What if?

Right now Copenhagen is awash with climate change frenzy.  The world’s leaders are coming together to agree on ways to try and change the climate back to it’s unchanging state before it started changing, or something like that.  Few realise that, aside from the clearly unsettled science that is man-made warming theory, Copenhagen is as much if not more about economic regulation as it is about climatic regulation.  After all, to heal the planet and lower ocean levels, the Obamas of the world have to have a means, a method, a regulatory outlet.  And what better way than to go once again for the perennial whipping boy of government – industry.

But as our leaders embark on some potentially Draconian curtailment of industrial output over the coming decade, surely we need to be sure we’re doing the right thing and that the problem is a real one?  Leaders, journalists, scientists, carbon credit fund managers, carbon offset consultants, environmentalists, anti-globalisation activists, authors, UK local council global warming officers, socialists, clean-energy venture capitalists, nuclear power companies and just about every other man and his dog are so intellectually invested in man-made global warming now that to question the status quo polemic is to commit grand heresy.  “Denialists” as they are called, are treated with the same contempt and ridicule as members of the flat-earth society, alien abductees, and other “conspiracists”.

How did we get here?  How did we get from a “global-cooling-next-ice-age” scare in the 1970’s to universally accepted global panic about 0.5 degrees of warming over the last 100 years?  How is it that something so widely accepted has so little hard science to back it?  How come credible and highly respected IPCC scientists refuse to attach their names to the author lists in the UN IPCC reports because they feel real science has been totally ignored?  How come we believe climate models are accurate when they are designed to conform to a pre-conceived theory of climate?  Do we really believe the world is heating up more than ever in its long history?  Do we really all believe that the tiny fraction of Co2 in the atmosphere (well below 1%), of which only a further fraction is attributable to humans, is really the dominant determinant of climate?

Despite all these uncertainties, our leaders at Copenhagen will attempt to fix a problem we cannot be sure we have, with methods we cannot be sure will even work, over a time frame we cannot really measure for a goal we cannot be sure is achievable.

Here’s a silly thought.  What if man does NOT cause global warming?

What if polar bears adapt to warmer arctic fringes like they have in the past?

What if Greenland was called ‘Greenland’ because when Vikings found it, it was green?

What if the CRU is ‘hiding the decline’?

What if climategate is a little more than just an embarrassment?

What if climate science peer review has been corrupted?

What if there was a medieval warm period warmer than now?

What if it was so warm that London was a wine-producing area?

What if the world actually cooled during the post WWII industrial/CO2 boom when it should have been warming?

What if temperatures have been falling since 1998?

What if the troposphere warmed at a slower rate than surface level temperatures, contrary to greenhouse warming theory?

What if once arid regions start getting more rain?

What if Siberia could be farmed?

What if the Arctic Circle permafrost melted and opened up a vast new ecosystem teeming with life?

What if the polar ice core hasn’t actually changed shape in 30 years?

What if emotive footage of ice-shelves crashing into the ocean is a normal occurrence every summer?

What if the almost perfect correlation between sun-spot activity and global temperatures actually meant something?

What if Africa actually needs to use fossil fuel power to develop out of grim poverty?

What if water pollution was a bigger problem than global warming?

What if the oceans exchanged far more CO2 with the atmosphere than our factories put into the atmosphere?

What if historical records show that temperature leads CO2 levels, not the other way around?

What if CO2 levels have been much higher in history than they are today?

What if people knew that Al Gore’s hockey-stick graph was a myth?

What if the Copenhagen-Kyoto-Global-Warming-Carbon-Footprint-Planet-In-Peril bonanza was all a load of hooey?  What if global warming was just a moral pretext for planetary economic regulation?  What if regulating the planet’s climate is the perfect framework to start regulating the planet period?  What if dialectic socialism/communism is making its next comeback in the form of climate change activism? 

What if we focussed on our real tangible problems?  What if we created monetary justice before getting hot under the collar for carbon credit offsets?  What if we maximised our coal resources to deliver cheap energy to our poor, instead of sink billions in state-led investment into expensive clean energy that can barely power a small clinic let alone a productive steel factory.

What if the world hadn’t substituted its actual problems that it prefers to sweep under the carpet for pseudo-problems it thinks can be solved with the swoosh of a signature by a corpulent climate-changing carbon-crusader at a cushy Copenhagen conference?

What then?

Just a silly thought.