Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est le Climate Change

There are climate change cycles within climate change cycles, the climate is always changing according to these cycles, in some places at a certain point in time the water rises, the grass gets greener, and the ice melts, in others at a different point it’s the opposite. Generally, warming is better than cooling for homo sapiens, who likes growthy conditions for his food, and friendly habitat that is between the extremes of desert or ice field, where not much grows. So anything that trends towards a greenhouse effect is good news, anything that goes the other way generally bad, from the food on the table perspective.

But there are winners and losers in these naturally occurring changes, of which mankind plays, since he is bound by natural laws like everything else, a transient part. So claims that suggest man contributes to climate change is stating the obvious, while claims that man makes climate change, or can unmake it, is blaming Canute for the tide and asking him to control it. That’s the historical Canute, the one who took his throne down to the beach to demonstrate to his subjects the limits of his power in the face of the incoming tide, not the Canute of popular myth cast as a deluded fool who thought he could stop the tide.

Unless there is some other agenda that benefits those who promote the idea of man’s omnipotence over nature at the expense of others, in which case it’s very clever. The mechanical system of checks and balances that work within eternal cycles are quite infinitely strong and complex, man by comparison is definitively weak, especially modern man with his historical prejudices and scientific vanity. It’s a one-sided battle. You can mitigate effects, but you can’t eradicate causes. So it’s kind of the opposite of Covid 19, where you can eradicate causes but you can’t mitigate effects. One is man-made, the other is a force of nature.


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