBefore the global warming catastrophists held sway in our politics and in the media, we were warned that another ice age was in our near future. But that prediction was overwhelmed by fearmongers who have been telling us for decades that we’re burning our world with greenhouse gas emissions. Now we’re hearing again that the big freeze is coming. What do we do with this new information?
Best just to ignore it, since predicting the future climate based on human activity is a narcissistic folly.
In 1970, University of California, Davis ecologist Kenneth Watt pulled the alarm handle. Our planet, he said, “has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Didn’t happen. Instead, climate activists have been promising an overheated future. In a 1988 Senate hearing, James Hansen claimed “the greenhouse effect is here.” We have since been inundated by predictions that man’s combustion of fossil fuels was not just going to roast Earth, it would cause more frequent and more damaging storms, calamitous droughts, overflowing rains, the wildest of wildfires and life-threatening sea level rises, to name a few of the end-is-near predictions.
The existential threat is always just around the bend where we can’t see it but we just know it’s there. Convincing you of that, is what the green left has always done to accrete power, wealth and influence to itself.
And yet, despite this, humanity has plugged on. But now a new threat has emerged. Carbon dioxide might be a factor in turning “warming events into ice ages,” thus saith a report recently published in Science.
Or maybe it’s not. It’s too soon to tell. And it’s likely that it will always be too soon to tell, since contrary to the left-leaning media’s take, most climate warming science is hotly debated and therefore not at all certain.
In any event, let’s not confuse this report with one that, according to the New York Post, also floats the idea that a new ice age is coming, in this case because “the Gulf Stream is near collapse.”
Reminder: This is just a couple of weeks after influential arch-global warmist and multi-billionaire Bill Gates announced a change of heart about climate change, saying that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
Whatever the supposed state of the climate is, no matter what dangerous trends have allegedly been identified, we suggest that everyone should take the new information and do … nothing. Because that’s roughly what it’s worth.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
I wonder who will win the race.
First, global cooling got a head start, I think in about the 1970’s. Then when that didn’t happen it morphed into global warming. Now we’re back to global cooling. I have a feeling our esteemed “scientists” will get it right one of these days.
Perhaps, after a new “vaccine” is created and mandated for a new variant of COVID. Or when the 1927 Yankees win another World Series!
In any event, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the global warming incantation (or as the too-much-time-on-their-hands-liberal-horde call it now, “climate change”) better described (in two words yet) than as I&I’s “narcissistic folly.”
Take your pick, because climate change is “settled science”.
Legitimate scientists, and other intelligent people, have long-since known that climate on Earth is cyclic.
We also have long-known that politicians and other scammers pretend otherwise for illegitimate economic gain.
50 years of BS down the tubes
Bill Gates is heavily investing in AI. AI requires massive energy. Wind and Solar can’t possibly supply. Ergo Climate Change isn’t that bad. Let’s open those nuclear plants now and crank up the coal. 😎
I hadn’t thought of that. Good point.
As they say, “Follow The Money!”
The people pushing the climate change agenda are the same people who can’t tell the difference between a man and a woman, so they declare that both are equal. These are the same people who tell men that they should take a divorce license from a gay government that considers his children the property of the state and women the head of the household instead of men. And they come from Universities that teach students to ask newborns for permission before touching them to change their diapers.
Funny we was suppose to be having New Ice Age back in the 1970’s but in twenty years its was Global Warming that was according to the leftists rags like Time and Newsweek
What a coincidence!
First global cooling led to global warming. And several days after Bill Gates renounced that global warming (after being such a rabid follower) was an existential threat, we go to global cooling again.
And they say that coincidences never happen. I wonder if Gates will now get on the global cooling bandwagon?
Or perhaps he’ll split up the Gates Foundation and half will perceive there is a real danger of global warming, while the other half rallies around global cooling.
The article is brilliant. It leads me toward a great idea for an invention. My vision for dealing with future climate changes (that is, varying temperature patterns) involves the invention of a piece of equipment that runs on gas or electricity and has a temperature thingamajig that you can turn up or down in response to fluctuations in the weather such that the temperature indoors is roughly constant. I’ll see about getting a patent right after the upcoming holidays when the government workers have used all their banked vacation time. Do you think it will catch on enough to produce a decent ROI?
I have read that the Earth has experienced four “ice ages”, and that we are now still in the last of these ice ages. Within these extended cooling periods, there are periods when shorter term warming trends dominate. The rate of climate change perceived by humans is too slow for preemptive actions. Humans just limp along and respond only when local food production is impaired to the point that humans must migrate to a warmer (or colder) climate. Only since the Industrial Revolution has it been possible to utilize remote food sources to alleviate local shortages. Past civilizations in peril moved people, not food.
I have no idea when and how people will physically respond to climate changes. Maybe it is happening now as global human fertility drops and global migration increases……both the result of millions of individual decisions, not government programs. Unlike the 19th century, few if any governments are consciously promoting emigration of their own people to relieve socioeconomic pressures at home.