Confessions of a Climate Curmudgeon

I have always been skeptical of the catastrophic claims of climate hysterics. There are several reasons for this. I myself have substantial experience observing, measuring, and analyzing complex systems and I just don’t accept that our ability to measure the entire planetary climate is as comprehensive as the hysterics would have us all believe. Adequately measuring and predicting the behavior of even man-made complex systems is not a comprehensively solvable problem. But we are nevertheless expected to believe that we have solved the problem of reliable sensor data for an entire planet.

I also harbor skepticism toward models or, at least, toward anyone who argues for making societal-scale changes merely based upon models. It is easily possible that our climate models are about as accurate as the Covid models were. So imposing societal hardship simply on the basis of models is a hubristic approach only an ideologue could love. Perhaps one of the upsides of the self-inflicted injury associated with Covid policy will be that the public will become far more skeptical of models in general, and of model purveyors in particular.

Third, models are not “science” in the way that people normally think of science. Models do not reflect experimental results but only computational speculations. No one has done actual experiments to prove any of the models because such experiments simply cannot be done at planetary scale. Models are merely mathematical predictions. Where the climate models are concerned, their actual predictive power has been consistently underwhelming. For thirty years or more, the looming climate catastrophe has always been just over the horizon but never actually right here.

Fourth, the climate hysterics tend to self-disclose their own mendacity by never balancing their shrill predictions of catastrophe with any consideration that there could actually be corresponding upsides to, say, warming or increasing CO2. For example, a reasonable person might ask if warming could expand the amount of arable land on the planet? Or if CO2 could improve plant growth efficiency, which would then be a boon to agriculture and thus contribute to human flourishing? I’m not saying that I know that such upsides exist, only that the climate neurotics rarely, if ever, provide an evenhanded analysis. Their consistently stark, one-sided predictions ought to raise warning flags in the minds of everyone not overly inclined toward abject credulity.

All of this bubbled up because of a recent study which reminds us that, not only is CO2 specifically NOT a poison, it is actually beneficial for many things.