This is part 6 of A Climate Counternarrative.
There could be more to the story than desertification being construed as runaway climate change, but the evidence for anything else is slim.
The would-be effects of climate change seldom impress those who work with nature for good reasons. Land stewardship and natural variability can usually explain what gets attributed to climate change. California’s Central Valley, for instance, illustrates how sun-exposed, irrigated soil acts as a dark body that heats up the water vapor it releases. Like Death Valley, it is surrounded by hills and mountains. Throw in a drought, a high pressure zone that lingers over the area, and a Colorado river worth of water, and the conditions are set to get scorching heat — no climate change needed.
The would-be extinction crisis is another good example. Nothing is less convincing that there is a problem than a scientist who elaborates about how low insect populations are, and then explains how to turn a garden into an insect haven. Would-be endangered species just need toxin-free habitat. Patches and bands are enough as discussed earlier. We could be managing habitat into our growing systems, at that, as is being done in permaculture circles. Overfishing is not a problem either. We could be creating fish habitat, as is being done in marine permaculture circles.
The shoddy decisions that amplify natural calamities can explain a lot too. Floods, for instance, are largely man-made. Properties that make active efforts to harvest water show that most heavy rain events can be tamed. Contrast that with California, where 95% of the early 2023 rainwater just washed away. Modern landscapes are effectively designed to channel water downhill. Roadsides, paved riverbeds, farm fields where little efforts are made to harvest rainwater, and more lead to runoffs. Homes built inside flood catchments in hurricane prone cities are not helping either.
Wildfires are largely man-made too. Beyond the accidents that start them, loggers tend to grow forest edge species that are adapted to prairie fires. These grow fast to quickly outgrow the occasional flames on the ground. They also burn like matches (explosively so, at times) so fires move past before killing them. Growing plantations of such trees in drought-prone areas is dubious. Doubly so by logging roads that channel water downhill, with unburnt scrubs and forestry waste near poorly maintained electricity lines. Ignite the canopy and you get a raging inferno.
Model predictions are another issue. Scientists create and test climate models using data from the past. Two key caveats are data quality and overfitting. Temperature readings in urban heat sinks or near plantations full of bare soil are dubious at best. So are reconstructed data. Poor data would not matter if the predictions checked out, but they do not. Using historical data to gauge a model’s accuracy invites making it fit so well it looks accurate while having no bearing with reality. What matters is how accurate predictions made on the record are a decade or two from now.
The cherry picking and massaging of data to make it fit the narrative has been so thoroughly picked apart that it warrants a passing mention only. In defense of the scientists, the would-be consensus doesn’t hold either. Speak out if you’re in the shrinking group of experts that hasn’t yet done so.
A Climate Counternarrative | Next: Green Imperialism
About the Author
Denis de Bernardy is the author of A Natural Language. His work exposes environmental big lies and puts solutions in front of the actual problems.
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