There was a
time when the entire Earth was a seething hellish mass with a toxic atmosphere. Then there was a time when things cooled off,
water condensed out and eventually life forms popped up to party.
Who were then largely killed off by a bunch of mutants who insisted on dumping oxygen into the atmosphere. And so we became an oxygen-based bio-culture.
For some reason, it is considered "good business" to attempt to return to those earlier halcyon days, and business is more important than, say, people being able to breathe or not die of heatstroke.
Yes, the climate of the Earth has changed many times. There are Indian villages located in what is now the Gulf of Mexico. Ocean levels have risen and fallen hundreds of meters.
And no one is disputing that.
The issue is that when you filter out the normal climate
patterns that come from
solar cycles and other external forces, the only thing that really tracks current trends is the amount of
greenhouse gas that we've been dumping into the atmosphere between the days when air pollution was something that rarely extended outside of the villages and towns.
And even that wouldn't be an issue, except that the rate of change is so fast that it's implicated in extinction events. Plants and animals can and do adapt to slow changes in climate. It's quite another matter when climate changes virtually overnight. Change takes time.
Plus, do you
really want a horde of refugees from Miami crowding into your peaceful little inland hamlet? I'm not even on near-ocean property myself, but a 3 meter rise in sea level would have water seeping in my front door. And if I were in my 20s, the probability of seeing that happen in my life is computed to be uncomfortably high.
The arguments about trying to mitigate global warming are really quite feeble. The #1 argument is that doing so would kill jobs. And that's bogus because many of the same people shouting that are people who are actively sending jobs offshore or automating them out of existence. It's also specious because when you create a demand, someone's got to fill it. There are people whose livelihood is based on making and installing anti-pollution equipment. Because our last scoffed-at environmental disaster was quite literally dissolving the underwear of workers sitting on park benches. Now you can sit and if there's a burning sensation, at least it's probably not local industry at fault.
Climate change denial is a Conservative political point, and from what I can see, if you're conservative, anything you cannot bomb into submission is either God's Will or a Librul Conspiracy. If you think it's God's Will, then you're helpless and might as well just sit around waiting for Jesus to come (not but what some are actively trying to
force Him to). And if it's the damn Libruls, then double-down. I could give you a long diatribe about the faults of the Left, but when did Conservative become about limited ideas? Was this the vision of Walt Disney or Henry Ford? The Captains of Industry have abandoned industry in favor of mergers, acquisitions, and complex money games. R&D can't allow the inefficiency of blind research and serendipity anymore - you have to show concrete goals on a fixed schedule for those quarterly profits rises. R&D is often outsourced or even disposed of entirely. Even universities have been subverted to monetization.
There are more people working at Arby's than in the coal industry. In fact, I believe that there are now more people working in the solar power industry than the coal industry. Coal mines are shutting down all over. Coal-fired generating plants have been switching over to cheaper, more efficient fuels. Even my own local technological backwater is bringing 3 more solar farms online at the local power utility.
Imagine what might be accomplished if we had an administration that encouraged development of renewable, non-polluting energy products instead of pushing for dinosaur (no pun intended) fuel - from foreign sources, often enough.
Make no mistake. I like the fact that I can grow a wider variety of tropical fruits than I used to. And it would probably be pretty cool if the dragonflies with 15-foot wingspans returned. But wheat doesn't grow in Florida. How about seeing Kansas with the sort of sub-tropical climate I grew up in? Hope you like peanut butter on corn tortillas.
