Straight Dope on Medicine: Death by Climate Change

Author

Scott Ganser
April 08, 2024

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us. Bill Nye

Climate change is the greatest threat to humanity, perhaps ever. Global temperatures are rising at an unprecedented rate, causing drought and forest fires and impacting human health. Cary Kennedy

Climate change is a terrible problem, and it absolutely needs to be solved. It deserves to be a huge priority. Bill Gates

There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it. David Attenborough

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn't think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilization, we wouldn't be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So, I didn't understand how that added up. Greta Thunburg

On climate change, we are told that there will be a civilization-ending development in the form of massive sea level rise as soon as 2050. Anybody plan to be here in 2050? I think a few of us do, myself included. Jill Stein

Alarmed yet?

One thing to bear in mind is that not everyone agrees, and not all data point in one direction.

This is not an existential threat.[i]

                                                -Atmospheric Scientist Richard Linzen

 Are Sea Levels rising?

Most indicators are yes.

Yale Climate Connections says, “Global sea level has risen 6.7 inches (170 mm) over the past 100 years — and the rate of rise has doubled since the 20th century. “[ii]

When sea ice and glaciers melt, the amount of sea water goes up. Secondly, warmer water is less dense, so thermal expansion is also a contributor to sea levels rising.

Yale recommends that we call our current age the Aquacene, because it is a time of rapidly increasing flooding from sea level rise and heavier precipitation events, because of human-caused climate change, which will drive millions of people from their homes and fundamentally alter society.

Is there more world flooding?

The data is not real convincing. In fact, argumentative type could argue that we have embarked on a declining trend.

Compensatory Mechanisms

The Earth is not without means. The Ozone Hole has essentially been eliminated. One way to take care of increasing CO2 levels, a greenhouse gas, is to grow a greenhouse. More green plants process the CO2. It also helps crop yields, so feeding people becomes easier.

The global greening effect, which dates back to the 1980s or earlier, isn't tiny. In one 2019 study published in the journal Nature Sustainability, scientists found that the Earth had increased its green leaf area (i.e., the number of leaves) by 5 percent in the last two decades.[iii]

Recent trends in global greening. Darker green indicates where the planet is becoming leafier. Chen et al./Nature Sustainability

Conclusion

One of the reasons that this is being done, is to give people power over the energy sector. That is why the climate catastrophe group came into being. This dates back to the 1960s. However, the direction has changed. The 1970s were supposed to be the advent of a new “ice age.”

The idea there was that you wanted to get rid of coal fire plants which created sulfates that were reflecting light and causing global cooling.

According to the homeostatic hypothesis, the earth is a dynamic system that can shift and change to contend with any disruption. We see that the ozone hole was something that the planet could and has healed from. Why should this be any different?

Le Chatelier's principle states that if a dynamic equilibrium is disturbed by changing the conditions, the position of equilibrium shifts to counteract the change to reestablish an equilibrium.

In fact, more technology instead of less might be salvific. There is direct carbon capture and we are on the cusp of getting nuclear fusion (see Helion Energy).

When India became independent, their population was under 200 million. Today it is 1.3 billion and they are food exporters.

The immense greening of the planet is a “big deal.” It will help with excess carbon dioxide. Crop yields will also go up.

Carbon dioxide does absorb in the infrared, which gives it the ability to warm things up. What are the implications?

If you hate technology and western culture, attacking energy is sensible. Energy = Prosperity is a well-known equation. Depriving a population of energy or making it prohibitively expensive is a way to tear the society down, and appear to be virtuous at the same time.

Levin surmises that a group of people resent the middle class and don’t want them to be able to rise above their station or enjoy heating/cooling and the benefits of their dishwashers. Jordan Peterson adds that there appears to be an antipathy for normal people thriving. In the Malthusian vein, the idea is that the only pristine landscape is one untouched by human beings. That would dictate that there should be fewer of us and that we should be more and more confined. Also, the notion of “limited resources” enters in. The idea is that the population will grow, eat up all its resources and then go extinct when everything has been depleted.

This is idiotic.

Crops are planted every year for about as long as man has been on the planet. There is no sign this practice has to or will come to an end. Our population is “sustainable.” In fact, the science indicates that we could well feed a planetary population of 10 billion. We might never get there because all the advanced societies aren’t having kids, and for the last three years there have been measurable excess deaths worldwide.

The Earth is NOT dominated by the greenhouse effect. It is a contributor, NOT a king. There are zoned like the tropics and extratropics which have their own powerful controlling mechanisms, like wind currents. These forces act to wipe out temperature differences.

You cannot reduce complex systems to one variable like temperature. That is like saying you could fairly represent a human being by height. There is IQ, interest, age, gender, health, personality that carry a great deal of weight as well.

Indeed, temperature instabilities between the tropics and the poles induce cyclonic and anti-cyclonic weather patterns. Hydrodynamics have a great deal to say about these temperature zones.

There is no polar amplification of the greenhouse effect. It doesn’t exist. This is a fallacy and fairy-tale thinking.  It is rather localized to the tropics.[iv]

Our weather systems have almost an infinite number of degrees of freedom. They can dump excess energy in a multitude of different ways, not just heating everything up. Even if things do heat up, no one should think it is permanent or irreversible.

Bear in mind that a lot of scientists are now getting paid a lot of money to say that there is global warming. It is highly financially incentivized. Saying the opposite, or not agreeing with the HOLY NARRATIVE relegates you to the scientific trash heap.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”