Settled Science is an Oxymoron

The biggest lie you will hear repeated in the climate debate is that the science is settled. Science is never settled; it never has been and it never will be. In the 2nd century, Claudius Ptolemy scientifically "discovered" (using observation and charting) that the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun and planets all rotated around us. For the next 1400 years, that science was settled until Nicolaus Copernicus discovered (through observation and charting!) that Ptolemy was, in fact, dead wrong. And so it is with the climate debate; the science is far from settled and somebody in the future will most likely laugh at the science-alarmists of today who go around telling us that we're headed towards drowning, boiling, starving, or whatever the slogan of the day is. Science often reverses itself; in fact, ~40 years ago the cover of Time magazine told us we were headed for an ice age because scientists used data that concluded that mankind was doomed and we were all going to freeze to death at some point. Often, they can't even accurately predict the weather tomorrow, much less tell us what is going to happen in X number of years. So much for scientific predictions.

For the record, I'm not a scientist and I don't know if climate change (formerly called global warming, until the timetables fell apart) is real, and if it is, if it is caused by our existence on the planet or it is just a naturally-occurring event far beyond our control. There are plenty of real scientists on both sides of the issue and frankly, I don't know who to believe. If these so-called experts can't agree, why should I take a side when I don't know who or what to believe. The media is spectacularly good at spreading half-truths and whole lies, so you can't believe much of what they have to say about it either.

Climate change science has also spawned a cottage industry that depends on government money and once that teat is suckled, we all know how hard it is to wean off of. It's easy to keep beating the drum when the revenue stream is flowing, and nobody cashing their paycheck seems to be in a rush to turn that faucet off.

Ah, but I do know when a charlatan is brought before us, and recently Greta Thunberg wore those clothes. With her bold speech that we'll be watching you...  how dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood ...People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you... she showed us what a tool she is.

Greta, we didn't steal a goddamn thing from you. In fact, we have instilled at your fingertips the sum of all that man has accomplished to date. You whored yourself out to the panderers of doom and gloom that knew it would be hard to attack a naive and pretty 16-year old girl. How dare you allow yourself to be used this way... You spout disputed "facts" and numbers as if you're some sort of expert, when in fact all you are doing is regurgitating their we're all gonna die because you're idiots mantra. In fact, if the predictions we heard a decade or so ago were right, major cities would already be underwater. They aren't and again, that should tell you enough about scientific predictions and their accuracy.

But I do agree with you on one thing, but for a very different reason. We are headed for a mass extinction, but it has little to do with anything you've said. And it has nothing to do with a big asteroid or meteor crashing into the earth either. 

The mass extinction in the US began in 1973 when we legalized the killing of unborn human beings, Greta. In America, we've lost 60+ million living beings since then (probably hundreds of millions worldwide) and if that's not a large number, you tell me what is. When human beings can't agree on what a human being is or what being alive is, then we're headed down the tubes. When we so easily discard our values about human life and somehow justify the arbitrary slaughter of our future generations, we are doomed. You're 30 years too late to the party, sweetheart. The mass extinction already began almost 5 decades ago. How many Einsteins, how many Beethovens, how many Van Gogh's have been lost because some people couldn't be bothered to do what was done for them? If there is anything to get angry about, if there is anything you should wear a scowl over, it's that, Greta.

So while you have your 15 seconds of fame and cash the checks associated with that, the rest of us are going to go about our daily lives. And we're not going to chuck the inventions and innovations of those that preceded us because of a cult of people that think the sky is falling. Neither are we willingly going to open up our wallets wider to fund what you think ought to be done about it, and that's because if there's one thing government is good at, it's wasting money while taxing us to the nines. Frankly, we all read the story about the boy that cried wolf too many times, and we're getting tired of it

You were used, Greta and you don't even begin to understand how.