I just saw a roundtable discussion show on a Christian TV channel on a specifically Christian programme (in Canada our Christian TV channels by law carry shows originating from other kinds of religious commitments as well, or from common-ground themes, or from presumably neutral ones). The subject tonite was "Climate Change." The show featured an international/local panel of 3 PhDs (Matt Khandekar, Olev Trass, Andrew Roberts--I hope I've spelled correctly), one journalist (Lorrie Goldstein who's written critically and extensively on the subject matter at hand), plus the host who supplies the name for the Michael Coren show.
I learned that I have not been wrong in my self-education on enviro (environometics) in trying more and more carefully to distinguish these often conflated concepts: 1.) climate change; 2.) global warming; and 3.) pollution.
Climate change is the area where the public is being stampeded into the arms of a vast propaganda machine, but where the sciences directly involved (like climatology, a young science) keep reducing their forecasts of doom (like the reduction from a hysterical 17-feet increase in world ocean-levels to the current prediction of a 1-foot rise). Climate change is real, but not what it is presented to be by stampeding science-cattle. That's most of us, cattle who gobble doomsdaying fodder by cowboy "science."
Global warming relates to climate change, but is not the same thing. Indeed, global warming is accompanied by global cooling, when we look at the locations and weather events that are involved in the two sorts of phenomena. We should always speak of globaly warming/cooling, neither without the other. But more than that, global warming is tied to the upper-atmosphere physics of "greenhouse gases," which in places and occasions of cooling, even freezing, are not heated into a greenhouse effect burning us alive, but do become a cloud cover that protects us from the more dreadful activities of the sun, while we continue to benefit (as now we do) from the ben+n solar activities. Climate change includes both warming and cooling, and is currently undergoing huge relocations and unanticipated events of both kinds. Not incidentally, the sustained overall temperature of the earth and its oceans have been decreasing since 1998. On average. Per square mile/hectare.
Meanwhile, there's the very different phenom of particulate matter in the air since the Industrial Age (in ancient Rome some neibourhoods were polluted by lead, poisonous to humans). Particulate matter these days, refers to those particles of alloys (not "pure chemicals" but mixed) that heat up and cool down but do not rise into the upper atmosphere as gases. Instead particulate matter remains behind with us mortals who breathe them into our lungs from our polluted air. This is a major element of pollution. Another is the more chemically-singular sulphuric acid which comes from burning coal (for instance), the burn-off of which rises into the forming clouds, and descends back to earth to poison habitats, as acid rain, capable of killing forests of trees. Then there's mercury poisoning that comes from over-usage of a particular element to be found on the Periodic Table of Elements where all chemicals are classified in their hypothetical pure states as constructed by chemistry according to standards of purity the science sets (Michael Polanyi). Other chemicals, elements and alloys are identified/created over time--so the Periodic Table to changes.
Pollution results in dirty air and dirty water. Not every single life-form is threatened by the known pollutants (there are ancient microbial life-forms still on earth that thrive in h+ temperature acidic water which to the contrary you and I mite consider toxic; so there are significant variations in what pollutants in relation to what life-forms/species are life-threatening, according to the various species affected negatively).
The big confusion I entertained was that between CO2 (carbon dioxide from oxidized carbon) which is a greenhouse gas and rises into the upper atmosphere, and the particulate matter that can be seen close to the ground on the horizon in a smog-filled cityscape in summer (and sometimes in other times of year).
The International Panel on Climate Change--a h+ly politicized body that selected out the participation of scientists who hold views out of step with the conjured consensus--does not deal with pollution. It does not deal with what we breathe and drink. That's the first lesson on these questions that we must distinguish from others. Yet, there are other lessons as well.
Climate change, too, must be dealt with, but there's no need to make it appear as a human responsibility in regard to which "deniers" (a labelling that exploits the Holocaust for mere metaphorical utliity) and "perpetrators" (usually the major pollutors like auto users and various manufacturers (but not major climate-changers like the sun, moving magnetic poles, etc) are constructed as enemies of humanity, haters of living creatures, of the biosphere, and of creation as a whole. The ideologists obsessed with climate change put the whole world's solar givens on the shoulders of ordinary people (de kleine luyden, then these blamers who are also, all too often, Christians within the climate-changist elites go about guilt-tripping ordinary Christians for not being the Atlas of mythology.
