"We are very energized and enthusiastic about millions of people coming together and making this the biggest day of climate action ever," said a young German activist wearing a 350.org T-shirt at Berlin's 10/10/10 demonstrations on Sunday. Campaigners around her, and indeed, at 7,347 events in 188 countries," according to organizers, danced, sang, planted trees and picked up garbage as part of the massive worldwide 10/10/10 Global Work Party.
What's that all about? And what is so special about 350?
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, explained: "It's the boundary condition for a habitable planet. We're already past it. We're at 390 parts per million [of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere]. That's why the Arctic is melting. That's why Australia is burning up ... . If we put very much more carbon into the atmosphere, we'll pass the kind of tipping points ... that mean we'll never be able to get back there, even if we stopped driving every car and powering every factory. ...We're fighting to keep real collapse at bay."
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First, no rational scientist denies that climate changes.
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Scientists such as Mr. Patterson obviously would deny that they deny climate change - they are denial deniers.
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The "denier" label is simply an attempt to equate those of us who question political correctness on climate change to Holocaust deniers. It is trying to discredit a message by discrediting the messenger, a logical fallacy referred to as ad hominem - against the man. It's also irrational to put the questioning of forecasts of future events on a par with denying what has happened already.
Climate activists claim there is a consensus among experts that humanity's CO2 emissions are causing a climate crisis. In reality, there has never been a reputable worldwide poll of the thousands of experts who study the causes of climate change. Assertions that the multitude of scientists who worked on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports agree that our CO2 emissions are taking us to a planetary crisis are unfounded. Climate data analyst John McLean of Melbourne, Australia, has demonstrated repeatedly that only a few dozen scientist participants in the IPCC process even commented on the issue.
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We cannot forecast climate decades from now any better than we can predict the weather two weeks ahead. The system is simply too complex and our understanding of the science too primitive.
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Many scientists who work with the IPCC know this. They even stated in their Third Assessment Report: "In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."
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Sadly for the environmental movement, which has committed vast resources to this activism, 10/10/10, 350.org and similar campaigns are dangerously off-track. When the public finally comes to realize how it has been so seriously misled on what has become a central theme of modern environmentalism, efforts to address real environmental problems may very well be set back decades.
In the meantime, billions of dollars are wasted and thousands of jobs threatened, all for an unproven hypothesis that never made any sense in the first place.