“Climate Change. A term, which attempts to take the natural weather pattern and attribute it to the activities of humans. Heavily adopted recently for use to promote cave living, the idea that humans are a noxious virus on planet Earth, and the practice of greater separation between the rich and the poor. I know the weather pattern is natural and everything we’re experiencing now has been experienced before, but I still feel all warm, fuzzy knowing that electricity companies are responsible for Climate Change and are being taxed accordingly because of it.”
- Excerpt, UrbanDictionary.com (satirical).
A Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this month, “It Isn’t Climate Change”, makes a valid point that recent “polar vortex” of subzero temperatures in the Midwest, East Coast, and Southern U.S. is not “climate change.” But this begs the question: what is climate change?
The term is used with such vagueness that it could never be used in a scientific experiment to meet Karl Popper’s test of falsifiability. The term has been made so politically correct that it has become Orwellian doublespeak.
In elementary school I learned that areas of the world that once were tropical jungles are now deserts and vice versa. So there is “climate change.” That no one denies, not even so-called climate- change “deniers.” James Hansen, himself associated with the alarmist wing of climate science, made this point clearly:
“Climate is always changing. Climate would fluctuate without any change of climate forcings. The chaotic aspect of climate is an innate characteristic of the coupled fundamental equations describing climate system dynamics.” [1]
Climate change is historical and empirical. But that doesn’t seem to be the same climate change that “climate change” modelers seem to be referring to.
I once worked for the largest water district in California where I studied the vast regional network of dams, reservoirs, lakes, pipelines, canals, and rivers in the Southwestern U.S. built to alleviate sub-regional droughts. This is the water hydraulic system that makes modern industrial society thrive in places where it otherwise couldn’t on the same scale and density.
So there is sub-regional climate change too. And due to modern engineering and the master resource of man-made energy generation to pump water uphill, civilization does not need to be dependent on gravity for where water flows or local climate and drought cycles. The water and power engineers that built Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct were 100 years ahead of the current brand of climate-change scientists. And they didn’t need computer models to do it.
Today’s New Definition
Consider the conventional definition of climate change can be found at Google.com:
The change in global climate patterns apparent from the mid to late 20th century onwards, attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels.
This isn’t so much a scientific definition as a postmodern sociological definition. Of all the definitions of climate change I could find online, the one that seemed to make the most sense was found at UrbanDictionary.com, a sort of sarcastic dictionary complied by volunteer editors of street lingo to show the absurdity of conventional definitions. Here it is:
A term, which attempts to take the natural weather pattern and attribute it to the activities of humans.
It is the contention of climate change scientists that “climate change” will certainly be induced in the future as a result of industrialization. This is obviously not the same historical “climate change” or the hydrological “climate change” mentioned above. It is more like religious prophecy under the guise of scientism.
But even this version of climate change requires further exploration of yet another layer of meaning of climate change. Following sociologist Max Weber and American philosopher William James, there are multiple layers of meaning for everything even though there is an objective reality.
Climate Change is Topographical
For example, California has nine out of the worst 25 cities for air pollution in the U.S.: Los Angeles, Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, Sacramento, El Centro, San Diego, Hanford and Merced. Texas has no cities on the American Lung Association list of the 25 worst cities for year round particle pollution. Why?
The major causes of smog in Dallas and Houston are cars and plastics, oil and gas production. Most other Texans live in plains and plateaus where any potential toxic substances are dissipated quickly into the atmosphere. Texas is topographically greener than California despite it has greater fossil-fuel usage.
Texas relies on coal for 32 percent of its energy usage, while California only depends on coal for 3.7 percent (but only 15.5 percent of its electricity usage mainly by the Los Angeles Dept. of Water and Power).
Texas imports coal from Wyoming to run TXU power plants in Dallas, while California imports coal powered electricity from Utah to light up Los Angeles.
Texas imports its pollution; California exports it. With a much higher usage percentage of so-called “dirty” coal-generated power than California, one would think that Texas would suffer from greater air pollution and the “greenhouse effect,” and thus greater global warming and climate change. But it doesn’t. Why?
The answer is topographical. Most Californians live in nine topograpahic basins along the coastline that serve as traps for smog. The major cause of smog in California cities is an inversion layerof warm air above cooler air that makes a toxic trap. Natural smog traps cause smog, not only man-made airborne substances.
For the most part, large Texas cities are not located in air basins and thus don’t have smog traps. The climate “changes” in Texas compared to California because of topography, and vice versa in California.
Envelopmentology Not Environmentalism
Following the 15th century Swiss toxicologist Paracelsus, the reason that California has so many smoggy cities is that “the dose makes the poison.” If any substance is concentrated by a trapping environment it becomes potential toxic or potentially capable of producing the “greenhouse effect.” The reason that Texas cities generally are not smoggy is that the “solution to pollution is dilution.”
What regulatory environmental science does is leave the “environment” out of environmental science. Following Paraselsus, I’m not so much an environmentalist as an “envelopmentologist.” What envelops air particles in the atmosphere, perchlorate in subsurface water basins, airborne “Legionnaire’s disease” pathogens in energy tight “sick buildings,” or so-called greenhouse gases in cities is their environments.
If you computer model the air in California you end up prophesying disaster like global warming. If you model Texas air you don’t end up with such Armageddon-like forecasts.
Climate Change: Ideology of a Regional Trade War
Karl Marx was right about one observation. People use ideologies as covers for economic conflicts, although such conflicts are not the sole driving force of history.
Climate change is an ideology in a trade war between a cartel of basin topography states with smoggy cities that don’t want to depend on imported fossil fuel and electricity and plains states that rely on indigenous abundant fossil fuels and can export it to basin states.
“Climate change,” unpacked, is an ideological smokescreen from the reality of this trade war and used to gain political legitimacy for uneconomic alternative energy.
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[1] James Hansen et al., “How Sensitive Is the World’s Climate?,” National Geographic Research & Exploration, 9(2): 1993, p. 143.
Source: http://www.masterresource.org/2014/01/climate-change-political-term/
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