Problems and Solutions

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

― Soren Kierkegaard

I was at a dinner party held by my uncle in Norway back in the 1990s, shortly after Al Gore had won the Nobel Piece Price for scaring the world with his prediction that sea revels were about to rise by tens of meters if we didn't immediately cut back on CO2 emissions. The lady next to me was from Holland, and could tell me that she was happy to have moved to Norway because Holland was about to get hit by massive floods that would render the area unliveable within a decade or two. She had bought a house high up from the sea to be on the safe side.

When I told her that nothing dramatic was going to happen, and that Holland would be just fine, she looked at me as if I was some extremist nut case. How could I possibly say such a stupid and ignorant thing?

I've since come across the same shocked stares every time I tell people to calm down about the climate. I'm the unscientific nut job, despite having been right for some 30 years. Disaster is always just around the corner, and I'm the crazy one for not believing it to be true.

Some people feel genuinely sorry for my mental inability to acknowledge the facts. My father will always tell me how warm the weather in Norway is compared to when he was little. Winter in Norway hasn't been very cold this year, and he's been quick to point this out.

All of this is a little irritating because I've taken the time to read up on the science behind the climate scare, and it doesn't actually predict anything dramatic at all. Some models even predict ice to build up on places like the Antarctic and Greenland, and since this is exactly what's going on at the moment, the CO2 school of global warming is quick to highlight the fact that some of their colleagues made this prediction.

I made this prediction too back in 2017. I used the exact same logic as what is currently being rolled out. But that didn't help. I'm still a little crazy for not believing that the world will soon become unliveable if we don't do something dramatic to save ourselves.

It amazes me that people keep falling for this hysteria some 30 years after it was initially created. But it fits a recurring pattern when it comes to political fads, so the longevity of it isn't a complete mystery. Seen from a political and historic viewpoint, this is exactly how things progress. A fad, once established and made popular, will hang around for about 70 years before it's finally washed away. The reason for this has to do with fashion rather than intelligence or insight.

The idea that CO2 is killing us is popular, and it's therefore going to be around for about 40 more years. This is based on the observation from history that links ideas to generations. An idea will evolve through the three stages of maturity as if it was a person. It starts off as the fresh new thing that blows away the old and established. It becomes in turn the mature and established idea, which subsequently fades into old age until some new fashionable idea blows away the old one.

The CO2 school of global warming is by now firmly positioned as the establishment idea, and this school is therefore in a position to push solutions onto everybody. It doesn't matter that the problem doesn't exist. Sea levels aren't rising. Nobody's dying due to climate change. What matters is that the idea of imminent doom is popular, and there's therefore a demand for solutions.

This means that we are now being advised in our economic planning by people who have proven themselves wrong for 30 years. These people have been given extraordinary power over national policies of great consequence for the general public.

Their solution to their made up problem is to build wind turbines in huge numbers, and this is being done in places like Norway at a massive scale. There are also a great number of these turbines planned for offshore deployment. The environmental destruction this will bring is easy to calculate, so it's not like they're ignorant of what they're doing. But none of this matters, because we're not dealing with facts, we're dealing with a popular sentiment.

Unsustainable sustainability 

By © Hans Hillewaert, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link