Climate change will destroy the planet! – Really?

Full of the evangelism of reading This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein (for my book group), I made the mistake recently of telling a friend how capitalism and its consequences would destroy the planet. He told me I was wrong. Of course he is right.

As St Julian of Norwich would say, everything will be all right in the end, and the marvellous mystery of God-in-Life on Planet Earth will not be destroyed by Man. It may only be that the planet is left to the cockroaches and a few sorry members of the global elite one per cent who’ve managed to stay alive in their gated and bunkered self-imposed prison cells.

So, from now on, I’m going to be very careful to say that capitalism and its consequences are likely to destroy the environment only, not the whole bloody planet. Words are important and even your friends will pick you up on any mistakes.

This brings me to my next words: “climate change”. I recently helped Milan Rai sell lots of his Peace News pamphlet, On Common Ground: an open letter from the radical peace movement to the radical climate change movement, to people on the March march J (in London on 7 March 2015) of the Campaign against Climate Change. The term “climate change” is used by Milan and the campaign itself.

Last week I decided to follow up the story about how our energy and climate change minister Matthew Hancock had accepted £18,000 in donations from Neil Record, who financially supports the Global Warming Policy Foundation thinktank and I wrote to them (see below). While doing so it struck me that their argument does have some grain of truth in that the term “climate change” is pretty meaningless. As they say, the climate changes from moment to moment and season to season, so calling someone a “climate change sceptic” or a a “climate change denier” is just stupid. No-one denies that the climate changes all the time.

As our opponents will pick us up on any mistakes, isn’t it time to change the nomenclature. We could speak of “man-made global warming”, maybe. (I don’t find that sexist because it is essentially the men, not the women, wot dunnit.) Or “anthropogenic global warming” or “catastrophic climate change”, even? But not “climate change”, pure and simple.

Then again, when I Googled the term “climate change” today to write this, I came across the definition of none other than the esteemed Met Office, who say

Climate change is a large-scale, long-term shift in the planet's weather patterns or average temperatures. Earth has had tropical climates and ice ages many times in its 4.5 billion years.

So what do gentle readers think of the term “climate change”?

There now follows my letter to the Global Warming Policy Foundation  - info@thegwpf.org - to which, I’m sorry to say, the esteemed Alex Epstein hasn’t yet replied (tho he said he would in 48 hours).
Dear friends
Just read http://www.thegwpf.com/the-church-of-climate-scientology/ in an attempt to understand what you are trying to say about climate change. Sorry to say, I'm not impressed. Why doesn’t Alex Epstein cite any names of the so-called Climate Scientologists that he castigates?
I’d like to know more about who Alex is referring to when he makes unattributed and anonymised references such as “2. They won’t admit when their theory fails” and “3. They intimidate, rather than explain”. Who, for example, is the person referred to when Alex writes “Two weeks ago I participated on an energy panel with a prominent critic of fossil fuels.”
It is not fair and not helpful to criticise people in this way. How do I know that such people really exist except in the Straw Man argument that Alex seems to have constructed here?
Please could you let me know?