I was thinking something like this the other day

Tom Knighton's Substack essay "Why I Can't Take Climate Change Seriously" is a perfect reflection of my own recent thoughts on the matter. Knighton admits that, in his own memory, the winters of his youth were much harsher than current winters are, so on a personal level, this could be taken as evidence for climate change. But Knighton also notes that climate models routinely and spectacularly fail to predict what's going to happen next, which is reason to mistrust them. Here's how he puts it:

Now, understand, I do think the climate is changing. I know what weather was like in my youth[,] and I know what it’s like now, and there are pronounced differences. In particular, with regard to winter.

We used to have it here in Southwest Georgia.

Now, well, we still do[,] and it’s still cold in the winter. For both weeks of it. (The 14 days aren’t necessarily consecutive, for the record. It’s usually two or three days of cold at a time.)

However, something I noticed is that despite what appears to be clear evidence right before my eyes, the climate models keep getting it wrong. In fact, the track record for those models is rather impressive.

They’re pretty much always wrong.

So how is it that I can see differences in the climate over a handful of decades while the supposed experts can’t seem to model any of it correctly? The answer is simple: They don’t know as much as they like to pretend.

[...] 

If climate scientists can’t get the models to actually work, then why should we take their predictions seriously? Remember, they want to create irreparable harm to the economy in an effort to combat this problem that they clearly don’t understand well enough to model effectively. 

So yeah, I’m not as concerned as I once was.

Knighton doesn't get into this, but it's a drum that's regularly beaten over at Instapundit: the climate-change crowd never seems to act as if we were living through a crisis. Leonardo DiCaprio sees no hypocrisy in jetting from climate conference to climate conference, for example. Plenty of limousine liberals are in the same boat: preaching the gospel of climate change while enjoying their environmentally wasteful lives. Let them all experience the benefits of walking from place to place instead of polluting the air by using transportation. That goes for Greta Thunberg as well. Another hypocrite. How dare you!

For myself, I think we have plenty of actual environmental problems we can worry about. Air pollution in East Asia is a good place to start. So is desertification throughout the world. Rivers clogged with plastic bottles are a major concern, so let's get some sharp minds working on that problem (I know some are doing so, but let's do more). In my own neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, where I'm from, there's plenty of trash along the George Washington Parkway that needs to be picked up. Seeing it lying there is a shame and a disgrace. So I'm all for doing green things where we can, and these things can be done without faulty predictive climate models. Here in Seoul, litter is everywhere because, like in the States, many people feel no sense of responsibility about their own trash—one of the hazards of living in a service economy. The city's response to litter is pathetic: remove trash cans in the hopes that people will be forced to pack out their trash. Instead, predictably, people just leave their empty bottles and wrappers sitting on low walls and benches. This is a bit of a tangent, but I often feel like Buddhist monks ought to be out there doing some actual good by scouring the city and picking up all the trash while preaching the dharma of not trashing the city.

So there's a lot that can be done, and it can be done without politicizing the issue. We can all agree that plastic-clogged rivers need cleaning, and that little kids in third-world countries shouldn't be playing in foul rivulets of sludge flowing between huge mountains of trash. There's no need to kowtow to a mirage of climate predictions that never come true (snows of Kilimanjaro? Pacific islands submerged under the sea? polar ice caps melted to nothing? extinct polar bears?), no need to develop policy based on those models. There's already plenty for us to do, and nothing to stop us from going out and doing it.