Turbulence – Another Phenomenon caused by Climate Change?

It Used to be Called “Weather”

I am writing this article on a flight to Toronto and we just experienced a bit of turbulence. I looked at my wife and informed her that this was caused by climate change. She knows my sense of satire but I suspect others don’t.

The recent incident of severe turbulence on a Singapore Airlines flight out of London, where one person sadly died from a heart attack and 30 people were injured, made global news. The next day, climate experts were coming out declaring that climate change will be making turbulence during air travel more severe. Shortly after, US Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, chimed in with the same “clopportunism”, suggesting that as the climate is rapidly warming and this type of extreme event will be occurring more frequently, the government will be “…assessing anything and everything that we can do about it.”

Five days after the Singapore Airlines incident, a Qatar flight reported that their flight also experienced bad turbulence. There were no serious injuries but it made the mainstream news. “Climaturbulence” has become a news story as it is another proof that climate change is happening and, let me just remind you, that was caused by mankind’s insensitivity to our once thriving planet. Pretty soon we can expect planes to start falling out of the skies from relentless extreme turbulence.

I am wondering whether I should contact a journalist or an official when my plane arrives in Toronto and let them know my plane was shaking for about 60 seconds. Soon there will be a special media desk at airports for such reports. Maybe I should sue the airline for their failure to guarantee me a shake-free flight (especially if I spill my hot coffee on my lap). As this airline is largely responsible for causing climate change, I would expect them to settle my lawsuit quietly. I’m sure there are now tort lawyers waiting in the airport arrivals sections trolling for a new breed of victim. Cost for ad-space in airports will soon be going up: “If you had a bumpy flight, Better Call Saul!”.

By the summer, everyone will be going on about how turbulence is an effect of climate change.

• Some NGO will come up with a scary term to explain this climate-caused phenomenon (more frightening than my climaturbulence turn of phrase) and victims will be telling their stories and demanding climate justice.

• Large news organizations will publish frequent op-eds on the new threat of turbulence.

• Greta will simply post: “I told you so, but you, in your desire for ever more profits, wouldn’t listen!”.

• Some under-employed post-docs will get grant funding for research into climate-caused flight disturbances. They’ll hurriedly publish their literature reviews to much media and activist amplification.

• There will be demands for changes in aircraft design. Special climaturbulent seats will be introduced.

• The market for trans-Atlantic ship-liners will become competitive (until those virtue signaling activists experience the long-term effects of climate-caused sea sickness).

How quickly we will forget that turbulence existed before we changed the climate. Sitting on my plane, shaken, but not stirred, I began to long for the days before man so callously ripped out the heart of Mother Nature.

It’s Called “Weather”

This month’s climaturbulence reports are but one more example of how simple weather events have been transformed by our “climasterical” narrative into a cascade of unending catastrophes caused by our careless indifference to the consequences of capitalism and industry greed.

But turbulence is caused by storms, sudden shifts in weather patterns and temperature differences. It is caused by weather rather than man’s careless use of fossil fuels or an appetite for beef and pork. In other words, turbulence existed before man burnt the planet. I recall during my childhood that one local airline was affectionately renamed “Great Shakes Airlines”.

But this repositioning of weather within the catastrophic climate change narrative is nothing new. We have been led to believe that heat waves, tropical storms, forest fires, blizzards, hurricanes and floods didn’t really exist in the same way before climate change became a political objective. Why is that?

• Our conversations on climate-induced weather events didn’t exist at such levels before some NGOs and foundations came into large amounts of funding to try to impose restrictions on our Western lifestyles.

• News reports on climate-induced weather events didn’t exist at such levels before the 24-7 global media environment needed constant access to fear and outrage.

My plane was shaking and I should be mad as hell that lifestyle changes are coming so slowly. Mad at whom? At everyone (except myself and the other polluters who chose to fly that day).

But, once again, it’s just weather. Growing up in Southern Ontario in the 1960s and 70s, we had some vicious heatwaves and long droughts. I survived the great Blizzard of 72, when we were convinced the Ice Age was coming. In my youth, weather events were not widely recorded and reported. But today when a flash flood rushes through a city, everyone films it and uploads it instantly online. More land was lost to forest fires before but fewer people built luxury homes in these locations and fewer journalists set up camp in the mountains to watch the fires spread. What has changed is that we did not have a well-funded activist community feeding a receptive, 24/7 news media with biased and alarmist interpretations of what has always just been, simply put, natural phenomena.

In the early 2000s, during the discussions over the IPCC Third Assessment Report (and after several cold winters), the climate scientists urged people to remember that weather was not climate. Where are those voices now, urging calm and correcting erroneous media stories? I suppose they are too busy in the courts suing people who called them names.

Our flight to Toronto included a stopover in Reykjavik, Iceland where I had just learnt yesterday from the airline that a volcano is presently erupting. Time was we were terrified of flying anywhere within one thousand miles of an active volcano.

It seems some scare stories have limited shelf lives.