Climate Change Is a Real Phenomenon, But Can We Really "Trust the Science?"

New Monster Storms Are Indicative of Changing Weather, But We've Been Burned Before

Asheville, North Carolina After Hurricane Helene. Source: Billy Bowling

I graduated from High School in 1995. The majority of my education, from kindergarten through 10th grade, took place in public school.

The public school environment was a lot less hostile in those days. There was still a liberal bent to public education, but I saw significantly less overt indoctrination. The student body at my upstate New York high school was a mix of different kinds of kids from different backgrounds and political alignments. There was no real homogeneity, and certainly no dominant “woke” culture.

Of course, back then we still jokingly called each other “fags” and “retards” and said everything we didn’t like was “gay.” The thought police had not colonized our young minds by curtailing our uncouth speech, which itself was a kind of play-acting of feeling free to express controversial opinions.

At age 15 or 16, I started listening to talk radio. I was the only kid my age I knew who regularly tuned in to Rush Limbaugh, but I grew up in an environment where political and religious awareness was prioritized. As you might expect, I imbibed the particular species of neoconservative, antagonistic anti-leftism that was popular in those days. I never called myself a “Dittohead,” but I did spend years nodding my head as I received “environmentalist whacko” updates about “tree huggers,” and hearing the Animal Rights theme song version of “Born Free.” I hated Earth Day before it was cool.

My dad’s boss, who owned a century-old lumber yard, proudly displayed a prank box of “Spotted Owl Helper” in his office — a joke that took aim at those claiming the timber industry was ruining the owls’ natural habitat.

(Fun fact: the timber industry actually plants more trees than it harvests on an annual basis by a factor of roughly 2 to 1.)

In any event, this was what peak conservative trolling of leftist environmental ideology looked like in the days before the internet. By today’s edgelord standards, it’s pretty underwhelming:

I homeschooled for my junior year, during which we had a presentation from a local television meteorologist who told us that anthropogenic climate change — they were just calling it “Man-made Global Warming” in those days — was scientifically unworkable. She said that the eruption of a single volcano emitted more greenhouse gases than a thousand years of driving all the SUVs on the planet around.

It was an explanation as powerful as it was obvious. Of course a volcano eruption put way more toxic crap in the atmosphere than all the world’s soccer moms. Duh.

But I was already ideologically primed to stop there. Many young conservatives were trained to hold a reflexively antithetical position to environmentalist views. We never took them seriously. We never even investigated them. We just dismissively laughed them off as a kind of public hysteria.

In hindsight, I think that was a mistake.

I went to college near Pittsburgh, and when I visited a museum in America’s most famous former steel town, I saw photographs of smog so dense and dark that it looked like midnight at midday, the old vintage cars all driving with their headlights on. I talked to a man who grew up there who said you couldn’t even see through the thick haze sometimes on your way to and from school.

If I couldn’t find an easily accessible trash can, I would sometimes litter without a second thought. Later, I came to realize, seeing windswept piles of trash on the side of the road, that all this kind of thing does is turn your town into a landfill. And who wants to live in a landfill?

The Great Pacific Garbage patch is one of the most stunning indictments of planetary stewardship I’ve ever seen. Far from dismissing the problem, I now proudly applaud efforts like The Ocean Cleanup that are working hard to remove trash from our seas and waterways.

Stewardship of our planet is just basic self-preservation. But that doesn’t mean that a lot of environmentalist activism isn’t a deeply politicized position that is exploited by power brokers for financial and political gain.

For conservatives, navigating the politicization of environmental issues to find common sense solutions to real problems without getting sucked into propaganda and policy traps is not easy.

And there are few issues more politicized than climate change.

The policies around this topic move trillions of dollars through the global economy. Greenwashing, so-called “green energy,” mandates on energy sources or vehicle fuel types, carbon credit exchanges, multi-national agreements like the Paris Accords (which appear to be designed more to create global economic control schemes than fixing any of the purported problems) — all of it adds up to big business, big regulations, big taxes and penalties, and big political power grabs.

The attempt to bully people into accepting a politically motivated, financially driven, scientifically questionable unified theory of anthropogenic origin on climate change has, once again, created a reactionary response. It has animated a widespread ideological resistance to accepting that climate change is real at all.

This becomes a real point of conflict when we look at data and storm activity that is clearly abnormal for the period of time in which we have records.

Yes, there’s really something going on with the climate. That much is becoming clear. But to attribute it singularly or even primarily to human action is begging the question. In many places, weather data goes back only a century or so - not a very long time when it comes to the shifting weather and geological patterns of a planet, or in the activity of its local sun.

But pointing a finger at humans has led to policy positions that translate into trillions of dollars of economic activity. Scientists who don’t support the alleged consensus can’t get funding for their research. Scientists who openly dissent, rather than being valued for their scrutiny, are condemned and ostracized and in some cases have their careers effectively ended.

Climate change was “trust the science” dogmatism before COVID was. (And fluoridated water, which has recently come under scrutiny, was before that.) The ever-changing (and often completely made up) “expert” information on COVID origins, mitigation efforts, and treatments showed us just how reliable “scientific consensus” really is when there’s this much money and power riding on it.

These things are conflicts of interest. They should call all such “consensus” positions into question.

As the fictional scientist Elvi Okoye warns in James S.A. Corey’s Leviathan Falls, "We're scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we're wrong."

How many primary sources of data are being used by all these climate scientists? Are they doing their own measurements or simply trusting the work of a small handful of others? Why have so many of their dire and calamitous predictions been so utterly wrong?

And yet here we are, getting pummeled by one meteorological model-defying monster storm after another. It’s clear that our weather patterns are changing.

Even so, anthropogenic climate change as a theory has been so weaponized politically and ideologically that many people would rather believe the government is manipulating the weather for the gain of those in power than that this is happening as a normal downstream effect of human activity. Here’s one such suggestion from a Twitter account with a large following that has already gotten a million views and nearly ten thousand likes just since yesterday:

Personally, I’m still inclined to believe the 11th grade presentation that compared volcanic output to that of SUVs. It just makes sense. And the earth has survived intense periods of volcanic activity many times over the course of millions of years.

The planet is still here, and still sustaining life. It’s a bit hubristic to think that in just the century or two since we industrialized, we have somehow thrown more at the planet than its own very active geology has — or more to the point, more than the Earth can handle.

Technologically, I don’t know that weather manipulation of the kind being suggested is even possible, though theories abound. But in terms of evaluating human motivations, the government manipulating weather so they can confiscate more stuff of value from the people they’re supposed to serve is just as plausible as the government using climate policy to impose regulations that confiscate stuff of value from the people they’re supposed to serve.

When you, Mr. Government Man, force people or companies to install solar, or buy electric cars, or use a certain amount of “sustainable” energy sources, or [insert mandate here], you’re still making them pay you or your crony constituents in service of your beliefs whether they accept it or not.

Do we think a government that would politicize the provision of hurricane relief after the worst storm we’ve seen in decades wouldn’t use any theoretical weather modification technology it possessed against its own people if they felt the incentive was right?

Weirdly, Occam’s razor suggests that the weather manipulation theory is the simpler and more elegant path to the same exploitative outcome.

And before you bristle at the suggestion that the government would ever do such things to unsuspecting citizens, we have plenty of examples from history. I asked ChatGPT to give me a few historical cases like the Tuskegee Experiment, just for reference. It gave me ten, some of which I knew, but others I’d never even heard of:

The U.S. government has a dark history of conducting experiments on its own citizens, often without their knowledge or consent. These experiments have been motivated by a variety of factors, ranging from medical research to military objectives. Here are several notorious examples, beyond the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment:

1. Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (1932–1972)

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study involved 600 African American men in Alabama, 399 of whom had syphilis, and 201 did not. The men were told they were receiving treatment for "bad blood," but in reality, they were given no proper treatment, even after penicillin was established as a cure in the 1940s. The study continued for decades, with participants and their families suffering severe health consequences as a result.

2. MKUltra (1953–1973)

The CIA’s MKUltra project was a series of illegal human experiments aimed at developing mind control techniques. The program involved administering LSD, other drugs, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and other methods to U.S. and Canadian citizens without their consent. Subjects often suffered severe psychological trauma, and the program's goal was to manipulate mental states for interrogation and potential use in Cold War espionage. The full extent of the damage remains unknown due to the destruction of many records.

3. Project 4.1 (1954)

After the U.S. detonated a hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in 1954 (the "Castle Bravo" test), fallout from the explosion exposed the Marshall Islanders and American military personnel to dangerous levels of radiation. The U.S. government used the people exposed to radiation as subjects to study the effects of nuclear fallout, tracking the resulting health issues, which included cancer and birth defects. Many victims were never informed of the long-term risks they faced.

4. The Guatemalan STD Experiments (1946–1948)

This lesser-known but horrific study involved the U.S. government deliberately infecting prisoners, soldiers, and mentally ill patients in Guatemala with syphilis, gonorrhea, and other sexually transmitted diseases, without their consent. The goal was to test the effectiveness of penicillin. Around 1,300 people were infected, and hundreds suffered lasting damage. This experiment was conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service, the same organization responsible for the Tuskegee study.

5. Operation Sea-Spray (1950)

In San Francisco, the U.S. Navy sprayed large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens into the air to simulate a biological warfare attack. This bacteria was believed to be harmless, but it led to a rise in pneumonia and urinary tract infections, and at least one person died. The test was part of a broader series of experiments during the Cold War, designed to understand how biological agents could spread over urban areas.

6. The Plutonium Experiments (1945–1947)

In this experiment, conducted by the U.S. government under the Manhattan Project, eighteen people were injected with plutonium without their consent to study how the body absorbs radiation. These patients, who were often terminally ill or uninformed about the true nature of the experiments, suffered significant health consequences from radiation exposure.

7. Willowbrook State School Hepatitis Experiments (1956–1970s)

At Willowbrook State School, a New York institution for children with intellectual disabilities, children were intentionally infected with hepatitis to study the effects of the disease and potential treatments. The parents were sometimes coerced into giving consent, being told that their children would not be admitted to the overcrowded school unless they agreed to the study. The ethical violations of exploiting vulnerable populations for medical research were later exposed.

8. Operation Whitecoat (1954–1973)

This was a U.S. Army medical experiment that used conscientious objectors, mostly Seventh-day Adventists, as test subjects to study biological warfare agents. Participants were exposed to diseases like Q fever, yellow fever, and tularemia. While these experiments were technically voluntary, and subjects were treated if they became ill, the ethical implications of using humans to test biological warfare agents have been hotly debated.

9. The Army's LSD Experiments (1950s-1960s)

The U.S. Army, as part of Cold War-era research, dosed unwitting soldiers and civilians with LSD and other hallucinogens to study the effects of these drugs on mental performance and combat readiness. These experiments often left the subjects with long-term psychological damage, as the powerful drugs caused hallucinations and disorientation without the subjects' knowledge or consent.

10. The Monster Study (1939)

In this psychological experiment conducted at the University of Iowa, researchers, including Wendell Johnson, experimented on 22 orphaned children by subjecting them to positive and negative speech therapy to study the effects of stuttering. Children in the "negative" group were belittled and criticized for their speech, which led to long-term psychological harm, even though none of the children had originally suffered from speech problems.

These examples highlight a troubling history of government experimentation on unsuspecting or vulnerable populations, often with little regard for ethics, consent, or the long-term consequences for the people involved. The legacy of these experiments continues to fuel mistrust in governmental and scientific institutions.

It’s actually terrifying to realize just how willing our overlords are to use us as guinea pigs. Which is, incidentally, exactly what they did with the experimental mRNA COVID vaccines. And I have my sources inside the government who tell me they knew it, but that they calculated that the risk was worth the benefit to the common good.

Now, I want to be clear: I am not advocating for the weather manipulation thesis. I am just trying to examine the set of possible variables. I think it’s important to dispense with the notion that the government wouldn’t manipulate the weather to affect an election outcome in an area of opposite-side political demographics or to exploit natural resources in service of shadow government corporations like Blackrock or…whatever. You get the gist.

The government’s job is to act like it cares about you, even when it’s actively working against you. And it has zero qualms about working against you.

But the suspicion and conspiracy theorism that has arisen over literally hundreds of personal accounts and videos of the federal or local government obstructing or flat out stopping private citizens from helping victims of Hurricane Helene underscores the lack of trust that conservatives already feel on this issue.

At the end of his 2004 eco-terror novel State of Fear, the late science fiction novelist Michael Crichton offers a number of after-book author’s notes and article references about his concern that “politicized science is dangerous.” He writes:

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.

This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.

I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago.

Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchill. It was approved by Supreme Court justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in its favor. The famous names who supported it included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; activist Margaret Sanger; botanist Luther Burbank; Leland Stanford, founder of Stanford University; the novelist H. G. Wells; the playwright George Bernard Shaw; and hundreds of others. Nobel Prize winners gave support. Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out this research, but important work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.

These efforts had the support of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus were alive, he would have supported this effort.

All in all, the research, legislation, and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.

Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of this theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people.

The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful—and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing—that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated.

Crichton argues that revisionist history buried the popularity of eugenics — a movement for which he says (despite protests to the contrary) “there was no scientific basis” — among the thought leaders of the early 20th Century.

“After World War II,” he writes, “nobody was a eugenicist, and nobody had ever been a eugenicist. Biographers of the celebrated and the powerful did not dwell on the attractions of this philosophy to their subjects, and sometimes did not mention it at all.”

And yet here we are, Crichton argues, doing it again:

Now we are engaged in a great new theory, that once again has drawn the support of politicians, scientists, and celebrities around the world. Once again, the theory is promoted by major foundations. Once again, the research is carried out at prestigious universities. Once again, legislation is passed and social programs are urged in its name. Once again, critics are few and harshly dealt with.

Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice—terms that have no agreed definition—are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression.

One proof of this suppression is the fact that so many of the outspoken critics of global warming are retired professors. These individuals are no longer seeking grants, and no longer have to face colleagues whose grant applications and career advancement may be jeopardized by their criticisms. In science, the old men are usually wrong. But in politics, the old men are wise, counsel caution, and in the end are often right.

Twenty years ago, Crichton — who was himself a scientist and physician before becoming a full-time author — exposed the seeds of the problem we are seeing now in full flower.

Climate change does indeed appear to be a real phenomenon, but is the science we have on it trustworthy?

Author, cartoonist, and political commentator Scott Adams says no. In his 2019 book Loserthink, Adams writes:

Here I draw upon my sixteen years working in corporate America. If my job involved reviewing a complicated paper from a peer, how much checking of the data and the math would I do when I am already overworked? Would I travel to the original measuring instruments all over the world and check their calibrations? Would I compare the raw data to the “adjusted” data that is used in the paper? Would I do a deep dive on the math and reasoning, or would I skim it for obvious mistakes? Unless scientists are a different kind of human being than the rest of us, they would intelligently cut corners whenever they think they could get away with it, just like everyone else. Assuming scientists are human, you would expect lots of peer-reviewed studies to be flawed. And that turns out to be the situation. As the New York Times reported in 2018, the peer review process is defective to the point of being laughable.

Thousands of climate scientists agree with the idea that the planet is warming in an unprecedented way. But how many of those scientists are directly involved in measuring temperatures versus how many are simply relying on the data from a smaller group that does that work?

While it is relatively easy to know if a certain region is warm compared to recent decades, one must rely on historical data to know how unusual that is in terms of the earth’s history. How many scientists in the world do you imagine have worked directly on determining historical proxy temperature measurements, such as tree rings and ice cores? A handful? A thousand? I have no idea. And neither do you.

There is a kind of priest-caste debate going on around climate change science, and it’s couched in jargon-heavy, layman-excluding credentialism that makes the claims and counter-claims very difficult to evaluate.

Adams again:

In theory, a nonscientist should be able to follow the climate debate to its conclusion and judge whether the scientists or the skeptics have the best argument. But in reality, all one can do is chase the arguments back and forth until one of the players says something scientific that you don’t understand. Then, if you are like most normal adults, you default to believing whichever side you already thought was right. The topic of climate science is effectively impenetrable for nonscientists.

[…]

If you have no experience in the field of science, you might think the climate models created by scientists are “science” because scientists make them. But prediction models are not science. They are an intelligent combination of scientific thinking, math, human judgment, and incomplete data. That’s why there are lots of different climate models, all a bit different.

[…]

If you were already aware that climate models are not science, and that they fit the pattern of well-known scams (sometimes called marketing), and that it is fairly normal for the consensus of scientists to be dead wrong, you probably have a healthy skepticism about climate predictions of doom.

One thing I can say with complete certainty is that it is a bad idea to trust the majority of experts in any domain in which both complexity and large amounts of money are involved. You end up with this:

Well, yes, our predictions were completely wrong, but now we know why they were wrong. If you give us a million dollars to fix it, our predictions will be accurate from this point on. Don’t ask me what we fixed or how we did it because you wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated.

Hurricane Milton. Source: Wundermap; Map time: Tue Oct 08 2024 16:41:20 EDT

As Hurricane Milton roars across the Gulf of Mexico toward an already storm-damaged Western Florida coast, ready to make landfall as yet another monster storm hot on the heels of Helene, it seems to me that it’s kind of important for us to cut through the bullshit and get to the real, honest, what-we-know-and-what-we-don’t about climate change.

These storms are so powerful because of atmospheric and oceanic conditions that really are different than what we perceive, with our century or so of temperature data, as normal.

But before the powers that be sanctimoniously order us to turn off our air conditioners and stop driving our gas-powered cars as they fly to climate conferences sipping their cocktails on private jets, how about they level with us on why they’ve gotten so much wrong, and why the changes that have been made across the globe in accordance with this apocalyptic ideology aren’t making any difference?

If they can’t put the “science” in terms laymen can understand, with data we can see for ourselves supports the theory, then the “consensus” is just a confidence game, perpetrated on the average citizens of the world who will always bear the brunt of any imposed policies while the elite continue to live by a different set of rules.

That’s not good enough, and we should refuse to accept it.