By Donna Laframboise, from her Facebook page
This photo is making the rounds at the moment. People I love and admire have posted it. Good people. Kind people. So I’m going to try to explain why it’s counter productive.
As a journalist I have followed the climate debate closely for a decade. When I research a topic, I dig deep. I assure you, it has never been the position of skeptics that ‘climate change isn’t real.’ That is a fundamental misrepresentation.
The climate has always changed. The last Ice Age was a mere 12,000 years ago. From this perspective, the claim that climate change is ‘caused by humans’ strikes skeptics as profoundly scientifically illiterate, a case of puny humanity exaggerating its importance on a planet whose climate was doing its own thing *billions* of years before humans even appeared.
The real question is: What portion of current climate change is caused by humanity?
Despite research costing billions, science cannot answer this question. The UN’s climate body can only say it’s the *opinion* of its experts that humanity is responsible for an unspecified *majority* of change since 1950.
I’ve written 2 books about that UN climate body. Its purpose is to play midwife to UN climate treaties, therefore it would love to phrase things more concretely. It cannot. Hard evidence just isn’t there.
There is now a long history of environmental doom mongering, of dire predictions pre-dating even the 1960s and 1970s, that have *always* failed to materialize. From that perspective, climate skeptics know their history & have learned from it.
How many failed predictions of eco-apocalypse are necessary before those who approach climate change with healthy skepticism are no longer dismissed as morons?
Belittling people, distorting their position so that they look stupid, gets us nowhere. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind. It doesn’t promote mutual respect. Instead it wounds, it insults, it polarizes.
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“…Instead it wounds, it insults, it polarizes…”
Aha! Mission successful, then!
“The real question is: What portion of current climate change is caused by humanity?”
The real question should be, Will the result of anthropogenic climate change be of greater cost than the benefits gained from the anthropogenic behaviour causing it?
My answer is No. All that may be damaged by climate change was created as a result of anthropogenic behaviour. I’d like a Climate catastrophist to explain, what has to happen for the destruction caused by anthropogenic climate change to be greater than the benefits from anthropogenic activity?
They missed the end of the chart. SCAM EXPOSED. COMPENSATION CLAIMS.
A major enabler of the progressive left mantra, “the ends justify the means,” is United Nations Principle 15. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, the United Nations produced the Rio Declaration. That document includes Principle 15: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.” This has become known as the Precautionary Principle.
The EPA interprets the Principle to mean that, if one can hypothesize a small possibility of an environmental threat, measures to respond to the perceived threat are justified. Compelling scientific evidence of a threat of serious damage becomes a moot point. The adoption of this premise was the beginning of “agenda-driven science.”
It was a small step for the EPA and their contractors to resort to falsified reports to advance political agendas and to achieve personal financial goals. I submit that the aggressive implementation of the Principle by the EPA has been a major contributor to “The Crisis of Integrity-Deficient Science” in the U.S. Rejecting the Precautionary Principle as a guide for environmental policy and returning to a rational environmental policy would go a long way toward restoring scientific integrity.