The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'chemtrails at sunset.'
From my perspective, climate change is an undeniable reality. Environmental catastrophes have become intertwined with everyday life. Most common foods now contain microplastics and hormone-disrupting chemicals. Most of the planet's insects and fish are dead. There are forever chemicals in the groundwater. Some animal species are getting weird diseases. Other species are going extinct.
All of this is evidence that our climate is changing, but this evidence is typically ignored in public discourse. Instead of addressing the apocalyptic ecological issues we face, we're being told to focus exclusively on atmospheric carbon. And we're being primed to accept a whole host of restrictive policy measures based on climate science that is, at best, inconclusive.
Here's a quote from a Forbes article that lays out some problems with this science and how it's being misrepresented:
In 1996, former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev emphasized the importance of using climate alarmism to advance socialist Marxist objectives: "The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order." ... IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer, speaking in November 2010, advised that: "One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world's wealth." ... Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of 2001 and 2007 IPCC report chapters, writing in a 2007 "Predictions of Climate" blog appearing in the science journal Nature.com, admitted: "None of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state."
It would be super cool if our computer models could accurately represent our planet's climate. But they can't. Our models can't even predict the weather two weeks into the future. We can see that glaciers are melting. We can measure rising temperatures and compare them with the temperatures we measured a hundred years ago. We can examine ice core data and consider the implications of that. But our grasp of the big picture is shaky at best.
At the same time, every one of us has the innate potential to tap into deep ecological awareness. If society's choices were guided by such awareness, many of these choices would be different. Instead, this potential remains largely ignored. On this account, all I can really do is feel sad for people. Because either they feel the natural world as a living, breathing thing, thereby feeling the distress it is in, or they cannot feel the world at all, which is a more heartbreaking thought.
On a deeper level, I think people do feel the ecological distress evident all around us. But instead of recognizing this feeling for what it is, they misidentify it as the kind of personal problem that the control regime approves of, which typically means one that can be treated with medication. Although it's perfectly reasonable to lament the wholesale destruction of the biological context for our lives, the cure for this is to actually fix our harmful systems. And the control regime has no appetite for a fix like that.
One of the most frightening policy responses to the climate crisis is the use of geoengineering. There are people out there who think that spraying reflective aerosol chemicals all over the world is the solution to the perceived problem of global warming. These people are an existential threat to our species. They have no idea what the real impact of their proposals would be, and appear ready to risk all of our lives on the shoddiest of science.
From where I stand, reducing emissions and transitioning to renewable energy makes sense. So does radically changing our land use habits to regenerate ecosystems instead of destroying them. But experimenting with climate interventions that could easily go horribly awry is deeply unwise. We don't even understand the climate. It's not at all clear that the climate itself is broken. Tinkering with this system we don't understand is beyond foolish. I would call it sheer madness.
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