By Mike VanBuren
From the Early June 2014 North Woods Call
Some folks tell me that man-made climate change is the most important issue facing humanity.
Others claim that this is a bunch of bunk.
Personally, I have no reliable way of knowing for sure, but—as readers of The North Woods Call have already seen—I’m a bit skeptical when it comes to the current doomsday scenarios.
It’s not that I don’t respect sound science, and I’ve long been suspicious of the Faustian bargains we’ve made with fossil fuels, nuclear energy and a host of other technologies. Like most everyone else, I’d love to see greener, cleaner and more affordable forms of energy developed.
But I tend to form opinions based on my own experiences, personal knowledge (as limited as that may be) and critical thinking. And I haven’t seen anything concrete that convinces me that human activity is significantly altering our weather and climate.
Does that make me a climate change “denier” worthy of name-calling and scorn, or should all sides of this debate be equally aired in the civic arena?
I suppose I could have my dunderhead submerged in a vat of mulligan stew, but I don’t think so. If I do, I stand waiting to be extracted from my ignorance. But that is going to take reason and logic—not the yammerings of corrupt politicians, or the self-interested measurements of academic grant seekers who rely on funding from government agencies and private foundations to produce research studies that are all too often subservient to slanted ideological agendas.
In my six-plus decades on earth, I have spent a considerable amount of time out-of-doors. Through the years, I’ve seen both hot and cold summers, warm and sub-zero winters, wet and dry seasons, high and low Great Lakes water levels, tornadoes, hurricanes and numerous other natural disasters.
I’ve heard the older folks talk about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and read about it in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” (one of my all-time favorite books). But my father has also described to me the harsh winter of 1936—at the height of the Great Depression—when he and his mother waded in waste-deep snow to deliver groceries to his stranded grandfather on a rural farm.
I’ve read about droughts, famines, floods and other environmental calamities occurring way back in biblical times—long before the Wright Brothers tested their first airplane at Kitty Hawk and Henry Ford pushed the first Model A off the assembly line in Detroit.
Heck, I even live on a sand and gravel hill deposited during the last Ice Age when glaciers receded across Michigan. Two summers ago it was so hot and dry that my lawn was scorched, and has never recovered. Yet, this spring, we are still reeling from one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record.
For 20 years, my family and I spent a week each August camping in one of Michigan’s fine state parks. The first several years, it was so hot and humid that we sweated and suffered whenever we pitched camp, or sat around the evening campfires (back when climate change was typically referred to as “global warming”). The last five or six years that we camped, however, it was decidedly cooler at the same location and we sometimes had to wear sweatshirts during the evening.
All of these things can be attributed to climate change, I suppose—or at least evolving weather patterns. But how many of them were actually caused by human activity that would suggest we’re in imminent danger of mass chaos and death if we don’t clean up our ecological acts?
None of this, of course, means that air, water and land pollution doesn’t occur at various levels, or that human beings are not capable of fouling the earth. Such homo sapien missteps certainly have manifested themselves at places like Love Canal, Three Mile Island and Donora, Pennsylvania—among other locations.
And if something as serious as man-made climate change is actually occurring on a level that threatens our very survival, we need to sound a clarion alarm. But we should also be encouraged to challenge such assertions.
It’s not unreasonable to expect that clear and convincing arguments be made—free from political gamesmanship, and the demonization of anyone who questions the veracity of these “facts.”
Who has ever known a trained meteorologist who could predict next week’s weather with 100 percent accuracy? Why, then, would we accept without question the prognostications of what the worldwide climate will be like decades, or even centuries from now? And why, for Heaven’s sake, would we base costly carbon tax schemes and excessive liberty squelching regulations on political and scientific guesswork—however educated it may seem to be—that may well be proven false and, in some cases, already has.
Back when I studied weather and climate as part of my conservation minor at Central Michigan University, nothing was said about global warming, or climate change. Instead, we learned about the natural forces that shaped our physical environment and how, at best, we could count on the weather changing from day-to-day. Anybody who thought they could unequivocally tell us what the weather would be like a month, or year, from now would have been ostracized as something akin to Elmer Gantry. These days, old Elmer is embraced.
I’m not omniscient enough to say without hesitation who is most correct on this issue. But then, few people—if any—are.
The best we can do is rely on our own intuition, personal experiences and powers of reason to sort through the various theories. Unfortunately, normal public discourse is notoriously unreliable—especially when those making the most noise appear to have stealth motivations that have nothing to do with saving Mother Earth.
Nevertheless, we ought to be able to speak like adults about such subjects and seek the truth wherever it may be found.
As it is, we seem to be collectively living the words of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” by “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
And the fruit of anger we are harvesting stems more from selfish ambition and human-generated antipathy toward one another, rather than unquestionable empirical evidence that shows our often confused species is destroying the planet.
Which, by the way, actually belongs to God, not us.
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