Opinion: Why I’m a Little Bit Skeptical About Climate Change

This feels all too familiar

Photo byAlexAntropov86 on Pixabay

I once wrote an article contemplating why flat-earthers believe the Earth is flat. I concluded that the difference between me (someone who believes we live on a spherical planet) and a flat-earther is likely not intelligence, as many people reflexively believe, but trust. It’s not as if I’ve traveled to space to see for myself, or if I’ve directly performed the experiments ancient scientists and mathematicians used to determine that the Earth is round.At the end of the day,I’m just trusting what the books I’ve read, written by seemingly credible authorities, are telling me.

I believe in man-made climate change on the same basis. It seems like there’s a consensus in the scientific community, and I generally trust scientists. However, there are notable exceptions to that last statement. Igrew up believing that eating fat was the worst thing for you, and that it would make you overweight and give you heart disease. The reason I believed this was because in the1960sthe sugar industry paid Harvard research scientists, among others, to understate the connection between sugar and heart disease.

I lived through a paradigm shift wherein all of the U.S. went from believing that avoiding fatty foods was the key to health until one day, seemingly out of nowhere, we were told avoiding sugar was the answer. The trend diets in the 90s were all low-fat. It was the era of turkey bacon, egg whites, frozen yogurt, and Snackwell’s fat-free cookies. In 1999, we were all introduced to the “Subway diet,” and a diet that centered around eating sandwiches somehow didn’t seem patently ridiculous at the time. And why should it when our government-supplied food pyramid looked like this:

Photo byUSDA Food Pyramid

It tells us in no uncertain terms that simple carbohydrates should be the biggest part of our diet! This is exactly opposite to what modern nutrition now tells us.It almost seems comical until you remember that~42%of adult Americans are obese, and cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death for both men andwomen in the United States. A handful of Americans will havediedfrom it in the time it takes you to read this article (one every ~33 seconds).

The science that backed these dietary approaches was every bit as popular, and every bit as credible in appearance, as the science that now backs my belief in climate change. Does this mean we should engage in some reactionary way of thinking and throw out all scientific findings on the basis of one unfortunate, society-wide scam?Of course not.It’s just a reminder that scientists aren’t infallible or incorruptible either.

Apocalyptism

If history has shown us anything, there’s nothing that can bring a society together like collective anxiety and paranoia over a soon-to-come end of the world. I don’t consider myself to be too old, yet I’ve had the occasion to live through at least three near misses for the end of days — which is statistically quite odd for what should be a one-in-several-millenia event. I remember as a child that all the smartest adults I knew were certain the world would end by one cause: overpopulation. Charts showing humanity’s rapid rate of growth could be found everywhere, and there were all sorts of predictive models telling us how we would reach a threshold beyond which the planet couldn’t sustain us. I remember my uncle, a data and analytics professional now working at a state university, telling me how the world was sure to “end in a whimper.”

Famously, we had Y2K, where everyone gathered around with bated breath, waiting for the turn of the millenium, when all computer systems on Earth would fail as they were unable to process the transition.Planes would be falling from the sky all across the country! I remember the rising tension as we approached the year 2012, and the final end, predicted by the Mayans, was to come about. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson was even helpful enough to give us a graphic portrayal of what was to come, in the form of a blockbuster movie. “We were warned” was written across the promotional posters.

Photo byhttp://www.impawards.com/2009/two_thousand_twelve_ver6.html

Every election since I was born has been “the most important election of my lifetime.” World War III, and the coming nuclear holocaust, has been on the horizon seemingly since World War II ended. I frequently hear that we’re in late-stage capitalism and the revolution is about to begin. The dystopian future was set to start with the advent of the internet, but has now been pushed down the track to AI. All of this is to say that I’m a little weary of being convinced that the world is about to end, when it has never happened, not even once, to date.

Conclusion

Do I believe in man-made climate change? I do. It makes perfect sense to me that massive amounts of emissions could build up in the atmosphere and cause the issues scientists predict. Also, I have a tendency to trust scientists. Science has unlocked near-magical capabilities for humanity. I’m typing this essay on a light-up box and sending it over the airways to my readers as we speak. I’ll be hopping into a giant metal tube with wings and getting hurled above the clouds later on today. I sit here, in an air-conditioned home, lit by electricity, while I wait. All of this tells me these scientists know a thing or two about what they’re doing.

However, do I also know that they sometimes get things wrong, especially it seems around topics of mass hysteria or highly popularized theory?Yes, definitely. It also seems that scientists sometimes have a problem with linear thinking. Hans Rosling did a great job demonstrating this in his stellar book, Factfulness. The reason we were all worried about overpopulation was because of basic extrapolation.A charted line of human population growth was trending upwards at a startling rate, and if things continued at that rate, it would have been a real problem, butit didn’t continue— and now decreasing population size seems like the real cause for concern!

Why didn’t these predictions come to fruition? Basically, people just happen to have less kids in more developed societies. It’s a totally unpredictable phenomena, and one of those things that seems to just happen that way with no real satisfying explanation. Is it possible that the exact same thing will come about with climate change? Might that scary line on the chart just top out for some currently unforeseen reason? I have no idea, but it might — I’ve seen it happen before.

In the meantime, I encourage the scientists to do their work faithfully, and I won’t mock them or impugn their motives. I’ll heed their advice and take their warnings seriously. Heck, much of what’s being suggested that we do to curtail emissions is sensible to do for a whole host of reasons, climate change aside.But until things look different from all the other times the world was set to end, I don’t think I’ll be panicking.