The Climate Is Always Changing

Every headline tells you the same thing. The planet is warming, it is your fault, and only trillions of dollars can fix it. I used to believe that too. Then I started reading the actual science.

Here is the part nobody on the news wants to say out loud: the climate of this planet has never once stopped changing. As Patrick Moore, the ecologist who helped found Greenpeace, puts it, the climate has been shifting since the Earth's genesis, “sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely.” Hoping for a perfectly stable climate is like hoping for the same pleasant weather every single day, forever. It was never going to happen.

And we know exactly what drives it, because none of these forces are new. The Sun runs through solar cycles that warm some regions by more than a full degree. The Earth itself rides slow Milankovitch cycles, its orbit, its tilt, and its wobble reshaping the seasons over tens of thousands of years. Closer to home, El Niño and La Niña push warm water across the Pacific and swing whole continents between hot and cold.

These are the same engines that ended ice ages and greened deserts long before a single factory existed. They are still running. So when the thermometer ticks up a fraction of a degree, why would the honest answer suddenly be humans, and not the machinery that has always done this job?

Nobody can point to one lever in that machinery that we actually control. The Sun, the orbit, the oceans: all of it is normal, all of it is natural, and all of it is far beyond us. The climate was changing long before us and it will keep changing long after. That is not a crisis. That is just the planet being the planet.