Peter Williams: The science is never settled on climate change
OPINION: I'm sorry but my head hurts. I am so over the nonsense that is being propagated by politicians and policymakers about this thing that is now just referred to as "climate change." Every day it is being foisted upon us. The world is in crisis. There is going to be a disaster, a catastrophe. The world is going to end. We have 12 years. We have 10 years. Some nutbag appeared on The AM Show yesterday saying it will end in seven years. Prince Charles says we have 18 months left before it is irreversible and the world will end. Why do we allow people to get away with this? Why is there absolutely no debate that these prophets of gloom may possibly be wrong? Why is it that not just Stuff, but it seems all media in this country refuse to allow even a skerrick of evidence that CO2 may not be the cause of the earth's warming? Those of us who ask questions, and do not accept what we are having forced upon us, are now being called deniers. Note the phrasing, the use of language. As if words like catastrophe and crisis and emergency were not enough, those who are skeptical are now being called "deniers." The last group of people to be called deniers were those who believe the holocaust didn't happen. The thing is, we know the holocaust happened. We have physical evidence of graves, of concentration camps, of gas chambers and of people being loaded onto trains to go there and never be seen again. How can people who ask questions about the changing climate and whether CO2 and other gases in the atmosphere be called "deniers?" The arrogance in the putdown is breathtaking. Why are people not allowed to ask questions? Why are people not allowed to make observations about what they see in front of them outside every day? Why are we not allowed to ask about all those other predictions of 30 years ago which have not come true? Why am I so worked up about this? I'll tell you why. We are being fed BS by our politicians, politicians from both parties who refuse to ask questions? Politicians and policymakers who use the phrase " the science is settled." Science can never be settled. How can science be settled? It's like technology. Once we thought black and white TV was just marvelous. Then we went to colour, then to digital. The technology is always evolving. It's just like science. Scientists are still working towards a cure for cancer, a cure for diabetes. They haven't found the answer yet. It's the same with weather and climate. How come the earth in the last 2000 years has been through multiple warming and cooling periods? And remember the last 2000 years are just a blip on the length of time the solar system and planet earth has been in existence. That ridiculous interactive front of website piece on Stuff this morning tells us breathlessly that we have more CO2 in the atmosphere now than at any stage in the last 3 million years. Wow - do you know how long this planet is estimated to have been in existence? 4.5 billion years. This is a piece that has a picture of a church surrounded by floodwaters as it's front page. Once again using emotive visuals of what was probably a quite natural event to propagate panic when rational thinking people will not panic, but instead, observe their surroundings, and ask questions. Like, why is Greenland called Greenland? Because about a thousand years ago it was home to a population of Vikings who lived and thrived there in a climate that allowed food to grow and animals to be farmed. It was the era known as medieval warming. Then the Little Ice age came along and wiped that population out. That little ice age ended in the first half of the 19th century. Since then the earth has been getting warmer. Now in this age of instant information, there is a lot of information available online which presents a different view of the world's climate. The James Shaws of this world will say these people are climate change deniers? We found this on a website called IZZit.org. It's an educational website, offering videos, lesson plans, and other teaching resources. It claims to have 18 million students, 195 thousand teachers and 44,000 schools as its clients. It has been criticised as offering "an unabashed ode to free-market capitalism and private property" .. as if that was a bad thing. But that's how your modern-day teacher tends to think. Can't have that capitalism thing. Some people might have more money than others. Anyway, I digress. This video asks questions. It challenges what has become the propagated modern-day story of CO2 induced climate change. It asks whether the sun could be the major player in the way the world's climate has changed and continues to change. The video is narrated by an identified teenage student, and features comments from Dr David Legates, from the Center for Climate Research at the University of Delaware and Doctor Willie Soon, an astrophysicist at Harvard Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. Watch this and then ask - why are James Shaw and Julie Ann Genter and almost our entire Parliament doing what they are doing? To follow that up, David Legates and Willie Soon are favourite targets of the High priests and clergy of the climate change religion. Because they have offered comments as you have just heard, the websites dedicated to rubbishing any contrary views on climate change, sites like desmogblog.com and skeptical science.com get all heated up themselves and go on the attack, mainly to accuse them of taking funding from the likes of the oil industry. It is up to you to make up your own minds on this. But if you listened to what Willie Soon and David Legates said, tell me they don't know what they're talking about. Peter Williams is a host on Magic Talk.