Bloomberg: “Climate Deniers are Increasingly Hiding in Plain Sight”

I’ve been most brazen on my views on climate since at least 1990. I’ve never tried to hide behind anything. I’ve been aware that at some stage oil and gas reserves may become too expensive to extract and hence there must be thoughts about how to generate energy and electricity using other technologies, but it’s been pretty clear to me for decades that that is a 21st century process, not a first 20 years of the 21st century process.

I’ve also been pretty clear that it’s a good idea to build homes in a thermally-efficient manner (construction technologies have improved immensely the past 40 years); it’s a good idea to keep improving the manufacturing technologies for aeroplanes (they again have improved steadily each decade); it’s a good idea to keep investing in mass transit systems, provided that there are populations to sustain them in economically realistic ways.

I”ve always said that it’s a good idea not to engage in ‘slash and burn farming’ aka chopping down forests and replacing them with cattle. That’s got zero to do with oil and gas politics, to be brutal. I’ve also said that innovating in farming to reduce dependencies on fossil-fuel products is going to ensure that food remains affordable and healthy for centuries to come.

I’ve focussed on hydrological cycles rather than rainfall statistics as how you manage the rainfalls you receive is infinitely more important for most than the absolute levels of rainfall falling. I’ve been most interested in those who have developed strategies to return barren desert to thriving green oases without shipping in water from hundreds of miles away. Even if some of those folks worry about carbon dioxide, I put that to one side and focus on the good they do to the soils they regenerate, the food they produce and the management of such rainfall as they do receive.

I”ve come to the firm conclusion that all the technologies necessary to create an appropriate level of green-ness on earth are already out there, in the public domain (i.e. in the totality of skills and transferable skills in the globe’s population of environmentally responsible farmers, foresters, landscape managers, market gardeners, vintners etc etc).

I’ve come to the conclusion that trees, the soil, the oceans are all remarkably good at turning carbon dioxide into glucose plus oxygen, when there is sunlight and water to hand.

I”ve noted the ‘greening of the earth’ demonstrated through ongoing satellite-based monitoring of the earth and it says that, if there has been a desertification crisis, it passed it’s peak between 1980 and now.

I’m almost certain that fixating on carbon dioxide is a sure-fire way to become emotionally unhealthy, not to mention neurotic and vindictive. It’s far better to focus on more practical things like restoring 10-20sqm of land to productive health via feeding the soil, creating ecosystems that match the soil etc etc.

As for ‘urban heat islands’, well, perhaps the next piece of ‘innovation’ should concern ‘designing 21st century cities to include the cooling effects of tree cover’??