While it’s wonderful how many people in the world are rallying around climate change, there are at least two facts that need to be stated a) the earth isn’t going to end in the next twelve years or even twenty five years and b) whether the world has the technology today, to do anything about it, is debatable.  There are still many unknowns about climate change and while it certainly exists, every hurricane, snowstorm, heat wave and cold snap is NOT the result of climate change.  It’s just weather.

Climate change is not a science like Physics or Chemistry, it’s scientifically based of course but part speculation.  You can’t figure it out in the same way a physicist can figure centripetal force or Newton’s Laws of Motions.  It’s not mathematical and not pure science.  No one really knows what’s going to happen or whether we can do anything to change it.  Not even Greta Thunberg, a well intentioned young person who only knows what she reads and is told.  She’s certainly not a scientist.

Observing the polar caps and glacier melt, is not science.  Before the 1860s -1870s we didn’t keep weather records.  We certainly don’t know what was happening 500 years ago on a daily basis.  Last summer NOAA Weather botched forecasts three times, causing me to be on my boat in storms that I would have preferred to avoid.  When the weather people say 0-20% chance of rain, odds are you’re not going to see rain.  These were forecast predictions made the same day.  Then there was the hurricane prediction for the 2019 hurricane season.  At first the climate scientists said it would be an average season. Then when things heated up in the eastern Atlantic Ocean near Africa, where most of our hurricanes first form, they upped their prediction and called for an above average hurricane season.  When the season ended, it turned out to be an average or just above, hurricane season.  Just this year, 2020. climatologists predicted an average season and it went on to be and continues to be, the most active hurricane season on record.  But of course when you predict weather for a living, there is no accountability.  So these climate change scientists predicting doom really don’t know what’s gong to happen in 300 years.  They don’t know what’s going to happen in two weeks and everything they predict is mere speculation.  When Venice was flooding, it was immediately attributed to climate change, then the canals ran dry, the cause being unusually low tides.

Extremes aren’t always or necessarily caused by climate change whether heat, cold, snow, tornados or hurricanes.  Climate change is not the reason for the California wildfires.  Anyone who says it is, is a liar.  Making statements that can’t be proven or disproven is the problem with this science.  The destruction is caused by the fact that people shouldn’t be living in areas that have always been susceptible to fires.  If you build there today or built there 300 years ago, at some point your home may be or would have been, consumed by fire.  If you build homes in New Orleans, a place that’s below sea level, odds are you may lose your home one day.  Katrina didn’t doom New Orleans, human beings building homes there did.

Major Hurricanes have always been a potential hazard in the Gulf and will continue to be even if we do eventually eliminate climate change. Some of the worst hurricanes ever recorded to hit Long Island occurred in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.  One final example, tornado’s have been ravaging tornado alley in the US for so long that a man named Frank L. Baum wrote a story in 1900 about a teenage girl who’s house in Kansas gets sucked up into a tornado and lands in OZ. Tornado season the last few years has actually been less active than historical averages.  But you never hear that reported because it might cause people to let their guard down.

The point I’m trying to make is that yes we should be looking at clean, alternative, renewable energy sources.  And yes we should be looking at plastic alternatives and cleaning up our oceans, (a cause I’m  very passionate about) but the assertions that we have 12 years before we reach the point of no return is both false and irresponsible.  Scientists will eventually discover how to save our planet from certain doom but until then, we all need to be mindful of the world around us and do whatever we can to reduce our carbon footprints.

Not eating meat and eliminating cars and airplanes, isn’t going to make a difference and more importantly people aren’t going to change their habits if it negatively impacts the quality of their lives.  The technology to combat climate change must be multi-faceted and address the realities of the world.  Humanity needs to clean up the planet of garbage, plastics, and pollution not because we face the end but rather because it’s the right thing to do for our planet.