Climate impotence

Grumpy should state outright that he is not a ‘climate change denier’ (although he is a ‘climate emergency’ – silly term – denier; see below). Nor would he feel in any way competent to question peer reviewed research on the topic undertaken at reputable establishments. However, he has cause to increasingly question the balance and veracity of public pronouncements on the issue, whether issued by the ‘climate emergency’ or ‘climate hoax’ end of the spectrum.

Further, there are initiatives and actions seeking to mitigate climate change which are well meaning, but fundamentally pointless, unless one subscribes to the edict of Mahatma Ghandhi that “whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” The comments in this section will also highlight the worst excesses of these public money wasting token vanity projects.

Their are many examples in this blog of misleading, hysterical or factual misrepresentations of climate change data, or about initiatives ranging from the well-meaning but pointless to the plain stupid, generally instantiated in the public sector by amateur politicians seeking to burnish their climate credentials.

Top of the list of misleading terms is ‘climate emergency’. The reason for the climate movement’s conflating the words ‘climate’ and ’emergency’ is that is has some much more emotional weight then the more neutral word, ‘change’. Along with ‘extinction’ it brings with it the image of global and imminent threat to human life itself , and hence gains more traction in the noise of media communications. However, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines ’emergency’ as “A serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action “; ‘unexpected’ is defined by OED as “Not expected or regarded as likely to happen “, and ‘immediate’ as “instant”.

But climate change is not unexpected, and the outcomes from any actions to address it cannot be in anyway correlated to whether those outcomes are delayed by 10 seconds or 10 minutes. So the word ’emergency’ is being used not to aid understanding or for precise communication, but to trigger emotive reactions. The expression is simply nonsense, by any objective analysis of the English language.

In addition, the climate lobby seems to now also embrace other ‘environmental’ issues; one current band wagon is about the use of plastics. In fact, their are inherent conflicts of the plastics campaign with the climate movement, in that (for example) one time plastic bags have a much lower overall CO2 equivalent impact that one time paper ones.