After reading stories last week about school children being encouraged to skip school or rather go on strike to attend climate change rallies, I have been compelled to speak out on climate change.

The strike was more evidence that our public schools are more about filling students’ heads with progressive propaganda than they are about educating them. The real purpose of the movement to blame humans for climate change, is best described by the words of the late journalist, writer, critic, and essayist H.L. Mencken who said that “the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populous alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Our nation has dealt with imaginary hobgoblins throughout its history. These would include various “red” scares, the “population bomb” with its prediction of overpopulation leading to famine and wars created by now discredited biologist Paul Ehrlich followed in the late 1970s by the fear of an impending ice age after colder than normal winters and blizzards in the northeast.

Our climate is always changing. Science supports the conclusion that climate has been changing since Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago and will continue changing until our planet is a cinder in space in 7.5 billion years. Humans have occupied this planet for only a short time in its history and development of an industrial society began only within the last two-hundred years.

Earth’s climate has fluctuated widely in its history. There have been periods when Earth was a “snowball” and periods when forests flourished and dinosaurs roamed at the poles. In the last 2000 years there have occurred the Roman Warm Period from 250 BC to 400 AD, the Medieval Warm Period from 950 to 1250 and the Little Age from 1300 to 1870.

I believe that the blind acceptance by many, including scientists who should know better, that manmade production of greenhouse gases is the primary cause of climate change, is to deny the validity of the “scientific method.” The scientific method is a process designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favour of those supported by experiment and observation.

The central aim of the scientific method is to reject a theory rather than prove it. Scientific theories or hypothesis must be testable and able to be proven valid or invalid. In the case of climate, it means that global conclusions cannot be drawn from observation of a particular phenomenon or location. Because so much of the “data” supporting climate change is anecdotal in nature, based on a limited number of locations and occurrences it often does not meet the standards of the scientific method.

We should examine closely what media reports tells us about climate change. Much of it is also anecdotal in nature seldom being put in context. Recently it was reported that July was the hottest July on record in the U.S. and that in Alaska “extraordinarily” high temperatures were killing spawning salmon in many streams in the state. This sounds like the voice of doom but remember that we’ve only been doing scientific weather forecasting and record keeping in this country for less than 160 years and salmon always die after spawning.

The media also tells us that sea levels are rising. But these claims are usually based on anecdotal evidence from places like Miami that are near sea level and in the case of Miami built on what was once a mangrove swamp. Finally, no island chains have sunk beneath the seas recently.

What is the real aim of the climate change movement? Its leaders say they want to save the world but many have darker aims. The late U.N. diplomat, Canadian Maurice Strong, the first director of the United Nations Environment Program is credited with instigating the global warming movement after realizing the value of the threat of CO2 induced warming as a means of advancing the doctrine of globalization. Regarding the purpose of the climate change movement he once wrote in his essay “Facing Down Armageddon: Environment at a Crossroads” that “Our concepts of ballot-box democracy may need to be modified to produce strong governments capable of making difficult decisions.” That sounds like statements that Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin would have made frequently.

Also revealing are the words of Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. In 2015 she stated that the goal of the climate change movement was to overturn capitalism, “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

Then, there are the words of German economist Ottmar Edenhofer, former co-chairmen of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said that “One has to free oneself from the illusions that international climate policy is environmental policy, we redistribute de facto the worlds wealth by climate policy.”

Whatever your position on climate change may be my advice is to retain some scepticism regarding information from either side until you do your own investigation.

I close, again with the words of H.L. Mencken that perhaps best explains the motivation of the Climate change movement. He wrote: “The urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.”

Thomas Kirkpatrick Sr. is a Silver Creek resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com