Thinking beyond climate

As noted in our latest Green Money Machine, there’s no question that humanity faces real environmental problems and that some worthwhile organizations and people are trying to do something about them. It’s an important reason why we oppose, and even resent, the way the overwhelming focus on “climate change” drains off so much effort, time, and even money. So let us tell you about some actual environmental issues that have caught our attention lately. For instance “the Mediterranean Sea’s critically endangered population of great white sharks.” Of course we also recognize that some ecologists may be taking a worldly, not to say cynical, approach and leveraging concern about climate to raise money for other actually more useful activities. But in the long run cunning isn’t a good plan any more than obtuseness is.

When it comes to great white sharks it is also of course easy to imagine that anyone planning to swim in the Mediterranean might regard their scarcity as a plus. But the fact that such a comment would be controversial today reminds us of just how far the environmental movement has come since the 1960s, and frequently in good ways.

Indeed, being historically minded, we even recall a jibe by the New York Times after US president Franklin Roosevelt’s crushing 1936 reelection victory (he won every state but Maine and Vermont) that “If he were to say a kind word for the man-eating shark, people would look thoughtful and say perhaps there are two sides to the question.” But just in case you were frightened by Jaws in your youth, we could also mention (also from National Geographic) efforts to save the Mekong River’s “megafish”, a catfish bigger than a person that… no, wait. Poor choice. Also scary.

OK then. How about the shrinking Great Salt Lake? Because according to National Geographic (yes again they do serve a useful purpose when not banging on about climate):

“Since 1850, the lake has lost 73 percent of its water and 60 percent of its surface area, and as more people move to the region, the water that typically feeds the lake is increasingly being diverted for agricultural, municipal, and industrial needs. What’s more, over the past few decades, a series of challenges – including climate change and the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years – has impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.”

Aaaargh. Banging on about climate. It’s a hard habit to break. And a bad one to keep, because it’s ridiculous to describe the loss of water going back to 1850, attribute it to human folly diverting the flow, and throw in the worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years (which necessarily means there was a horrific one 1,200 years ago which can’t have been our fault) and then toss in “climate change” which again is a description of alterations in weather not a causal force, and then speak of all these things having “impacted the cyclical climatic conditions that have sustained the lake for millennia.”

Bosh. In the first place, they cannot possibly know what cyclical climate conditions were like thousands and thousands of years ago. Nor what kind of pattern of megadroughts occurring millennia apart is natural, especially since interglacials don’t last that many millennia. Second, it isn’t possible that diverting water to agriculture, or swimming pools, has disrupted climate cycles. It just isn’t. Critical thought seems to be among the first and worst victims of “climate change”. The mind virus not the weather thing.

Especially as we regard it as intensely desirable that our fellow human fools stop draining the lake. Really. Take some of the tens of billions governments squander on trying to fix the weather, which honestly has always been bad, frequently dreadful, and put it to sensible uses.

Here let us also mention a piece in Heatmap that for once wasn’t about heat. Instead Robinson Meyer wrote about a US government program to keep the “screwworm” out of the American cattle industry by keeping it out of North America at all using radiation in what he calls:

“what was, up until recently, one of my favorite ‘unknown’ government programs. For decades, the United States government paid to breed millions of male screwworms, blast them with radiation to make them sterile, and then drop them from planes into the rainforest at the narrowest stretch of the Panama peninsula.”

Now it does have a bit of a “Dr. Frankenstein, call your office” feel. And one wonders where the sympathy that now even reaches great white sharks goes when it comes to “screwworms”. Not into our hearts, that’s for sure.

It’s not obvious to us that this kind of program can keep a parasite out forever. As Ian Malcolm observes in Jurassic Park, life tends to find a way. Even the nastiest, reddest in tooth, claw and proboscis. And we’re inclined in this regard to don our crunchy-con hats and suggest that massive industrial beef-farming might be sufficiently unnatural to be inviting disaster. But these are just a small handful of things that politicians, activists, volunteers and citizens could and should be thinking about instead of the increasingly empty ritualistic claims about “climate change” and allegedly worsening weather that isn’t happening and we couldn’t stop even if it was.

For instance, to get less cosmic, this item from Inside Climate News from late May:

“In January, a 60-year-old sewer pipe known as the Potomac Interceptor, running along the Maryland shoreline of the Potomac, collapsed near the Clara Barton Parkway corridor in Montgomery County, releasing an estimated 243 million gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River over approximately three weeks. But even before that spill, another crisis had already begun to unfold elsewhere in the watershed. At Joint Base Andrews in Prince George’s County, a fuel system failure on Dec. 11 led to thousands of gallons of jet fuel entering the headwaters of Piscataway Creek, a tributary that feeds directly into the Potomac. The leak continued for months before state regulators were notified.”

You get the idea? Both of those ones, and countless others, are very much within our control and should be addressed. But how many tens of billions did, say, Joe Biden’s misleadingly named “Inflation Reduction Act” dump on climate change not real ecology? And how many environmentalists objected to such distorted priorities? Or ponder spending on desalination of seawater versus trying to make it absorb more carbon.

We’ve been collecting items in this “Real Problems” file for a while, as you’ll realize when we now cite one from Heatmap from earlier in May promoting a podcast:

“We live in a time of unheralded environmental victories. Dolphins and whales swim in New York and San Francisco harbors. Lead has been eliminated globally in gasoline for cars and trucks. And Southern California has cleaned up its air. That last one is more important than you might think.”

True. But only because of the incredibly distorted focus. Just for starters, what’s more important than breathable air? Without it you die in minutes whereas even toxic water you have hours (assuming you don’t drink it unawares).

Also, why are so many of these victories unheralded? Why aren’t they models instead? As that promo adds, Meyer and his guest:

“chat about why LA initially misdiagnosed the causes of its terrible air pollution, how it got them right, and what we can learn from the city’s eventual inspiring success.”

Which is nothing if you are chronically, or lucratively, in the all-doom-and-gloom business or else so fixated on “climate change” that you only think soot matters because of its impact on clouds or albedo. But it shouldn’t be.

Just as, while not wishing to be messily devoured on land or at sea, we should surely all be on tenterhooks about efforts to save India’s last lions, not to mention tigers. It’s bad enough that we humans seem to have so much trouble sharing the planet. It’s worse that a major cause is how full of ourselves we are about saving the planet from us.

P.S. While noting with approval a New York Times “Climate Forward” piece about the desirable undamming of many American rivers, removing well-meaning structures that harmed ecosystems, we also wonder how it squares with wanting to electrify everything and, if a conflict arises, how many greens would prefer natural rivers to “carbon-free” generation. Especially the ones who also want to dam the Bering Strait to “Save the Climate”.