Guest Column: Don’t fight climate change

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on March 11, 2019.

It is clear to me that common sense and rational thinking have gone the way of the dodo bird and as a result, the human race is not far behind.

The young Democrat affectionately known as AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) is convinced that the world as we know it will end within a dozen years and she is advocating that we rid the world of airplanes, gas-powered cars and cattle within 10 years in order to stop carbon pollution. She also believes that every building in the United States should be retrofitted within 10 years to meet strict environmental standards. Some have estimated the cost of this to be at least $93 trillion or about $65,000 per year for every American family. They would do all this to reduce carbon emission in the U.S. while China and others continue to increase their carbon emissions.

I am not a climate change denier. I know that the climate is constantly changing and always has. The problem with the climate issue is that instead of dealing with the change properly, the political left is exploiting it for their end goals through fear mongering and misinformation.

The evidence for these beliefs is obvious to those who care to see them. They tell us that our carbon footprint is the problem when the truth is that carbon dioxide is the element that is increasing slightly in our atmosphere and is one of the factors that is contributing to the warming of the planet. Contrary to what we are told, carbon dioxide is not pollution. Carbon dioxide is necessary for life on this planet.

Many studies into our changing climate have been skewed, misleading or just plain wrong depending on who is paying for the information. We ignore the obvious in order to guilt the populous into paying more taxes and relinquishing control to government.

Nature controls the climate, however I have no doubt humans may be contributing in some small way to climate change. Over the past 70 years, the earth’s population has increased by about four billion people to seven billion. The fact that each one breathes out a lung full of carbon dioxide every five seconds may have some influence on increasing carbon dioxide levels. Reducing fossil fuel emissions in North America and taxing fossil fuels is not effective in reducing global carbon dioxide levels when other countries, like China, are increasing their outputs and populations are increasing.

We need to understand that solar panels and wind turbines at this time are not effective or efficient ways of meeting our energy needs. We also need to understand that if we eliminate fossil fuel, nature would continue the process without us through forest fires, volcanoes and myriad other ways. Humans would be forced to cut down all the trees for fuel and that would only exacerbate the problem. It is the trees that convert the carbon dioxide into the oxygen we need to breathe.

With all our efforts to fight, we will soon have the same control over climate change as we have over volcanoes, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes and the movement of the continents. It is only the arrogance of mankind that makes us believe that we can significantly alter the path of natural events.

We still do not understand all the factors that go into the issue. Past species and civilizations that have failed to adjust to their changing worlds have gone extinct. The planet has been here for four and half billion years. In that time there have been several total extinction events and numerous partial extinctions. Humans have been on this planet for a mere 5,000 years and we “may” be among the smartest species to live here, but as smart as we think we are, we are still subject to all of the same rules of nature.

The solutions to climate change that are presented to us only forward the political goals of those in power and ignore the reality that humans have only been on this planet for a very small fraction of the time that the earth has existed. We need to accept that we are not in control and must adapt to the changes inflicted on us or we are doomed to extinction in the same way as millions of life forms before us. It may mean moving away from shorelines and changing our agricultural patterns while we are adapting to changing temperatures and weather. If we are half as smart as we think we are, then we should be planning to adapt to the changing earth rather than fight it.

Paul McLennan moved to Alberta more than 20 years ago as a member of the RCMP. He remained in Alberta after retirement in 2002, taught driving part time and settled in Medicine Hat in 2011.

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