This , for me, short article builds on a longer TEXT I wrote nine months before: What is climate science?
At the time I put quite a few hours of study into preparing that text. However, I had not yet formulated the title of this piece as a conclusion. Among other things, I went through a number of dissertations. The second paragraph of that longer text was called: Climates versus climate and that’s where the core of this article was already hidden.
Climates
I thought bakc at what I learned in primary and secondary school about different climates: with emphasis on the plural. Climates were different in other countries: that’s what we learned then. They differed -and still differ- by location. Fortunately, we did not have a polar, continental or desert climate, but a maritime climate.
Nowadays people constantly talk about the climate: singular. And that one climate would change; not in terms of place, but time.
Do we have the same climate everywhere these days?
Are the different climates becoming more and more similar?
To ask the questions is answering them.
The way in which the term ‘climate’ is misused nowadays is built on the suggestion, never expressed but always decidedly intended, that there is not only such a thing as an ‘average climate’ in the world, but that this average would also matter. As if that average climate would be of some importance for all people, animals and plants.
In reality, a calculated average climate is of no importance to any human, animal, or plant on this planet
Contradicting the false suggestion that is in the use of that weird concept of ‘the climate’ is crucial. Why? Because the climate-worried build further on it, as if their lives depend on it!
Take the term ‘klimaat neutraal’ (‘climate neutral’).
This absurd term is used by adults: not only in half-drunk conversations at the bar, but also in written texts. And they even meet and negotiate about the derived ‘climate neutrality’. With serious faces. I am not 100% sure about the latter, but I am assuming it.
There is a Wikipedia text about this concept in 25 languages.
As is so often the case, there is a fairly big difference between these different language variants. I checked eight of these and found that it is suggested that what is called ‘climate neutral’ in one language is similar to ‘carbon neutral’ in other languages. In English, French, Spanish, Polish, Portugese one uses ‘carbon’, in Dutch, German and Afrikaander it is called ‘climate ‘ before the neutral part…
There is absolutely no doubt that ‘carbon’ here represents a more scientific approach, ‘climate’ a very explicit embracing of the political, the fear-mongering approach.
Many of those Wikipedia texts have a chapter “See also”. This is what that chapter looks like in the Dutch version of that Wikipedia text with its English translation:
These nine links together (probably unintentionally) illustrate the effect of the terribly resounding success of that infamous 97% claim. (The 97% madness, I call it in the aforementioned long TEXT).
What on earth is the link between climate and ‘fair money’? I follow the link and read, “In the Netherlands, the Bankwijzer (Bank Guide) is an initiative of Oxfam Novib, Amnesty International, Milieudefensie (Environmental Defense), peace organization Pax Christi Netherlands, trade union FNV and World Animal Protection.”
Okay, that’s clear. The link is ‘activism united’.
Had you ever heard of “Carbon Dioxide Equivalent”? Not me. Since I had done some digging into this matter before and had had a solid education, I did have an immediate suspicion. I also followed this link and my suspicion turned out to be correct. This is its definition:
… a measure of how much a given amount of greenhouse gas contributes to global warming, using an equivalent concentration of CO2.
Not a complétely nonsensical notion, just: the story about CO2 being really the greenhouse gas has been taken as a self-evident basis to build on. Why?
Why take CO2 as the reference substance?
To ask the question is again almost to answer it: everyone has heard of it.
So much -or rather so little- that sometimes you can hear truant schoolchildren in groups chanting “CO2, out with it”. It has nothing to do with science, but all the more with political agendas.
Serious scientists would not have chosen the most well-known gas suspected of having a positive influence on the average temperature on earth, but the gas for which this was most certain. In the English Wikipedia text on this subject, by the way, there is no mention (yet) of climate change, but of ‘Global Warming’…
Greenhouse effect, no greenhouse gas effect?
I follow the link (from the above ‘see also’) and notice that the very first sentence is of extremely dubious nature:
The greenhouse effect is the process by which thermal radiation from a planetary surface is absorbed by atmospheric greenhouse gases and then emitted in all directions.
The greenhouse effect refers –the word says it all, doesn´t it– to greenhouses. I know this from my own rental apartment that is a bit like a greenhouse. Even when it is below 10 degrees Celsius outside, the temperature inside regularly rises to 23 or 24 degrees, thanks to that effect. It has nothing to do with absorption. The walls here are all pure white. My energy bill consists for a very large part of tax. And then that eights link, People Planet Profit. The cry comes from a person Elkington:
People Planet Profit, nowadays People Planet Prosperity (also called: the three P’s), is a term from sustainable development. It stands for the three elements people, planet and profit, which should be harmoniously combined. The term was coined in 1994 by John Elkington[1], a sustainable development consultant.
Feel free to dwell on that change of name!
And so, this Mr. Elkington has a job in the sustainability world. He has written a book with the hardly scientific title: Cannibals with forks. In a summary by a huge Dutch online bookseller (bol.com) we read:
Elkington convincingly argues that future market success will often depend upon a company’s ability to satisfy the three-pronged fork of profitability, environmental quality, and social justice.
Yes, that emphasis is mine.
We ‘climate deniers’ need to draw a line in the sand.
We do not accuse people who are somewhat or deeply worried of being phobic.
The higher educated and or more diplomatically minded in our camp restrain ourselves from adopting the term climate freaks. But sometimes that takes effort. Under a graph of someone who describes himself as a climate scientist in his Twitter bio, I wrote this comment: “Source?” and in response I received all kinds of insults hinting at my (too) old age…
Talking about ‘deeply worried’.
The photo below is taken by Forum MEP Dirk Jan Eppink. It shows the (turnout in the) meeting room of the European Parliament at the moment when there is a meeting about what shortly before has been declared a state of emergency by the majority in that parliament…
See also this video adressing the question: ‘What is climate?’