Luxembourg Times: “Climate change scepticism isn’t real”

Essay by Eric Worrall

“… What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change … they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally …”

Climate change scepticism isn’t real

To deny the existence of global warming, or its human causes, is an untenable position to take and hard to believe, argues Alex Stevensson

…

What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change is real is actually that they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally, and that they would rather do nothing. 

If you own a few classic cars, work for a petrochemicals company, enjoy travelling to Asia twice a year, gorge on steaks twice a week, or any number of other scenarios, this is not an unreasonable reaction: “If I can convince myself, and at least some people around me, that this problem doesn’t exist, I might just be able to live out the rest of my life in blissful ignorance.”

This logic could probably work for most of us – and certainly for someone as elderly as Mr Trump. But sometimes ignorance isn’t bliss. Sometimes it’s nothing short of deliberate sabotage of the future.

…

Read more: https://www.luxtimes.lu/world/climate-change-scepticism-isnt-real/104965758.html

What a profoundly ignorant article.

Do we affect the climate? Of course we do. Cutting down trees impacts water cycles. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions also likely affect the climate, though since the CO2 band in the atmosphere is already saturated, adding more CO2 likely has limited impact.

But this isn’t the only viewpoint in the climate skeptic community. If Alex Stevensson had bothered to do some research, he might have discovered there is a range of views, from people like myself who think CO2 has almost no effect, to people who fully accept IPCC predictions of global warming, but question the economic calculations of estimated impacts.

Had Alex made an effort, he would have learned that far from being dangerously warm, the world is currently locked in one of the coldest periods of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, that permanent polar ice is not the normal state of Earth’s historical climate, and that life thrived in past warm periods.

Alex might have even learned even if the world warms, there is no evidence that warmer conditions hurt nature. He might have learned that our monkey ancestors first emerged in the fossil record during one of the warmest periods of the last hundred million years, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when global temperatures were 5-8C hotter than today. Far from being harmed by such warmth, our monkey ancestors colonised much of the planet, feasting on the abundance the extreme warmth of the PETM provided, spreading across Eurasia and Northern Europe, only retreating when the return of colder conditions drover them from their their new homes. If a monkey ancestor with a brain the size of a matchbox could thrive in much warmer conditions than today, we humans could certainly cope.

Most of all, if Alex had bothered to do his job as a reporter and get out and talk to people, rather than wasting his reader’s time by airing his nonsensical personal prejudices, he would have learned the real fakes are those who push unfounded fear, uncertainty and doubt, that the climate fear mongers are no different to the Covid fear mongers, who damaged our national economies and our children’s mental health with months or in some cases years of completely unnecessary enforced social isolation at home.