The End Of The World Is Nigh

I don't know much about science. I didn't pay much attention to it at school, preferring to joke around with my mates instead. I was very good at Maths, English, and Art, though, so was sort of allowed to drop the ball on other subjects as a kind of balance.

Looking back on it, I wish I had paid attention, because nowadays a lot of scientific advancements and discoveries fascinate me. Not to the point where I might have sought a career in it, but it would be good if I understood the principles or the theory behind it a little better than I do. The truth is, too much scientific gobbledegook bores me very quickly, and my brain just shuts down, pushing me away, preventing me from grasping the finer details I really feel I ought to know better than I do.

Climate Change is the biggest scientific issue that currently concerns us. It potentially could signal the death of the human race, if we mess it up. Or at least change the world to an unrecognisable state.

I was a skeptic about it for a long time, and still have some lingering doubts. When the Global Warming theory first emerged into the public consciousness, sometime in the early 90s, the computer model predicting it appeared to be only one of many possible outcomes that had been calculated, the rest not really foretelling anything too bad was happening. But the Media got a hold of the worst one, and made a meal of it, releasing the term "Global Warming" into popular culture, putting forth all sorts of misinterpreted statistics into the agenda, and generally causing a widespread panic.

Scientists were of two minds. A great number of them were skeptical, and many remain so. But there were some, most at the heart of the issue, who maintained that it fit the evidence thus far, and was worth investigating just in case.

To me, it was rather too convenient that the hippies of the previous decades who were saying "We've got to look after our world, man, it's the only one we have. Bad karma, dude. It's going to happen!" and what do you know, a decade later everything the hippies predicted, based on whatever drug-induced tree-hugging uneducated madness they were spouting, appeared to be coming true. All a bit suspicious, if you ask me.

But as time has passed, the evidence appears to be mounting, and the science seems to bear it out. Something bad is happening, and it appears to be the humans at fault.

The Earth has existed for millennia, with billions of different creatures living on it over that time, variously dominating and going extinct. The dinosaurs, in various evolved groups, were around for 250 million years, then died out for an indeterminate reason possibly related to an asteroid impact. Then 65 million years passed while mammals and birds appeared amongst the ecosystem, eventually getting to the point where Man appears on the scene. 1.5 million years later they reach a state that we would recognise as "intelligent". And 100,000 years later they decide the planet was created for them, that it was served to them on a plate, that they are the dominant force in the universe, and can therefore take everything and misuse it for their own selfish gain, while fighting off all other living beasts to the point of destruction, just to maintain their dominant position.

Humans suck.

Frankly, we deserve to die by our own hand, after our abuse of the natural world that created us. If any species deserved karma heaped upon them, it is us. And Climate Change is that karma, almost as a textbook example.

But we may be able to save ourselves. Apparently, through desperation, they think we can change some of our behaviours, and fix things. They'll never return back to the way they were before we messed everything up, but it can at least keep us, and everything else, alive for longer if we're careful and really try hard.

How do we do this monumental task?

By changing our light bulbs, and having shorter showers.

Hmm. That doesn't really sound like it would be enough.

Okay, we can also drive hybrid, or even fully electric, cars.

That sounds a little better.

Except the amount of pollution that is caused when the electricity is generated, or hydrogen cells are produced, or the cars are manufactured, outweighs any immediate benefits from the less emissions the cars produce.

It seems to me that our domestic carbon footprint is so minuscule compared to industry carbon emissions that anything we do as an individual at our home isn't going to make an impact that matters. It would take decades, possibly centuries, before we'd be in a position where what we were doing at home actually mattered in this huge issue.

But the world of Industry, which creates collectively about a bazillion times as much carbon as the whole of human domestic pollution, will not change their methodology without a fight. In order for them to do so they have to invest money, which they don't want to spend, on new technologies to develop and perfect. And their production will, in itself, create carbon emissions.

We have to make pollution to reduce pollution.

On top of that madness, the Governments have to start the ball rolling, by signing agreements, with strict rules for Industry to follow, but they're still arguing over fine details, over whether it's actually really happening, how much money they can get out of the under-the-table backroom deals, and thus watering down all the agreements. Meanwhile they continue to burn the skies with military action, greedily maintain oil-based profiteering, and relentlessly attempt to wrest control so the world can be run their way (instead of by those idiot foreign buggers).

It's a huge steaming pile of nonsense, and it will kill us all.

But perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps we deserve it.

Climate Change

I'm going to talk about a particularly significant and controversial subject, one where I am not part of the majority view.

Global Warming, or perhaps more accurately Climate Change, is the theory involving our world's temperature extremes are actively changing to be higher and lower than they have been in the past. Most people, and Governments, seem to accept this at face value because it's what the scientists are telling everyone, and they all seem to agree on the broad facts, so there's no real reason to disbelieve it.

However, for me, I have doubts. It's not that I think it's not happening at all - I'm not clever enough to be able to understand the statistics to know if it is or not, and it seems a reasonable assumption to me that something is happening, at least - but I do think that what we are being told isn't actually what's really going on. And my reasons for this are simple - nobody seems to be able to agree on the finer points. And by 'finer points' I mean the broader points.

Q. Is it happening?
A. Apparently. Probably. They can't say for sure, but they think so.

Q. What is happening?
A. Many places are getting hotter. And some places are getting colder. And some aren't really changing much at all. A few are doing all three. But on average, there is change of some kind occurring.

Q. How bad will it get?
A. They don't know. It could mean the death of many millions of people. It could mean a slightly damp Iceland.

Q. What's causing it?
A. Probably the build-up of various carbons in the atmosphere. Or maybe it's something else.

Q. Are we causing it?
A. They don't know. Most evidence correlates with recent human industrial activity. But there are some who think much of the evidence points to being mostly natural.

Q. What problems will result?
A. Possibly the melting of polar ice-caps, causing flooding worldwide. Possibly the drying out of water resources, causing drought. Probably both, and more besides. But then again, maybe nothing.

Q. When will this start to manifest?
A. They don't know. Perhaps it's already begun. Perhaps it will be many years away. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in 200 years.

Q. Can we fix it?
A. It seems doubtful, but they don't know. Some evidence suggests it's far beyond any repair, let alone within our own reach. But they'll try to pretend we can fix it, just to make everyone feel better.

Q. Then is it too late?
A. Some have suggested so. But they don't know.

Q. Is this all actually just natural?
A. They don't know.

Q. Then this is all our own fault?
A. They're trying to spin it like it is, but in reality they don't know. Whichever it is may not make any difference anyway.

So that's how I see it - nobody really knows anything for sure, there's still a lot of argument, a lot of assumption, a lot of projection. They're trying to make us all behave as though it is happening, trying to get us to be more responsible.

For the most part that's probably not such a bad thing - using less resources, and those we do use handled more responsibly, are reasonable behaviours. But what makes me a little suspicious of it all is that twenty years ago, the hippie green-conscious nature children, who had no discernible power or influence, argued "If we don't start being more careful with our wasteful use of resources, we'll destroy the planet, man!" and then rather conveniently, when many of these hippie green-conscious nature children finally got some amount of power after they got jobs as environmental scientists and the like, now they had some statistics that said exactly what they had cried in the dark up until then. Isn't that just a bit too convenient?

Now that may be because they were absolutely right, and it really is happening exactly as they claim. Most of the world seems to accept that at face value, but I am not convinced. I think that, like most statistics, they're easily manipulated to look like anything you want them to, and that, though there may be some truth, it's mixed in with some considerable amount of fudging and exaggeration.

The Media then step in and cause panic by talking about Global Warming as though it is absolutely true and happening as we speak, and that if we don't "do something now" we are all going to die. More exaggeration, more telling people how to think, more spin on something that at this stage is still a lot of supposition and theory.

Here's my take on it:

• If it is happening, and we did cause it, and we are all going to die, then we deserve to die.
  
• If it is happening, and we did not cause it, and we are all going to die, then that's natural selection at work - many species of creature have died out naturally in the past, and this is our turn.
  
• If it is happening, and we can fix it by being more ecologically responsible, then that's good.
  
• If it is not happening, but we continue being more ecologically responsible, then that's even better.
  
• But if it's not happening, then who cares? We'll survive just as we are now.
  

Either we live or we die, either it's our fault or it's not, either it's happening or it isn't. What happens, happens.

Penn Jillette is of a similar mind as myself:

From Crackle: Penn Says - Weather Opportunists