Okay, I'm sure anyone close to my age remembers when "climate change" was called the hole in the ozone layer. Who ever hears about that one anymore? Then for the longest time it was called global warming. Then all of a sudden, "no wait! It's not always warming!" So now for the past several years it's almost been taboo to refer to it as anything other than climate change. It's not just climate change, however, it's "human caused" climate change. Yes, the indisputable fact that the sun is naturally getting hotter by the second, to such an extent that the surface temperatures on Earth will be over one thousand degrees Fahrenheit a billion years from now, is completely outweighed by what humans are causing. Right.
       The truth is, I bought this bologna as a child. Why wouldn't have I? Authoritative adults were talking about it like it was real. An example, I remember an episode of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood in which characters were saying, "don't spray the aerosol cans as it will cause a horrible windstorm!" I remember being scared by this, thinking "My God, if they really want us to stop doing this, it must be something serious!" Yet, more than thirty-five years has passed since then, during which time aerosol cans, (many of which contained CFC's), have continued getting sprayed abundantly, and I'm still waiting to see the "Big Windstorm," or any change in the Earth's climate for that matter. Nothing about the climate has changed since I was a child. In MN, where I'm from, there's still occasional unpredictable warmer than average and cooler than average temperatures every year. The winters haven't changed, the summers haven't changed. This summer, in fact has been significantly cooler than a lot of the summers I recall as a kid back in the 80's. Furthermore, ocean levels haven't risen any more than a few millimeters throughout this time, (a rate at which scientists have proven they've been rising at for centuries before any industry existed). No populated coastal region on Earth is even close to being flooded by the adjacent ocean. Nothing has seriously changed in the thirty-five plus years that I recall hearing about this hooey so-called phenomenon, and yet we're still supposed be taking this nonsense seriously!!!
       Okay, so Kilimanjaro has less ice on it now than it did then, and a few polar bears have less bergs in the arctic to roam around on. And oh yeah, they drilled in parts of the arctic and found that the ice sheets that form each year have become thinner in recent years. Oh no, it must be real, right! Climate change activists thrive on these facts, but the truth is these facts don't prove anything, other than a rather vast predictability distinction between human nature and mother nature, (as the later isn't influenced by the almighty dollar). Climate change activists will only show you what they want you to see, regardless as to whether or not it fails miserably as actual proof. To prove that so-called climate change is really a global threat you need far more than pictures of mountains and polar bears. You have to demonstrate that so-called climate change is responsible for adverse effects worldwide, not just in certain parts of the world. If one mountain is losing ice every year, but a mountain somewhere else is gaining ice every year, obviously no global change is occurring that warrants any serious attention. And that's exactly what's happening in the world today. Certain parts of the Arctic are in fact losing ice, but vast portions of the Antarctic at the same time are gaining ice. As such, the overall ice reserves on the planet are maintaining extremely close to equilibrium. That's a scientific fact. So with that being said, does so-called climate change pose any serious threat to our near futures? Answer: absolutely none. And as far as the inevitable effects "natural" climate change will have on our very distant futures, I doubt even the best science fictional novelist could propose a feasible notion for preventing the sun from naturally heating up. It's just nature. It will happen, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. No carbon emission reduction program is ever going to change that.
       So why do so many intelligent people apparently buy into it then? Well, it seems a lot of intelligent people prior to 1492 believed the Earth was flat. It appears quite evident now they may have been a little off on that one. A lot of intelligent people before Galileo also believed the Earth was the center of the universe. Try selling that one to an astronomer today. More recently, it seems a lot of intelligent people believed a catastrophe was going to occur when the clocks struck midnight on New Years Eve of 1999, and that the world was coming to an end in 2012. People buy into things that are bogus, there's simply no way around it. While scary, there's a certain level of excitement that goes along with a belief that an "end" is coming soon. It triggers that "will to survive" instinct that stimulates all sorts of potential advancements, (that certainly doesn't mean it's all for the best, however. I personally don't think a belief in a lie can ever produce a better result than a belief in what's real, no matter how boring and uninteresting the truth might be).
       There's also quite a financial incentive that comes with selling such beliefs to the public. The US Global Change Research Program has in recent years received increases in annual government funding that surpass the rate of inflation. What do they do? They research climate change. Obviously then if they want to continue receiving such increases in funding, they have to continue convincing the public that this so-called climate change caused by humans is for real. Now I don't know about you, but I'm all for clean water, clean air, and clean energy production, but funding an organization like the UGCRP is about as ridiculous to me as funding a project that studies the flow rate of ketchup. Nothing humans are doing is causing any significant changes in the climate, and there's nothing we can do to prevent the extremely slow effects of natural climate change. Funding programs to study this, therefore, is like taking money and flushing it down the toilet.
       Yes, many millions of years from now the Earth will be a hotter place than it is today, but it will have nothing to do with carbon emissions. Humans have been putting Co2 into the atmosphere for quite a number of decades now, during which time nothing involving the climate has experienced any changes out of the ordinary. Meanwhile coal miners are getting laid off, coal fired power plants are getting shut down, fossil fuel haulers are being forced to find alternate employment, all because of this nonsense. Pretty inconvenient for them and the economy in general; pretty "convenient" for certain scientists and politicians.