The title of this post is a made up word. Canuting comes from Canute and behaving like him. Who on earth is Canute I hear you ask mentally if not out loud. King Canute was King of Norway, England, Denmark and parts of Sweden who lived between 985 or 995 – 1035. More information may be found here. Any English school child will be more than familiar with the story of King Canute and the waves. In this story, the King is adored by his courtiers and proclaimed to be all powerful so powerful in fact that he can control the elements. To demonstrate the foolishness of such claims, Canute has his throne placed on the beach and from there, he orders the tide to stay out. As the tide relentlessly marches in, Canute is able to show his courtiers that he is in fact, not all powerful deferring such power to God.
So what is Canuting?
Canuting is when someone believes that they have power over the elements and they are deceiving themselves and others in the process.
President Obama is Canuting right now trying to tell us that man impacts the climate and can help control it by reducing CO2 emissions or in effect, paying more taxes to the Government so that it can spend that money fighting ‘climate change’.
I suppose the next question is why is he Canuting? After all, isn’t climate change the biggest threat facing humanity?
The answer to this is that if one thing can be assured it is that the climate changes. As all geologists know, throughout the history of the planet, climate has changed. For most of its history, Earth has had a much warmer climate and no polar ice caps. It is only in the recent past that, as a part of the glacial age, the Earth has cooled and ice caps formed. To suggest that humans can legislate the weather or even change the weather (globally and pervasively) is actually plain stupid if we chose not to mince words. To believe that CO2 is driving up temperatures is illogical and defies what we can actually observe throughout 4 billion years of the planet’s history. To say the science is proven is to not understand the nature of science nor even what climate science comprises of. If you think the weather forecasts pretty bad then that’s how bad their climate models are and why you can get more or less whatever answer you chose.
We are all being Canuted right now and I think the money being wasted could be spent actually making a difference to the environment as opposed to trying to make the weather our enemy along with plant food – CO2.