It is 84 degrees as I write this. This would not be a noteworthy detail save for one qualification: it is October 4 and I live in Hillsdale, Michigan. Today, Palm Springs is only five degrees warmer.
This is unusual, to say the least.
My weather app, for instance, informs me that today’s temperature is 19 degrees above normal. While I am no climatologist, I do remember things that happened in the past. This data point sounds right. 13 years ago, when I first moved to Hillsdale, I remember it being cool in the fall.
It was not regularly 80+ degrees in early October, as it has been for the last three years. While there was a smattering of warm days in the low 70s in the fall, it was not a regular occurrence to have a lot of them.
What are we to make of this change? What does this data mean? How should it inform the way we live?
First, just because it is hot now does not mean it will be hot in the future. The determination of what is “normal” or above “average” depends entirely on the quantity and quality of data collected. Humans have only been collecting information on the weather in Michigan for a little over a century. Much of that data is, of course, questionable.
How do we know that the weather over the last 100 years is the norm? Why should the weather in the future “obey” the same averages? The climate is complicated. Isn’t it presumptuous to assume we really know how it works?
On the other hand, man is not stupid. Our records are not nothing, and while our knowledge of the weather is not perfect, there are human beings who do know a lot about how various gases interact.
The “greenhouse effect” is real and observable in controlled environments. It represents the manifestation of a chain of causation occurring from an increase in carbon dioxide in a contained environment. Something like this might be happening in the wider atmosphere.
Man has already transformed the surface of the earth. He may have done likewise to the sky above him.
But what would it matter if he had transformed the atmosphere?
Perhaps it is hotter now because of man’s burning of petroleum energy. And? Alarmists warn of an increase in hurricanes, wildfires, and tornadoes. But what of it? Those things have always existed. Nature has always threatened man. What is the “right” number of natural disasters?
In order to have the immense fruits of civilization, we have needed to produce and consume vast amounts of energy by burning carbon-based fuel. If one tradeoff is longer summers, then, well, that is simply the (comparatively mild) price we had to pay to have the goods we enjoy now.
It is by no means certain that global warming—assuming it is man-made, exists at all, and won’t solve itself—demands vast new increases in taxation and regulation.
This, of course, points to the real issue. The reason there is so much consternation over the climate has nothing to do with temperature and atmospheric data. This isn’t a fight over scientific principle but political power.
Climate alarmists demand the complete subordination of our liberty to wise central planners (themselves) who will save us from the “emergency” of warm weather. Free human beings, these activists claim, are too stupid to solve the problems created by climate change through their voluntary choices. Therefore, the ignorant many must be enslaved to the few wise and far-seeing climate activists.
We must “stop oil” in order to bring back historical average temperatures. That this will mean the extermination of billions if brought to its radical conclusion is of no concern to these climate communists. If we don’t act now, then humanity itself will die out completely.
Even more “moderate” climate activists want to be given vast new powers of taxation and regulation, which they intend to wield for the “greater good” of “green” energy and fighting pollution.
If granted this power, the lives of ordinary people would become dramatically worse. Climate socialism is little better than full climate communism.
But none of this follows! Just because there is change does not mean we need to enslave ourselves to reverse the change. In fact, it may not need to be reversed at all! I hold that freedom is better than slavery, that a free people will better solve the problems inherent to human life than a legion of slaves toiling under the crack of the climate change lash.
So what if there are new problems caused by man’s past technological achievements? All this means is that we need to work to solve those problems. More wildfires will mean homeowners in vulnerable areas will need to take new precautions. More hurricanes will mean that residents will need to move away from coasts or pay to reinforce their properties. Increased droughts will necessitate that farmers move from submarginal land to other, more productive properties.
If carbon dioxide pollution is such a problem, then the federal government should respond by deregulating nuclear power. Substantial decreases in carbon emissions are more than feasible under current market conditions. There is no need to provide vast subsidies to favored “green” businesses. The solution is for the regulators to take a step back, not double down.
It is possible that some solutions designed to bring about cooler weather, like cloud seeding or other atmospheric transformations, will have complicated effects on property owners more broadly. But those property rights issues do not require that idiotic government bureaucrats dictate the process. Common law adjudication through juries and courts of law is more than enough.
The moment we adopt the principle that some portion of our fellow citizens ought to be enslaved to another portion, we raise the question of who ought to do the enslaving. Given the choice between being a tyrant or feeling the crack of the whip on their own back, most human beings will choose to be tyrants. This is a problem that can only be “solved” (if you can call it that) by violence.
Civil war is worse than climate change, far, far worse. The climate is always changing, but war is always a choice. We should choose peace and freedom!
Human life is filled with problems. Every waking moment of every human life is spent trying to best remove miseries and acquire happiness. The question is not whether we will have problems—that is inevitable—but how we will solve them. We have two choices: slavery or freedom.
If we defenders of liberty spend our time arguing over graphs, then we have already lost. By digging into the data, we adopt the left’s fundamental premise that if climate change is real, then it can only be solved through enslavement. Once that claim has been accepted either openly or implicitly, we have already lost. We are then only able to defend our rights by insisting that the data is a “hoax.”
A similar problem occurred during COVID. Opponents of lockdowns and mask mandates, instead of directly addressing the question of justice, spent the bulk of their time talking about whether masks and lockdowns worked. No!
The question of human freedom, whether individuals should be allowed to go about their lives as they see fit, even in the face of danger, is not in any way dependent on laboratory data, government-funded studies, or charts. The question of who, if anyone, has the right to enslave his neighbor cannot be settled by pointing to infection rates, mRNA vaccine efficacy, or the air filtration capacities of N95 masks.
Climate change and COVID both point us deeper, to the most fundamental human questions. The flight into data, into “value-free” natural and medical science, is cowardice (and malice) made manifest. We cannot shy away from answering the question of the best way of life at its core: slavery or freedom.