One thing that strikes me as being very odd is the way that so many people cite the “many” scientists who support human induced climate change as being reason enough to accept  it as absolute truth.  Apart from the fact that the supposed universal scientific agreement on the subject simply doesn’t exist, this acceptance by the public is completely at odds with the general distrust the public has for a lot of modern science.

An example is genetic engineering.  There has never been any identified risk with any commercially developed genetically modified (GM) crop yet a large proportion of the public is convinced that GM crops are a great evil rather than the best solution to food shortages around the world.

So the question is, why does the public distrust science so much on many issues, yet accept science without question in relation to global warming?

Part of the answer lies in the promoters of human induced global warming and the anti-GM movement. Unsurprisingly, in many cases these are the same people. So organisations like Greenpeace will tell you not to trust scientists in relation to GM, but to trust them in relation to global warming. In fact, the last point needs to be qualified; Greenpeace tells you to trust only the scientists who support their views on Global warming.

Many of the scientists who are the biggest proponents of human induced global warming are the same scientists who gave birth to worldwide scares in relation to population explosions (running out of food), DDT (which the UN now accepts as safe, as the non-alarmists scientists said all along, and which could have saved millions from dying of malaria), and the looming disaster of the ice age they thought was coming in the 1970s. These so-called scientists have been crying wolf for 40 years or more and they are not to be trusted without convincing support from non-alarmist scientists (which they don’t have in relation to global warming).

What these people do is match their theory to the facts.  When the earth did heat up a bit in the 1990s, they jumped on this fact as a chance to launch their latest “the sky is falling” scare.  However, it has since been clearly demonstrated that the rise in human emitted CO2 (which is still a tiny component of the atmosphere) was a coincidence rather than a cause of the temperature rise. Now that the temperature is not rising further, they quickly adapt their theory to fit with the new circumstances (that’s why they call it climate change instead of global warming; so they can still say it’s our fault even if it gets cooler).

It seems to me that a big part of the problem is that the general public has very little understanding of, or even interest in, the science. People are prepared to accept blandishments from celebrities and United Nations bureaucracies as the absolute truth without any desire to see if they actually make sense. How can people not care about something so important?

If you haven’t yet done so, you owe it to yourself and your children to actually consider the science behind the global warming claims and see if it really stacks up.