A Society of Fear

Nobody is going to agree with this post but here it goes. I think all this climate change discussion is important but it is also being shoved upon us by alarmists and the media because we thrive in a constant state of fear. Murray Bowen, a renowned psychiatrist, says we are a society so immature that we can only focus on fear and the negatives without considering the possibility of something positive happening. This is why the news is constantly filled with terrible events and possibilities of an apocalypse. In the 70's global cooling was going to bring about a new ice age. We should have been hit by three earth-devastating meteors. After 9/11 we were going to live in a nation under constant attack. A few years ago bird flu was going to lead to our extinction. None of these things have happened, but at some point were near certainties. I feel the same thing is happening with global warming. According to this article from the AP science division, global warming is confusing all animals and plants biological clocks. What about this:

"The capital's famous cherry trees are primed to burst out in a perfect pink peak about the end of this month. Thirty years ago, the trees usually waited to bloom till around April 5."

Are you telling me these plants may bloom an entire 5 days before they did thirty years ago?? And what about this dire indicator:

"The young of tree swallows — which in upstate New York are laying eggs nine days earlier than in the 1960."

These are just some of the examples stated in this news article. Granted, I picked the ones that were the most ridiculous but isn't this a bit alarmist. Are those small deviations even statistically significant, or do they simply support the theory presented so get put in there. This is my favorite part of the article:

"This past winter's weather could send a mixed message. Globally, it was the coolest December through February since 2001 and a year of heavy snowfall."

So why are the plants blooming earlier? If the article claims that these premature spring events are happening because of hotter weather earlier, how come this is not in direct contradiction to this? In fact the global temperatures for the month of January have dropped .595 degrees Celsius compared to last year. The consensus is that it is just an anomaly. But which one is the anomaly. What if the warmer temperatures last January were not an indication of global warming just an anomaly in the weather patterns? I like how if one month is .595 degrees warmer than the same time last year it is front page news. But, as in the case of January, the temperature drops by that amount, the news doesn't take notice. While I'm not quite convinced global warming has simply become our newest obsession and is completely false, I still think that it should be looked at with a critical eye and given some time to play out. There are much greater forces at work: solar flare activity, earth changing tilt for example, that play a much greater role than human activity. Maybe the melting ice will change the salinity of the oceans and actually have a cooling effect. There is so much uncertainty in the climate that we should not make huge policy decisions based on it. If we want to stop burning coal to clean up the air, I agree with that. But if these decisions are made based on alarmist global predictions, maybe they are not such a good idea. Maybe the "global climate crisis" is not as important as we think.


A graph of January temps for reference (http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/january-2008-4-sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/):