WEIRD WEATHER AND CLIMATE HUBRIS

While temperatures have risen to over 100^o  in areas west of here, in New York it has been unusually chilly. It is now June 19th and temperatures are currently still in the 50s. This has made for great gardening weather, but terrible swimming weather. Meanwhile late yesterday rains arrived which no one had predicted. 

If nothing else this shows us two things: first, weather is precarious and at best only partially predictable even now, and less and less accurate the further ahead we look. This only makes claims of certainty about “climate” many years from now simply ridiculous despite what the “experts” tell us. For the only certainty in life is uncertainty. It is just another instance of people claiming to know far more than they actually do know, and that is too often the source of much of the damage we do ourselves. Time and again things are grossly mismanaged and end in failure because of this sort of conceit. But because we are now a resolutely humane and ever-indulgent society, heads never role even after they have bungled everything.  What we really need is a big dose of humility, and a healthy skepticism about any claims of certainty. 

This does not mean denial of “climate change;” (which is a bit of an oxymoron), for the simple reason that if you have millions upon millions of more people coming online in a better standard of living based upon fossil fuels there are inevitably going to be consequences. The trouble is most of them are located on the other side of the world, and yet we have idiots insisting that we shoot ourselves in the foot  to correct something that is increasingly attributable to other places. There are things we can, should and will do to ameliorate all of this short of self-destruction, but they are more on the order of simple things, like planting trees, rather than dubious schemes telling us what to do and how we should live, or crash “crisis” programs towards this end that only cause other problems because they are fundamentally based upon ideological principles that vary sharply from reality.  The truth is that climate change is a constantly evolving process, with or without us, that is of an order of complexity far beyond our actual capabilities- again because we have people, who in Socrates terms, claim to know more than they actually do know.

The second thing to note is that given the great variations in weather, temperature, etc. just in this country, it is preposterous to seek to impose “one size fits all” policies on everyone that are out of touch with the realities on the ground that people actually  face. These conditions are inherently varied and complex, and cannot logically adhere to a single standard. Ye that is what we face with inept policy-makers seeking to impose uniform solutions on all of us in places where they simply do not apply. In the area where I live there is an abundance of water resources, while out west there are serious drought conditions. But the latter is the result of what few will yet admit, namely overdevelopment beyond what the region can sustain in terms of water resources, and ludicrous overdependence upon a single river across several states. Meanwhile in California where the consequences are going to be more severe, instead of investing in desalinization technology, or channeling water resources from the Pacific Northwest where they are abundant, they throw away money on mass transit boondoggles than no one is going to use. 

This is all a result of hubris on the part of an elite that is running out of credibility across the board, and rather than more prescriptions from them as to how we should go about things, what we really need is considerably more silence, restraint, and humility on their part.