Is your Environmentalist a Philosophy Drop-out?

Vincent J. Curtis

15 June 2019

How many philosophy drop-outs are there?  It’s pretty much “settled science” in philosophy that a single cause produces a single effect.  All the laws of science rely on it, and a good number of them are restatements of this principle in disguise.

Within a week, the Hamilton Spectator, my hometown newspaper, published an article in which an "expert" asserted that the wildfires in Alberta earlier this spring was “climate change in action.”

An unusually hot and dry winter apparently caused by high CO2 levels left Alberta forests tinder dry, and those fires were a consequence of CO2 induced climate change.  Then comes the report today that an unusually cool and wet winter and spring are making the planting of crops a real problem for Hamilton farmers.  Indeed, this is a problem across most of farm country in North America.

So which is it?  Hot and dry produces dry forests or cold and wet making crop planting difficult?

Different effects are produced by different causes.  Rising CO2 levels can cause one or the other but not both.  Climate “change” cannot be both hotter and colder and drier and wetter at the same time.  To say otherwise is either to admit the existence of other causes or to deny a fundamental principle of logic and science.

When someone claims that this or that is due to climate change, you know you are in the presence of a philosophy drop-out.
-30-