King Canute, Don Quixote and climate change

“We need system change to stop climate change” according to OLO blogger En Passant (OLO September 17).

No wonder people call me a denier. Certainly one of us is.

Here’s a fact: If there were no people on earth, none at all, the climate would keep on changing. So why lead an article with such a silly statement?

When King Canute set up his throne on the beach and commanded the tide not to rise he was acting in the certain knowledge that he would get his feet wet. He was demonstrating to his subjects that certain things are inevitable, that to believe otherwise is hubris, demanding powers not available even to kings.

This is a lesson lost on our leaders, who seem to be suggesting that we can stop climate change. We can’t.

Perhaps it’s true that anthropogenic activities contribute, but even so the forces that have been at work since the world was formed just keep rolling along.

Of course when they say ‘climate change’they actually mean ‘catastrophic anthropogenic global warming’(CAGW), but its handy to reduce that to a term that really has little meaning.

CAGW is the ideal political issue. It presumes a catastrophe from which the masses need to be rescued, and it’s caused by human activities that can be regulated and controlled.

It has the advantage of being long term, and the politicians who win election now will not be held to account. If temperatures continue to rise, it will be because we didn’t take the actions they proposed. If it stops rising, or in fact falls,  it will prove the efficacy of those actions.

No wonder Ban Ki-moon, Al Gore, Barack Obama, the CPA (Combined Politicians of Australia) and the political class generally embrace the concept. If you told me that there was a consensus supported by 97% of politicians I’d be inclined to suggest that you were erring on the conservative side.

What of the 300,000 people who turned out on the streets of New York? There was no obvious consensus demonstrated by the crowd.

The march has been compared to the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, or Martin Luther King’s Freedom march in the 60s. There is, however, an important distinction that needs to be made.