It's no secret that the Earth's climate has and always will be an ever-changing system. Through most of the planet's history, in fact, it's been warmer than it is now, and through much of that history, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels have been higher than they are now. In fact, we are, at present, still emerging from the last major glaciation, and if you look at a chart of estimated global temperature trends over time, we're actually still in an unusually cold spell. In times like the Eocene Thermal Maximum, there were tropical forests in Germany, and hardwood timber in Antarctica. So, yes, things change.
It's also no secret that human activity does have some effect. Everything we do, after all, does have some effect, even if it's tiny in comparison to the Earth's natural cycles in ocean currents, in axial tilt, in its orbit, or the cycles of the sun, which can also have a significant effect. All of these things are known. But it's only been the last few decades that some people have tried to weaponize this inevitable aspect of the planet's history for a political agenda.
In the U.K. Telegraph, Jordan Peterson recently made some very good points on this weaponization of climate by the left.
A veritable moral panic over air conditioning is raging – rather surreally – across the West as high summer temperatures produce the usual flood of exaggerated concerns.
Britons have been summarily ordered to remove already installed AC units under net zero rules, as The Telegraph has reported. France’s climate minister expressed horror at the very notion of artificial indoor cooling. “Do you think that’s going to prevent forest fires?” she said. “Do you think that’s going to prevent a crop from dying?” Germany’s state broadcaster added to “climate awareness” with this pearl of wisdom: “Air conditioners: what cools us down, heats up the Earth.”
Moral panic isn't too strong a term for what the governments of Britain, France and Germany are trying to do here. But the issue goes much farther than that. Mr. Peterson continues:
The roots of such worrisome totalising can be traced in the more academic realm to the 1960s and 1970s, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth. More distal influences, such as Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto of 1848, also merit consideration, as we shall see.
There is another source, however, unmatched in its combination of scientific pretension, charged emotional tone, policy impact and mass appeal: former vice-president Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which this year marks its 20th anniversary.
Ay, that's the rub: The sensationalizing of the planet's climate, which began in the 1960s. Now, some of us are old enough to remember the 1960s, and yes, there were very serious environmental issues then. The air in some of our major cities was almost unbreathable. Our roadsides were covered with litter. Our rivers were badly polluted. But we have fixed all that now; our air, land and water, at least in the developed world, are cleaner than they have been since the start of the Industrial Revolution. We won that fight, and we're still winning it.
But the political fight it still ongoing, and the environmental issues have morphed, becoming climate issues, which are not nearly as tangible; one can point to a veil of smog over a city or a pile of garbage along a roadside, but looking at global mean temperatures over hundreds and thousands of years, that's something different, and something most people can't be bothered with. So why?
It's all about control.
More than any other single work, this glossy, visually dramatic production translated the abstractions of climate modelling into a compelling, emotionally charged narrative – one that struck fear into the hearts of tens of millions. It did so by framing mankind’s industrial activity and consequent increase in CO2 production as the driver of a truly dangerous increase in global temperature. It did so by warning of severe and impending ecological devastation and economic disruption. It did so by arguing for the necessity of emergency response, while casting dissent as the most serious of modern sins.
That's the very nub of the matter.
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There are, without doubt, true believers among the climate scolds: People who are, despite all evidence to the contrary (which they won't examine) believe in the bugaboo of anthropogenic climate disaster with a religious fervor. These people are the useful idiots of the movement, the clowns who go to protests with their synthetic-fiber clothing, their plastic shoes, their smartphones, none of which would be possible without petroleum - and there, they wave "STOP OIL" signs. It's ridiculous, in the original sense of the word.
Politicians, though, almost all on the left, are leveraging this issue to clamp down on free enterprise, to reduce our modern, comfortable lifestyles. We see it in Europe, where homeowners are being forced to take down air conditioning units in the middle of a heat wave. We see it in the United States, where state governors are trying to eliminate gas stoves and state legislatures are trying to pass laws forbidding the sale of gasoline-powered cars and trucks.
It's all about control. It's not about science. It's not about the earth. It's not about our environment. It may have been, at the beginning. But it's not any more. It's all about control, and leftist politicians and activists will keep using this issue, will keep invoking climate change to promote panic, to gain more and more and more power and control. That's what the left does.
