Chicken Little's Great Big Thermostat in the Sky

Over a century, the earth’s temperature may have risen by one to two degrees Fahrenheit; and, it is possible that humans are culpable; but from the rhetoric of climate change alarmists one might conclude that the world is on fire and that the fire is an arson ignited by American humans against their host, earth. By contrast, weren't Chicken Little's claims sedate?

These alarmists spend most of their time stoking hysteria ("the consequences will be terrible if we don't take quick action") and excoriating their opponents as "flat-earthers", "deniers", and "anti-intellectuals" spewing "venom" and "sheer rage". Maybe they consider it disclosure and debate to just darkle populist, even institutional opposition like Congress, (ie. preposterously, as believers that the moon is cheese)? Why all this drama, mama? Are they scaring because they are caring?

If only we could calm them, if only they would hush their hysteria just enough for a reasoned discourse they might discover the 'nuts' that inform some of their opinions.

First, why are these alarmists so negative about climate change? I thought they were all about change. Remember the rain forest? Rising levels of carbon have been and will be a boon to plants according to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate, citing 3,586 studies: “Most plants will display enhanced rates of photosynthesis and biomass production as the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration rises”—even anthropogenically. Aren’t plants green? So, this is a reason for alarm: the spruce tree in one’s own landscape may become a giant sequoia? It seems like climate change activists are looking at the glass half empty. Maybe, instead, it is half-full: will melting ice caps / rising oceans be adverse to endangered whales? According to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate, “Multiple studies from multiple ocean regions confirm ocean productivity tends to increase with temperature…..Subjects of this research include phytoplankton (whale food) and macroalgae, corals, crustaceans, and fish.”  Hurrah for the whales!?

In resisting change, which may be demonstrably good for plants and animals, are climate change activists being anthropocentric chauvinists—discriminating against plants and animals and in favor of their own species? So, whose environment concerns environmentalism, hypocrite? Would you speak for the Earth and all its life? While some climate scarers are hypocrites, I think it is likely that most are sincere but misinformed. ‘Consensus’ and catastrophism has them denying the prospective benefits of change—even to humanity. And even if climate change is as adverse to humans as alarmists assert, won’t humans adapt? Maybe climate change will enhance our evolutionary biology? Perhaps they have never seen that budget-buster movie, Waterworld?  Why won't they focus on the positive? And be calm? And defer to a deliberative approach? 

Second, climate scientists have been so engrossed in discerning a change to global temperatures, in refining what were unreliable models of climate change, and in constructing consensus publications that even the most panicked among them have yet to make specific, sequenced policy prescriptions. Instead, a recent report by the U.S. Global Change Research Program which pooled resources from many federal agencies including NASA, (the once National Aeronautics and Space Administration--retooling as the National Atmospheric Science Administration?) focuses on simulating catastrophes. It draws tangents between future catastrophes and past events without disclosing probabilities and correlations. It describes future black swan events including floods, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and food shortages in detail by U.S. region. This approach makes cataclysm seem close to home.  What the report lacks is specific, sequenced prescriptions about how society might avert the simulated catastrophes. But if its authors are panicked about our prospects without climate controls, why would they omit these? Especially when the report asserted that: "response activities are necessary to limit the magnitude and impacts of global climate change on the United States". What response activities “are necessary”?  They won't say.  This they defer to a prospective Climate Controller in Chief.

Have they omitted their prescriptions because there is no consensus among them as to what response activities will save us from the dire consequences they simulate? Doesn't this say something about how ingenuous they are about their fire alarms--if they won't immediately identify the emergency exits they see and supply us with their prospective extinguishers? Doesn't it also say something about how efficacious they consider their evacuation plans and extinguishers? Would they have all of creation put its blind trust in a single, human, lay Climate Controller in Chief?

Third, recognize that this alarmist approach creates a climate of crisis in America that is adverse to the rule of law. Is "quick action" on climate change--like the new executive edicts and the new EPA regulations--legal or Constitutional? Do they acknowledge the sovereignty of the rule of law? Will Congress or the Supreme Court consider and check these executive, federal, and bureaucratic histrionics? Or will we, like Chicken Little in tow, become fox food?

Fourth, our ability to measure, let alone to hindcast or to forecast, climate change is nascent. Consider this:  how reliable were weather instruments a century ago? How robust (ie. as to frequency) were thermometer readings a century ago? How subject were these readings to human errors (ie. someone slept in)? How unbiased was the choice as to where measuring instruments were placed when data couldn't be retrieved wirelessly? In other words, what inferences can one make about how global surface temperatures have changed from intermittent data collected at sparse points on the globe as recorded in private journals a century ago--let alone how oceanic or atmospheric temperatures have changed? And what assumptions or adjustments are necessary to relate those scant measures with the more robust readings available today--and thus to form a time series? A time lapse map showing the counts and placements of human instrumentation employed in measuring climate change data would reveal how tenuous are any take aways as yet. Recognize that robust climate change measurement is just decades old. And human hindcasts and forecasts are much younger.

Given the data limitations, it is entirely possible that global warming as measured has much to do with environmental changes only at the points where weather instrumentation was placed. Of course, New York City and London have changed and were cooler when they had pastures--green pastures where blacktop and buildings now stand. Climate science has not adjusted its data for urban heat islands as noted by Dr. Roy Spencer. And adjustments would be assumptive--and not exactly scientific.

Somewhere, perhaps a civilization more advanced is chuckling unsympathetically: here is a curious life-form, the human, still uncertain of its own consciousness and comprehension; perceiving progress (ie. science) even in nullifying entropy (its own concept)--as discerned by its biased anatomy using tools, references, and elements motive in nearby space; presuming, to make inferences from the near past (decades) reliant on the most minute changes to its heat measures (a degree) to simulate centuries of cataclysms to be averted; presuming to differentiate cause from effect and help from harm to its host while assuming its tenancy is healthy to Earth; presuming to sustain its comparatively superannuated satellite by its fledgling, but now conscious (?) acts or omissions; presuming to check itself in favor of other life-forms; presuming, on this basis, to enforce regulation of existential emissions against its own kind. Is this what 'science' saw in the lemmings? Meanwhile, on Earth, this callous exercise might be as harmless as a game of billiards played "on a cloth untrue, with a twisted cue, and elliptical billiard balls"--if it didn't involve all of our lives and livelihoods.

Of course, true conservatives acknowledge climate change. Global warming is described in the Bible:  "For behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts.....But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.....And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet". True progressives, true conservatives don't consider this reference to global warming to be a cause for panic any more than we consider current climate scare tactics to be a cause for panic. We trust the Creator.  How many comets, asteroids, and satellites, in this solar system, have never collided with the earth? How many calamities have never culminated here? Elevated, erroneous observations of science and edicts by our leaders are just a precursor to Biblical global warming. To avert the adversity of this inevitable, imminent climate change, one needs only personal change: to be humble, to cease to do wickedly, and to trust God. Neither science, nor authority, nor crisis should supplant our trust in God. And it would be catastrophic to render unto Caesar that which was made in the image of God: if we trust God, we will not be reconciled to having our God-given breaths taxed by men, to having the air we exhale regulated by government, to giving custody of our bodies to a state--any more than we will be reconciled to erecting a man-made, high-tech, Babel-like tower to 'heaven'. Some may consider our dissent intolerable discord. We consider it concord with the will of God--trusting that those who foment false crises, who burn the truth, who burn the Constitution, and who burn believers, will, in God's good time, be burned--eternally.