Climate Skeptic: Thunder & Lightning are not man made, let's party

Blame Twitter for our foray into the murky world of climate change because we found someone ah-ing and aw-ing about how a founding member of Greenpeace came out as a climate change skeptic.

A few minutes of research performed by our famous Random Research (RR) team lead to an article on the Heartlander web site.

The typical problem of the K-Landnews basement newsroom manifested itself after the first read of the article: we are just not extreme enough to yell and dismiss it with tons of righteous indignation.**

We agree with Mr. Moore on many things, for example "certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model." There is no doubt about temperatures having gotten warmer long before the massive CO2 emissions shown in the hockey stick graph.

We'll even buy the observation "The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields."

Sheer stubbornness on the part of the K-Landnews draws the line at "Humans Saved Planet". That's just a dumb statement, without any logic if you accept Mr. Moore's stated premise that we don't really know enough about how climate behaves.

Much of the climate change debate suffers from a focus on CO2, which is understandable in terms of the volume, gigatons of the stuff is released through human activity each year, partly because computer models are so complex and measurements are equally complex.
And being able to talk about just CO2 to a human population on non-scientists may seem a good idea.

The mild mannered K-Landnews staff keeps asking a simple question: why does it matter whether climate change is completely man made, partly man made or not at all man made?

The answer by Joe Average usually is: because if it is not man made you don't need to do anything.

The brighter of the climate skeptics, though, shy away from this answer because they know that it does not hold water. The flu is not man made, yet we fight it. Thunder & Lighting are not man made, yet we don't party outside in a thunderstorm.

As fossil fuels go, we are partying in the thunderstorm.

The big brains at the K-Landnews (size wise, not necessarily IQ wise) have long held the belief that the focus on CO2 is as detrimental as it may be useful because we tend to not look at all the issues from fossil fuels unless there is a major oil spill. Enough humans will be able to live in a greenhouse, no doubt, but it's the chemicals that will get us and our food.

On a lighter note, let's misappropriate a line from a Hunter/Garcia/Kreutzmann song: If the thunder don't get you then the lightning will.

** Emissions of righteous indignation cause undoubtedly man made heating up of the atmosphere of public discourse.