The Useless and Pointless Denial of Climate Change

The trees surrounding my house are covered with about an eighth of an inch of ice. There is even more than that on my car, my driveway and the street we live on.

Out in the world, people who have things to do that require traveling are living dangerously, never sure which part of the road under their wheels is sheer ice.

It’s one of those days when you are happy you work at home. For those who don’t, it’s one of those days that they really wish they did.

As ice storms go, and I have been through a few, because, hey, this ain’t Florida, this one is not too bad. The tree branches are supporting the weight of the ice that’s forming on them so there’s not much danger of one of them falling down and damaging my car.

What’s happening today is winter in Canada. But with all the conversations going on about climate change, it’s easy to leap to the conclusion that this is part of a chain of disasters that have been caused by human recklessness and corporate greed.

But the simple fact is that it is really not. It’s a winter storm. Three degrees either way would make it a winter snowstorm or a winter rainstorm. But it’s right in the middle. Just the luck of the draw and the confluence of weather patterns.

That’s not to say that climate change is not real. I’m only saying that it’s a pretty long leap from a fairly benign ice storm in the southern part of Canada to a global catastrophe.

Compared the the forest fires in California, the 10 foot snowfalls in central Europe, the floods in south America, the Hawaiian and Icelandic volcanic eruptions and a whole bunch of other really serious shit, this little ice storm barely registers a blip on the climate change scale.

The Politics Of Climate Change

If you look around a bit you can clearly see that this is not so much a science issue anymore as it is a political one. The political people who know it’s a real thing that’s happening to us tend to be much more left wing, the climate change deniers tend to be the righties.

This would force the companies and corporations who are contributing the most to creating the toxic atmosphere that has been a big part of triggering this phenomenon in the first place, to start diverting profits into re-tooling their plants to make them less capable of spewing poisons into the air.

Now this is a big deal because it would actually effect literally hundreds of thousands of businesses.

The larger businesses would fear a radical drop in their share price and dividends paid to investors. Many of the smaller business would find themselves stretched financially, because it’s not cheap to make make your plants run more responsibly.

So businesses right across the spectrum would all have to suffer a bit. Lay people off. Close down for a period of time. Or go right out of business altogether in some cases.

There’s Really Only One Solution

Right now the earth’s atmosphere is experiencing the highest levels of carbon dioxide in history.

If this continues, the climate change that we are seeing now will only accelerate. It will eventually throw the world into complete disarray, millions will die while civilizations figure out how to deal with the new world that this has created, and we will probably end up with one of those strange dark Bladerunner worlds. Those of us who survive that is.

But most importantly to those polluting companies, their customers will start disappearing, or will not have enough money to buy their shit.

This is so simple an argument that it completely astonishes me how few corporate leaders and their pet politicians are willing to admit that a whole bunch of things need to be done and done soon.

Of course, when it’s a political issue, especially these days, practicality and rational thought leading to consensus are somehow nowhere to be seen.

And so the world continues to stagger along.

The question is for how much longer.

Jim lives in St Catharines Ont. aka The Quiet Side of the Lake

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