Climate change is neither a myth nor a conspiracy

Is the current urge to combat climate change all a conspiracy on the part of scientists whose only desire is to get rich by creaming vast amounts of money from governments in order to fund their research?

That is what you might think from some of the rhetoric of climate change deniers, especially in the United States. However, this attitude ignores some very important facts.

One is that the evidence in favour of global warming has been accumulating for more than 100 years. If it is all a plot by scientists, they got their heads together a very long time ago! They must also have been a very odd breed of conspirators, in that they conducted all their activities in full view of the world’s academics and politicians – aren’t conspiracies supposed to be hatched in secret?

Another strange feature of this conspiracy is that – having reached their findings – these conspirators seem to have bent over backwards to try to prove themselves wrong!

But this is how science operates. The greatest sceptics of all are scientists. Once they reach a conclusion based on the available evidence they do everything they can to find an alternative explanation. That is why there has been so much talk – from the scientific community – of possible causes for global warming other than man-made ones. Cosmic rays have been proposed as a possible source of atmospheric warming, as have changes in solar activity, etc. It is only by examining each alternative and finding that it does not do the trick that the original theory can be proved.

There have certainly been conspiracies over global warming, but they come from the dirty tricks departments of organisations that have a vested interest in maintaining mankind’s consumption of fossil fuels – which are the chief cause of the recent spikes in global temperatures. These people will do everything they can to bamboozle people into thinking that climate change is a myth.

However, the evidence is clear and stands up to any degree of examination. Global warming is real, and it is definitely not the result of a scientific conspiracy.

© John Welford