A few days ago some interesting news rolled by the bottom of the screen on a Fox News show- skepticism about the concern about climate change has reached a record high. While I didn't expect the news, I can't say I wasn't forewarned. The DeWeese Report, a conservative newsletter I receive, recently predicted the collapse of the global warming façade, and the prediction could not have been more punctual. After years of talk about CO2 and being green, I was rather glad and expressed my half-vengeful jubilation- as my mother reminded me that I too had been brainwashed about the whole climate change thing until a few years ago.

Despite my contrary dispositions, all the years I spent marching to the leftist tune in the Northampton Public School system couldn't help but rub off in my gait. [When An Inconvenient Truth, which I saw when it came to Northampton's Academy of Music theater, environmentalists handed out "what you can do to help" sheets, while outside hard communists protested, arguing that until the capitalist system, which Gore allegedly supports, is overthrown, the environment will not be safeguarded]. One of those things was accepting, more or less, the whole package about man-made, potentially irreversible global warming (or as they say now climate change), to the point that I insisted upon getting those fluorescent light bulbs for our home. I had been somewhat undecided about it until I read The Heat is On by Ross Gelbspan, a rather alarmist book which one of my high school teachers had spoken well of. Naturally, I never supported any of the globalist "solutions" to the problem, and figured I would just do my part as an individual, and that peak oil (which I am tentatively inclined to believe) would lower emissions in the future whether we (or China and India) wanted to or not.

I have become much more skeptical about climate change in the last few years. Not that I have done any great amount of research. Even if I had, it would perhaps have still been best to give the scientific establishment the benefit of the doubt, since one's views can be affected poorly by too narrow a scope of readings. Otherwise, a selective series of chimney shadow readings could land one in the same sad boat as the good Bishop Williamson. For what I expect is the same case for many of the new doubters, the climate change people have simply been careless, and contradictions in their work have become obvious to everyone. One of the key things I've noticed contradicts one of Gelbspan's most convincing arguments: that hotter, dryer summers will be accompanied by colder, harsher winters. Not too complex a point, intended to explain away the evidenced jokes of many that they could use some "global warming" during some present blizzard which apparently defied global warming. That would have worked for the green lobby, minus that, whenever winter is mild, they automatically switch to the more intuitive assertion that climate change means warming the year round. I find this everywhere, but has anyone ever seen scientists running around to set the politicos and Hollywood actors straight one way or the other? I have not: do they even care, or are they ignoring it because they don't care so long as they're allocated money to study it? Another of Gelbspan's arguments, that those scientists outside the "consensus" were few and often connected to oil, has become much less tenable of late. I don't even hear the consensus argument much anymore. A recent, good speech by Senator James Inhofe makes clear that too many scientists are themselves skeptical to simply write them off, as the climate change people obviously want to.

Either way, the green people can't blame me for anything. Although I now regret that we'll all need to use those mercury-laden bulbs in our homes, I don't drive, try to walk rather downtown rather than get a ride, use public transportation, and don't even drink bottled water (when I did like the fluorescent lights, though, I did come up with a good propaganda idea to make people use them: bring back the old, beautiful Educational Series $5 note, but with a fluorescent and not an incandescent light bulb). If everyone were like me, the environment would be so clean that snow would stay white even after days on the ground. Even if climate change is cyclical and natural rather than caused by man, we have certainly failed to be good stewards of nature in other ways, almost universally as a result of our devotion to consumerism. If we made use of fewer gadgets manufactured in the Far East, drive places we could walk (ahem, suburbanites), take the bus to (ahem, my fellow Assumption greyhounds), or avoid altogether, and were happy with more balanced lives, there wouldn't be so many unintended consequences- that's my inconvenient truth.