I read in a BBC article that scientists have found that climate change was most likely responsible for the demise of Diprotodon and other large Australian beasties more than 45,000 years ago.  Long believed to have been caused by humans encroaching on their land and hunting them to extinction, these new findings certainly raise some serious questions that need answers.

According to modern scientists, climate change is surely caused by man.  Their continual reports of global warming clearly indicate we humans are to blame for any real or perceived changes in Earth’s weather.

That being the case, regardless of what the article states, man must be responsible for these extinctions.  Somehow, long predating any level of human technological or industrial advancement, we must have caused the planet’s weather to change on a massive scale.  Our planet doesn’t do such things on its own, right?

Modern scientists blame any possible changes in our global weather environment on combustion and other man-made technologies which somehow, in only a few hundred years or so, have so drastically impacted the planet that life as we know it must certainly be in danger.

This begs the question: if current changes in Earth’s global weather are absolutely caused by man, what caused the very same things to happen many, many times in the past?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a tree hugger.  I’m very much in favor of protecting our environment.  I’m also a scientist, though, and very much believe in the facts, even when they stand in the way of good political drama.  Scientists who continually declare that man has indeed damaged the environment on a global scale and that no other explanation is possible are doing an injustice to those who have long held that scientists are objective and that their findings can stand up to scrutiny since they are founded in the scientific method.

Scientific method be damned, those scientists say.  Never let the facts stand in the way of good politics, and never let real science stop you from being an alarmist even when you can’t prove it.

Sadly, poppets, we simply don’t have enough hard data to indicate whether man is truly the cause of any weather changes, real or perceived.  We are only now becoming familiar with the true workings of our planet’s ecosystem.  Only now are we beginning to understand in even the most simple of terms how the vast earthly ecology works, how weather patterns that span decades — or even centuries — play pivotal roles in atmospheric physics, how naturally occurring phenomena impact global weather patterns through a series of interconnected events which can even be catalyzed by something innocuous and seemingly unrelated (gas expulsion from the sea floor, natural weather patterns like El Niño and La Niña, large influxes of fresh water into the salt water system, changes in sea currents due to water temperature changes, volcanic eruptions, natural oceanic oscillations, solar flairs and sunspots, meteor impacts, and so on).

We can’t even predict with any level of certainty what the weather will be like tomorrow, yet some scientists have quickly jumped on the global warming bandwagon and are convinced that man must be responsible.

We may be.  We may not be.  I think it’s the height of human arrogance to assume we could have such an impact on the planet, especially in light of how little time we’ve actually been around and how many times in the past significant climate changes have taken place on their own.  I’m unwilling to discount the premise, however, since we simply don’t know enough either way.

I’d rather err on the side of caution than assume nothing is wrong, only to find later that we’re screwed.  That doesn’t mean I have to claim global warming is true and is happening today.  This is especially true when the facts and historical references contradict those findings and indicate the planet is fully capable of such changes — very rapid changes — all on its own.

I simply detest the alarmist attitude of scientists, in direct contradiction of the scientific method and objectivity which must always be practiced.  Study, investigate, research — but don’t scream that the sky is falling when you still can’t tell me if it’ll rain tomorrow.  All that proves is that you still don’t fully comprehend the planet’s weather systems but are willing to claim understanding just to get your name in the headlines.