Number 4 in the series: The Snowflake Chronicles


Snowflake- A very sensitive person. Someone who is easily hurt or offended by the statements or actions of others.

From Chapter 1:

Once a week in a conference room in Salt Lake City, in the American state of Utah, a dozen people gather for a session of climate change grief counselling. Convened by a Laura Schmidt, a full-time activist with a masters in environmental humanities, the sessions permit the participants to vent over all the things not being done about climate change, and how the participants themselves are doing things that contribute to a problem (such as drive cars to the meetings, we suppose) that they imagine will affect their loved ones. One tale to emerge from these fraught sessions is that of a woman who, when confronted by piles of merchandise in a store produced and packaged in all sorts of energy-intensive ways, had to retreat to her car to recover for a time before she could face shopping again. Ms Schmidt, who organised additional sessions following the election of Donald Trump as American president (Trump easily won Utah, a traditionally Republican state), has developed a ten-step coping program loosely based on the Alcoholics Anonymous program to cope with this sort of stress.

This is an extreme but hardly surprising indication of the hysteria about global warming/climate change amongst those predisposed to believe in catastrophes – hysteria largely unconnected with anything actually happening in the earth’s climate. Scientists and activists have been screaming that the end is nigh and thumping the alarm button on global warming for all they are worth for more than thirty years, as of early 2019. In that time, any number of climate tipping points, deadlines for action, and projected climate disasters have come and gone without anything much happening. Snow is supposed to have vanished, the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets long melted, Bangladesh is meant to have disappeared beneath the waves along with the assorted tropical islands, and Adelaide should be deserted due to lack of drinking water.

Like all veteran forecasters, however, and in the grand tradition of political pundits who were almost all totally wrong over the election of Donald Trump as president, the many global warming activists and scientist-activists have brushed off their abysmal forecasting record and kept on talking. Climate doom is just around the corner, and anyone who dares to question this is obviously in the pay of big energy (I only wish) or suffering from a psychological disorder.

One result of all this talk, supported by a great deal of government funding, is that the world of climate alarmism has split from the real world. This alarmist world has its own logic and is on the verge of climate doom, and never mind what’s happening in the real world. For example, what is happening in Salt Lake City that causes grief worthy of counselling? Have temperatures become markedly higher? As temperatures in that region vary wildly between hot summers and chilly winters, individuals would have trouble noticing any change. Has rainfall been reduced? Again no, but then the area has been classified as semi-arid (the classification is in dispute) so it may be difficult to tell. Salt Lake City is a long way inland so sea level increases should not be a problem, even if sea levels happen to be increasing very much, which they are not.

The city does have an air quality problem, however. An air inversion caused by the surrounding mountains traps smog, including exhaust from a lot of vehicles. It is one of the last American cities to have such a problem. This has nothing to do with climate change or with carbon dioxide, which is odourless, colourless and spreads around the globe quickly. Smog involves the likes of sulphates and aerosols which might also be produced in the same sort of emissions as CO2, but can be dealt with locally through strong measures. However, the sort of people who go to climate grief counselling are not about to make the distinction between carbon dioxide and pollutants. As far as they are concerned, local pollution is the same as global CO2 concentrations and we are all doomed, unless industry stops. The climate grief, or perhaps climate silliness industry is by no means confined to Utah. In March 2017 the American Psychological Association, in conjunction with the organisations Climate for Health and ecoAmerica produced a report entitled Mental Health and Our Changing Climate – Impact, Implications and Guidance. This points to all sorts of mental health effects that will result from climate change, which includes “natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, like floods, storms, wildfires, and heatwaves. Other effects surface more gradually from changing temperatures and rising sea levels that cause forced migration. Weakened infrastructure and less secure food systems are examples of indirect climate impacts on society’s physical and mental health”.