Climate Change, the United Nations and Hubris

The United Nations is at the center of a perfect storm of meteorological misinformation. This effete debating society, loaded with upper caste socialists and pseudo-intellectuals, has decided it likes playing, “chicken little.”  They have adopted a highly questionable and deliberately edited paper blaming global warming on humans.  Not just any humans of course.  The culprits are invariably Judeo-Christian, capitalistic, self governing and successful.  The United Nations is unable to blame bad things on genuinely bad people.  Instead, they like blaming only those people who actually pay the bills for these free-loaders.  It’s the same reason teen-agers despise their parents—a combination of jejune guilt and jealousy.  If you are a failed/fascists/socialist/third world/Islamic human you get a pass.  The rest of us get blamed for the apocalypse.  Oh, wait a minute.  “Apocalypse” would endorse a Christian viewpoint and we know Christians are part of the problem, so not the apocalypse—but we are definitely to blame for something very bad.   

Surrounded by this surfeit of truth, half-truth, convoluted half-truth, conjecture, assumption and outright artifice we need a little academic triage to maintain our sanity. 

First, there is ample evidence of global warming.  We live in the Holocene epoch, in the middle of a warming trend between ice ages.   Glaciers have been melting since the end of the last ice age.  The planet has been much warmer than this.  Our sea levels have been much higher.  All of this happened without human cause.

Our global surface temperature has increased by less than 1 degree Celsius since the late 1800’s.  Global temperatures have leveled off over the last 15 years, despite predictions that they would soar.  To explain this away, the U.N. has decided that only high temperatures count and that maybe the oceans are just sucking up the warmth.  This is after the debacle of their infamous, “hockey stick” graph which was a computer program so badly written that you could put in any set of random numbers and it would always produce the same graph.

Finally, the sun will always be the primary mover in our climate.  Solar output was thought to be a constant until the late 1970’s.  Now we know that solar radiation production is variable to the point of affecting our climate.  This information was deleted from the United Nations study.  

The United Nations contorts data because of hubris.  It needs to embrace the idea of anthropogenic climate change because it wants man, not nature and certainly not God to be in charge.  Humans understand much, so we think we should control much.  We like simple solutions that follow the same pattern as our movies and televisions shows.  We want a villain who is big and powerful.  We want a hero who is the underdog.  We want a solution that empowers us all.  We like the meteorological story to be easily understood and capable of completion within our two hour attention, popcorn and bladder span. 

The United Nations gathers money and power only if there is a sense of impending disaster.  It is not adverse to altering or exaggerating data to create that sense of doom.  However, paranoia and political zeal are no substitute for empirical data.

Remember, simple solutions work only for simple problems or simple minds.  Far from being a done deal, the causes, extent and prevention of global warming is still an evolving science and it needs broader, unfettered examination.  This can not happen if media presumes perfect knowledge on the side of militant environmentalists, and deception on the part of those who seek hard data and real solutions.

Read widely and keep the faith.