Why is it so important as to whether or not the phenomena is man made or not? Could it be because you would have to change a few habits if it is? If it is your drunk uncle or your dog pooping in the yard, does it matter? It still needs to be cleaned up. All of this is a distraction from the real issue at hand. An issue which basically places the blame squarely on humanities shoulders but nobody wants to bear the burden because it hurts their insignificant little feelings. It goes against their convenient lazy wasteful self absorbed lifestyle. It would require to much EFFORT to admit that maybe, just maybe, humans are actually making our habitat filthy. After all, God made us in his image and therefor we must exploit the resources He gave us as fast as we can… and if we actually take the initiative to clean up our filth and start behaving civil towards one another and the other creatures around us, well, that somehow shows a lack of faith in His providence.
It does matter whether a condition is or is not manmade. If something is manmade, then perhaps man can change it if it needs to be changed. If it is not manmade, then one must ask whether there is anything man can, or even should, do about it.
Nobody advocates “filth” accumulating in the environment. This country has done much to avoid that and to clean up prior pollution of all kinds. The results are obvious to anyone who has lived long enough. Treatment of the environment is dramatically better now than it was, say, when I was a child. A very large portion of it is simply due to the fact that individuals now treat the environment differently, whatever motivations one ascribes to their doing so.
But that phenomenon really doesn’t tell us anything about the proper course, if any at all, appropriate for what some perceive as MMGW. For one thing, it isn’t obvious, as the NASA site readily admits. Toxic “chat” piles leaching toxic chemicals into the environment are obvious. Buried batteries are obvious. Erosion from farming lands that shouldn’t be farmed is obvious. Unrecovered strip mines are obvious. As regards the harmfulness and causes of such things, there is no disagreement. MMGW is not like that. There is nothing obvious about it, particularly when, as now, the climate is cooling. There is no agreement, let alone unanimity on the causes of global warming, or even whether we’re in a warming period or a cooling period. People can, and do, go back in history and make a case for either one. And, having made their cases for whichever it is, posit causes which they can make seem plausible, but cannot prove.
It is wrong to say that those who are skeptical about MMGW are that way because of “greed” or “laziness” or “self absorption” or anything of the kind. At minimum, people have a right to be skeptical about “causes de jour”, given past experiences of them. Rachel Carson’s book led to the worldwide banning of DDT. It did not lead to the banning of all insecticides, but to the proliferation of them. And now, decades later, there is a significant body of opinion that the whole DDT scare was misplaced and that, further, millions have died unnecessarily of malaria, sleeping sickness, etc all because of something that may have been nothing more than a popularized view.
We have, as we know, been warned of global cooling in the past. New ice age and all that, due to aerosol pollutants. We have been warned by Paul Ehrlich and others that overpopulation was going to cause mass starvation in a foreseeable time frame (now long past) Instead, we’re looking down the barrel of a potential “population implosion”, the consequences of which may be very severe indeed. According to past predictions, we should have long since run totally out of petroleum. We were promised decades ago, and not just by its leaders, that the Soviet Union would soon “surpass” the West in productivity and living standards. And, of course, we were told by Jimmy Carter that we were simply going to have to accept the fact that we were just going to have to learn to live with the “fact” that the only way we could henceforth keep warm in our own homes was to wear wooly sweaters.
We have been told by “scientific experts” that children should be bottle-fed from the first available moment and that they shouldn’t; that babies should be kept more or less immobile and that they shouldn’t; that they should be rigorously potty-trained at “age X” and that they shouldn’t. And, of course, “scientific experts” once told us that smoking prevented lung cancer.
It cannot be denied that the current MMGW popularization has financial ramifications for virtually everyone. For some, the movement means wealth. For some, it means a higher cost of living; perhaps disasterously higher. Without question, for this government, it means more tax revenue. When those who stand to gain are massively outnumbered by those who stand to lose, the potential losers may reasonably be expected to question the whole proposition, particularly when their incipient impoverishment is not based on anything obvious or even anyting upon which all experts agree. That is particularly so when the conclusions fly in the face of experience. It’s hard to accept the idea that the planet is warming disasterously when one experiences repeated colder years. It’s hard to accept that warming, if it’s real, is manmade when greater warming cycles have occurred when they could not possibly have been manmade.
And so now we’re seeing information come out that many interpret as evidencing an intent to defraud on the part of the experts who are at the forefront of the “scientific” justification for the MMGW panic and, therefore, of all the hardships about to be visited on the population as a consequence of it. It is perfectly reasonable for people to be skeptical about such things.
