The evolution of a climate change skeptic

I’ve never fully believed in man-made global warming but there was a time when I wondered.  I remember when Bob Dyck was president of CAAR – maybe 12 years ago now.  Bob was the head cheese at Cargill Canada so I thought he should have some serious smarts.  I have a lot of respect for Cargill as a company – they don’t put dummies in any position and they certainly wouldn’t put a fool in charge of Canada. 

We had a big debate at the board wherein Bob flat out stated that not only did he not believe that humans were causing global warming, he didn’t think that the globe was getting warmer for any reason.  I remember re-evaluating my opinion of him at the time because it seemed obvious to me that the world was warming up for some reason.  Maybe mankind wasn’t causing the warming trend but the data at the time seemed to clearly indicate that something was causing the world to warm up.

 

Of course in the last 10 years it has become increasingly obvious that the “something” that was causing the world to appear to be warming up was nothing more nor less than ridiculously flawed science.  Everything from bad data points caused by urban heat islands to outright fraud on the part of the global warming priesthood has been implicated.  The list continues to grow to the point where voices of reason like Lorne Gunter sound like they are piling on.

Catherine McMillan (“Kate” of Small Dead Animals) recently said: 

I know. At this point, posts like this are almost unseemly, there's a nasty sense here of "piling on". All I can say about that to my warmist friends is this - "better get used to it".

My personal evolution was from an attitude of wondering if there might be some truth to man-made warming to a conviction that the underlying cause of any warming was a natural cycle to my current sense that there simply isn’t any warming happening.  We have been sold a bill of goods by whores masquerading as scientists. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this gives any of us the license to foul our nest.  Even a pig knows better than that.  Given the choice a pig will keep its nest clean and we should demonstrate the same intelligence. 

The ubiquitous space images of our planet that have become so much a part of our visual vocabulary in the last 20 years have changed our collective understanding of our place in the universe.  Our parents’ generation could be forgiven for thinking of the world as immense and unchangeable but we have to consider it an island floating in space.  Thinking of our planet as an island fundamentally changes how we view resources and waste.  Like a pig in a pasture we should have the intelligence to not needlessly foul our finite living space. 

At the same time the image of a finite world floating in a vast emptiness should remind us that we have limited resources.  Squandering our talents or labour tackling a “climate change” problem that doesn’t exist accomplishes nothing and makes our collective life more miserable.