Oh, boy.
We’ll be facing some tough decisions pretty soon, kids. We’re going to have to make up our minds whether climate change is racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, hateful, spiteful, or otherwise discriminatory in some way we haven’t even fabricated yet. Why do I think that? I think that because the always-objective Washington Post published an article headlined, “At least 85 percent of the world’s population has been affected by human-induced climate change, new study shows”. Wow!
Get a load of this:
At least 85 percent of the global population has experienced weather events made worse by climate change, according to research published … in the journal Nature Climate Change … which focused on events such as crop failures, floods, and heatwaves.
This call to arms invites a veritable plethora (as Howard Cosell loved to say) of questions. Here are a few, in no particular order:
- Who are the people who comprise the unaffected 15 percent?
- Where do they live?
- How and why have they escaped the cataclysmic horrors wrought by extreme weather climate change?
- What’s the cause of all this?
Come on. You can answer that last one. No. It’s not the volatility of the ever-evolving earth. Nope. It’s not the effects of ever-present solar activity. Uh uh. It’s not methane from ever-farting cows. Sorry. It’s not even hot air from blowhards like Al Gore. According to The Washington Post, the big culprits are (you should have had this) fossil fuels and carbon emissions. Right.
Why are fossil fuels and carbon emissions the big culprits? It’s because politicians, environmentalists, and their cronies at the IPCC think like Linus van Pelt from the Peanuts comic strip. Yes. It was Linus who, clutching his security blanket famously said, “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.” And because politicians, environmentalists, and their cronies at the IPCC can’t stand people, we’re to blame for everything they don’t like and everything for which they want to blame us for the purpose of controlling us, our lifestyles, our industries, our utilities, our economies, our money, and — most of all — our individual liberties.
(OB’s Free Hint of the Day: If you’re inclined to follow the money, which you should be, you’re likely to find the unaffected 15 percent live in countries so economically bereft their paltry wealth isn’t worth trying to extort by the Global Puppet Masters who pull the strings of redistribution. When it comes to climate change, poverty affords the ultimate protection.)
Politicians, environmentalists, their cronies at the IPCC, and all the bandwagon jumpers who comply with their pronouncements and edicts without question are the kinds of people Jordan Peterson was referring to when he said this:
People who don’t have their own houses in order should be very careful before they go about reorganizing the world … People have things that are more within their personal purview that are more difficult to deal with and that they’re avoiding … the way they avoid them is by adopting pseudo-moralistic stances on large-scale social issues so that they look good to their friends and their neighbors.
Similarly, it’s the avoidance of our own demons in favor of adopting pseudo-moralism, popular causes, and trending narratives that led Geoffrey Miller to write this:
Newton wouldn’t last long as a “public intellectual” in modern American culture. Sooner or later, he would say “offensive” things that get reported to Harvard and that get picked up by mainstream media as moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from academia, social media, and publishing. Result? On the upside, he’d drive some traffic through Huffpost, Buzzfeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s Laws of Motion.
“Will it play in Peoria?” was a question that originated in vaudeville. It implied that if a show could make it in Peoria, it could make it anywhere. Its interpretation and application came to be expanded to ask if whatever was being referred to would go over with broader audiences of folks across a broad range of demographic and psychographic groups. The scare- and power-mongers in charge of The Church of the Anthropogenically Changing Climate don’t even have to ask that anymore. They’ve found a captive audience and a damn-near sure thing.
If you’re interested in a balanced perspective on climate change, please try this.
In the meantime, don’t worry. According to Axios, “White House vows to treat climate change as ‘systemic’ financial risk”:
A new White House report released Friday morning says climate change poses “systemic risks” to the U.S. financial system, and presents a “roadmap” to building a “climate-resilient” economy.
If you believe climate change is going to make the planet uninhabitable, at least by all of us critically thinking humans, that’s gotta make ya feel better.
Good grief.
Interesting theory. He who has the least to lose…etc. Trouble is that while they are in the process of losing nothing in particular, the flood comes and drowns them. Or the blizzard comes and freezes them. Or the drought comes….etc.The trouble with climate change is that it doesn’t give a rat’s ass about socio-economic factors. It is an equal opportunity destroyer. I don’t even know what building a climate resilient economy even means. Sounds like political BS to me. I personally think that if the capitalist of the world were smart they would start investing in things like the carbon eater that has just gone on line in Iceland. Or any one of thehundreds of amazing innovations that are no being developed by people who actually want to make things better. I gave up trusting any governments when the Brits elected a twit and the Americans elected a narcissist to run their respective countries. Even my country has a inept pretty boy music teacher as Prime Minister. It’s all going to hell unless the world wises up and starts investing in the ideas that can save it. IMHO, of course.
I’m with George Carlin on this one, Jim: “Save the planet? We don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c