The evolution of a scare tactic: Climate Change™

In the early 1970s, the populace at-large was warned about “Global Cooling,” the threat of a new ice age burying the temperate latitudes in snow and ice, freezing crops and starving hundreds of millions of people. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Malthusian nightmare changed from cooling to warming. Now the planet would heat up and desiccate its landmasses, flooding coastlines and causing plants to wither, starving billions. This time the changes also had a principal cause: Man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Unfortunately for the Chicken Little crowd, the crude computer models that predicted an increasingly alarming rise in temperatures were shown to be exaggerated. So in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we were treated to a new threat with the same cause: Climate Change™. Now, every bit of severe weather, every extreme in temperature whether hot or cold can be blamed on the emissions of factories and automobiles, because we human beings arechanging our climate.

This, of course, ignores the fact that the makeup of Earth’s atmosphere and its global climate has been changing constantly for the planet’s entire existence. Indeed, the term “Climate Change™” is incorrect. What these individuals are actually proposing is “anthropogenic climate change,” since our climate is already constantly evolving. Simply calling the process Climate Change™ insinuates to the uninformed that our climate has always been and will always be the same except for the influence of man, which is preposterously fallacious.

Filed under: environment, science, anthropogenic, climate, climate change, climategate, cru, east anglia, global cooling, global warming, malthus, malthusian, pseudo science