Conflation plagues the modern mind. We have so much to think and do daily, that we often mix things up a bit. Such is the nature of the human brain: The more it gets, the more it conflates, or, at least, the more that it has the potential to conflate.
But, short of an apocalyptic nuclear war that reduces us to groveling primitives, our lives aren’t going to change: We’ll still have brains overpacked with intrusive social, psychological, and physical concerns that are indeterminate orders of magnitude greater with every new technology.
Buy an electric car? Then this pops into your head: What brand? What technology? How many passengers? Room for luggage? What mileage? What comfort? What warranty? What repairs done by whom and where? What charging portal at home? Where to recharge on a trip that exceeds the mileage range? Where to park? What are the chances of theft? How much for insurance? What insurance company? How much is the deductible? Do I clean it today? Pay for detailing? Are the tires appropriate for winter roads? Does it have planned obsolescence or a length of service I determine? Will the car bring me an acceptable social status in my or the larger community? Does it hold its value? And all that plus more thoughts, objects, and interactions not related to the car fill our heads. Wasn’t life simpler for our ancient ancestors? Sure, like them you have to obtain food, but in just the last 200 years alone our food choices have gone from about 500 to more than 50,000, and more food choices bombard our brains stimulated by commercials, cook books, magazines, and food shows. Yes, life was simpler.
So, we conflate when we can’t keep things straight under the speed of modern life. And among the matters we conflate are our personal economic circumstances and the propagandized topics the professional and social media thrust on us daily, no better example of which is the subject of global warming and its corollary climate change.
Background for the Foregoing
I saw part of a climate alarmists’ TV spot yesterday. Because I did not see it in its entirety, I cannot relate it verbatim (and I’m too disinterested to search for it), but I believe the following captures its essence accurately. Appearing as a chat or exchanged texts, the video runs something like this:
“I can’t take this heat.”
“We can’t afford to run the air conditioner and simultaneously pay for food.”
“We have to move.”
See the connection? Yeah. Neither do I. But it is clear in the minds of climate-change alarmists eager to send humanity back into a time before mankind controlled fire.
Somehow the video got around to conflating climate change and personal economics. And somehow the video’s producers missed the point that the costs to run an air conditioner are more related to energy prices inflated by nonsensical public policy that takes fossil fuel power plants offline while simultaneously making the country dependent upon fossil fuels produced elsewhere.
Under the conflated thinking of alarmists who made the video, the USA should abandon the extraction of its 44.4 billion barrels of petroleum, its 625.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, and its 471 billion tons of coal and replace all with wind-, hydro-, nuclear-, and gerbil-power.
Fire and Climate Change
What are those lines by Robert Frost in “Fire and Ice”? “Some say the world will end in fire….” I haven’t seen the alarmists use the tragic Maui fire yet, but I’m sure it will be part of a media argument in the aftermath of almost 100 deaths. That conflation will come soon though the suspected cause of the fire at the time of this writing isn’t global temperatures, but is rather the electric utility’s equipment.
Forest fires killing off koalas? Yep, that’s what Greenpeace suggests with a video of a cute little koala clinging to a eucalyptus tree in a burning forest (edited?). And fires in Canada spewing choking smoke into the northern USA? Have they somehow spontaneously started because the climate is changing? Does it matter that some of those Canadian fires were set by arsonists? No, has to be global warming, right?
With regard to the tragic fire in Hawaii, I’ll make the alarmists’ argument for them: Global warming has led to more and more intense hurricanes, such as the one that fanned Maui’s fire, killing people on Maui. Does it matter that hurricanes have occurred in the Pacific (called typhoons there) since the Pacific formed? Nope. Does it matter that hurricane intensity and number have not risen as predicted? Again, nope.
For the alarmists, modern fires are the product of too much anthropogenic carbon dioxide, a gas that ironically puts out fire supposedly started under an overabundance of carbon.
Those Rising Seas
And what of seas rising so fast that they make Noah’s Great Biblical Deluge look like a damp floor immediately after a mopping with white vinegar and water? Why, in a mere 900 years at the current rate of sea level rise, the ocean will be a full three feet higher. Obviously, that’s bad news for coastal residents, but not so bad as to deter alarmist Barack Obama from building two expensive houses at the water’s edge—one on the site of the TV series Magnum, P.I. and the other on Martha’s Vineyard, that demonstrably (un)friendly sanctuary to illegal aliens.
Ouch, Ouch, Ouch
Let’s not forget Phoenix’s sidewalks, so hot during the 2023 summer that some falling pedestrians suffered burns. Can anyone say, “Don’t touch the car hood during a Miami, Dallas, or Phoenix cloudless July afternoon”? “Hot enough to cook an egg”—a standby reference used by reporters for decades. “No joke,” as POTUS says, “I’’ve seen it. No, really, I remember how hot my car was in Miami in 1980, how hot it was in Huntsville, Alabama, during a summertime visit to relatives” (at least the high temperatures were accompanied by high humidity in both places—otherwise, I would have said, “Yeah, hot, but hot like Vegas in summer”).
Past vs. Present
Why do climate alarmists fret so much that they have generated a new kind of therapy centered on their anxiety over climate change? Do they believe this to be the first time humans have had to deal with warming? Steeped in an historical vacuum that relates no Earth or human history—thank you, educators— they appear to have been propagandized into unwarranted fears by little kids like Greta Thunberg and an uncritical Press and political class willing to give up prosperity for a dubious hypothesis that links carbon dioxide causally to atmospheric temperature when past rises in temperature cannot be definitively linked to carbon in the atmosphere.
The human past was also riddled with very hot summers, as during the heat waves of 1743 in China, 1808 in England, and 1900 in eastern United States—too many historical heat waves to mention and many never recorded by their victims. What of the Roman Warm Period that Theophrastus reports? it lasted about150 years.
It’s Not Just Fires That They Conflate with Carbon Emissions
What about the Tropical diseases like leprosy spreading into Florida? But wasn’t malaria a problem in the Chesapeake area until the 1950s? And those other tropical diseases? Aren’t they the obvious result of climate change? Or are they invasive diseases related in some way to the influx of aliens who never have to go through a quarantine as so many immigrants did on Ellis Island in New York or Fisher Island in Florida? Did one of the three or four million illegal aliens admitted by the Biden Administration enter the continent with leprosy? Yes, hot summers are not the only product of global warming according to the activists; deaths by tropical diseases are a serious concern for alarmists. A warmer world will kill us in more ways than one, they argue. As the video I reference suggests, all of us should move (but we don’t know to where).
Conflation is a selective process when an agenda is the motive: Alarmists can easily conflate the spread of diseases with global warming but not with global migration, evil intent, and people who have never had reasonable healthcare or running water, screens, and public sewage disposal in their previous homes. A mobile world population spreads diseases, just as the early colonizers spread small pox in the New World.
What Do You Prefer?
Patrick Moore, founder of Greenpeace, makes a point worth considering in his recent book. Cold is more enemy to humans than warm (352). * Our species, he reminds us, evolved in tropical conditions in Africa. I might add that hominids-turned-hominins probably became bipedal during droughty conditions that decimated forests and replaced them with hot savanna, forcing our ancient ancestors out of the trees and onto the ground. Alarmists “walking” around today owe their bipedalism to a warm and droughty Africa. Would they prefer walking on all fours without opposable thumbs?
Cold is more challenging than warm for all life-forms without adaptation. Cold-adapted life-forms migrated from warmer environs. But if cold is life’s enemy, how does one account for herds of caribou and stocks of cod? Note a general biogeographical trend: More species in the tropics each represented by relatively small member numbers and fewer species in cold climes each represented by large member numbers. Heat favors diversity. Migration with cold adaptation favors high membership numbers.
But as with most generalities, there are exceptions, and human distribution is one of those exceptions. Humans apparently survive rather well in warm conditions as the populations of tropical countries attest. They do not do as well in the permafrost without the aid of technology. The population of Indonesia, where the temperatures range from a low of 70 degrees F to 94 degrees F, is 277,000,000, making it the fourth most populous nation. The distribution of India’s 1.3 billion people seems to be unaffected by high temperatures, but is, rather, affected by the amount of rain with the exception of the Assam valley, the Circars coast, and the southern face of the Himalayas where population is less dense though rainfall is abundant. Brazil, Bangladesh, Mexico, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, all warm countries, are all highly populated. Without technology, humans don’t fare as well in cold climate countries if population numbers are the test. Moore also points out that most Canadians live near the warmer regions next to the US border. The frozen North of Canada is sparsely populated.
Before the technological development of transportation systems that connected warm to cold, hunting and gathering provided food. Agriculture began in warm climatic conditions: The Norsemen were not known for their extensive croplands. Moore argues that during the entire Phanerozoic (the half-billion year era of multicellular, and thus, “visible”—phaneros—life) is dominated by higher temperatures with just three intermittent cold periods, the last being our own times beginning about 2.5 million years ago. His message: The current Earth is an exception; the planet is normally warmer and has been cooling for the past 50 million years (after the Paleo-Eocene Thermal Maximum).
The current “interglacial” period could reverse itself just as previous interglacials ended in the spread of vast sheets of ice like those that covered most of Canada and northern United States and Europe just 12 millennia ago. What’s better? Canada completely covered by massive sheets of ice more than a mile thick, or Canada with available arable land? New York City’s Central Park under ice, or New York City with a three-foot rise in sea level? Yeah. Being able to grow food in Canada is a plus and a three-foot rise over the course of the next 900 years is, as changing coastal cities have discovered over the past four millennia, not a process that New York City can’t handle as successfully or more successfully than all ancient coastal cities.
The Media behind the Conflation
The American media has fully accepted the global warming hypothesis, and their reporters tie any hot weather to carbon. To account for cold weather, they also blame global warming under the term climate change. They do not have an out: Their commitment to the propagandized climate debate prohibits them from considering the complexities of weather systems, climate systems, atmospheric physics and chemistry, and overriding large Earth cycles. It prohibits them from acknowledging that humans have chosen to live in harms way, as the over developed coastal cities reveal. Want to live near the water’s edge? then expect to be affected by hurricanes (typhoons and cyclones).
Okay, You’ve Read Enough
Conflation is an inescapable mental process in the modern world. All of us do it, but some do it blindly, drawing on a predisposition to see relationships where others tell us to see them. Hot in Phoenix? Then move—or don’t move. But don’t fault carbon for increasing your electric bill. Fault those who refuse to allow America to regain its energy independence.
*Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible EnvironmentalistPatrick Moore, Ph.D. Published 2013
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