For many – including the legacy corporate media, academia, the ‘scientific community’, etc. – the answer to that question is of course human activities like burning hydrocarbons, growing crops, and raising livestock.  All of this releases dangerous levels, in their view, of greenhouse gases (especially carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, which in turn trap heat from the sun, causing catastrophic global warming/climate change.

But a dispassionate analysis of the data shows that greenhouse gases are not supercharging a rapid, dangerous change of the world’s climate.  A new report illustrates this yet again:

Popular claims that CO2 changes drive temperature changes currently or throughout the distant past “are based on imagination and climate models full of assumptions.”

A comprehensive new study details a stochastic assessment determination of the sequencing of CO2 variations versus temperature variations since the 1950s, over the last 2,000 years (the Common Era), and throughout the last 541 million years.

The robust conclusion is that the causality direction – with the understanding that causes lead and effects lag – clearly shows the temperature changes lead and CO2 changes lag on yearly, decadal, and centennial/millennial scales. In other words, “the reverse causality direction [CO2]→T should be excluded.”

The claim that CO2 increases drive temperature changes is thus a “narrative” only, as the claim that “humans, through their emissions by fossil fuel burning, are responsible for the changes we see in climate” can be regarded as a “non-scientific issue.”

Even the threat of acid rain, which we have previously pointed to as a real issue, appears to have been overblown (though it remains detrimental in various ways):

In the early 1980s, acid rain caused by NO2 and SO2 emissions from industry became a major environmental concern. Acid from rain was blamed for acidifying lakes and damaging forests in Eastern Canada, the Northeastern United States, and Northern Europe. Magazines and newspapers showed images of dying trees, blaming industrial air pollution.

In Germany, the word “Waldsterben” (forest dieback) was coined, and acid raid was said to be destroying Germany’s Black Forest. In 1981, Professor Bernard Ulrich of the University of Göttingen, predicted, “The first great forests will die in the next five years. They are beyond redemption.”

The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), a $500 million multi-year research effort, was established in the US in 1982 to study the issue. The Geneva Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution began efforts in Europe in 1983. Acidification of lakes and destruction of forests from air pollution became a widely held belief taught in universities across the world. Acid rain became a driver of US and European efforts to reduce SO2 and NO2 emissions.

But the actual impact of acid rain was much less than feared. The 1990 NAPAP report, titled “Acidic Deposition: State of Science and Technology,” concluded that “acidic deposition has not been shown to be a significant factor contributing to current forest health problems in North America,” with the possible exception of the high-elevation red spruce in the northern Appalachian Mountains. Another study found that damage to Appalachian red spruce forests was caused by the conifer swift moth, not acid rain.

The NAPAP study also found that only 4.2 percent of lakes in the Eastern US were acidic, and that acidic conditions for many of these lakes were due to natural factors or surface mining runoff, not acid rain. The NAPAP study also concluded that 1990 levels of pollution-caused acid rain were not harmful to agriculture or human health.

In Europe, subsequent analysis showed German forest dieback to be due to disease, weather, and other factors, with acid rain playing an insignificant role. The great forests of Europe remain with us today.

Can we, then, point to any man-made climate change that threatens the earth?  Actually there is, though the nature of it may surprise some, as the danger lies precisely in processes created to combat man-made, greenhouse-gas-driven climate change (similar geoengineering tech patents, old and new, listed here):

A geoengineering technique designed to reduce high temperatures in California could inadvertently intensify heatwaves in Europe, according to a study that models the unintended consequences of regional tinkering with a changing climate.

The paper shows that targeted interventions to lower temperature in one area for one season might bring temporary benefits to some populations, but this has to be set against potentially negative side-effects in other parts of the world and shifting degrees of effectiveness over time.

The authors of the study said the findings were “scary” because the world has few or no regulations in place to prevent regional applications of the technique, marine cloud brightening, which involves spraying reflective aerosols (usually in the form of sea salt or sea spray) into stratocumulus clouds over the ocean to reflect more solar radiation back into space.

Experts have said the paucity of controls means there is little to prevent individual countries, cities, companies or even wealthy individuals from trying to modify their local climates, even if it is to the detriment of people living elsewhere, potentially leading to competition and conflict over interventions.

In nearly every way one looks at it, the man-made climate change narrative is false.  It is yet another scam by the Power Elite to enrich themselves, bankrupt the common folk, and make the latter more dependent upon the former.

For those States with some common sense remaining and a will to survive with the good traditions of their forefathers intact, they ought to pass legislation that is similar to Florida’s HB 1645, signed into law by Gov DeSantis, that outlaws a lot of the alarmist climate change nonsense:

Climate change will be a lesser priority in Florida and largely disappear from state statutes under legislation signed Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that also bans power-generating wind turbines offshore or near the state’s lengthy coastline.

. . . It takes effect July 1 and would also boost expansion of natural gas, reduce regulation on gas pipelines in the state and increase protections against bans on gas appliances such as stoves, according to a news release from the governor’s office.

DeSantis, who suspended his presidential campaign in January and later endorsed his bitter rival Donald Trump, called the bill a common-sense approach to energy policy.

“We’re restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots,” DeSantis said in a post on the X social media platform.

The legislation also eliminates requirements that government agencies hold conferences and meetings in hotels certified by the state’s environmental agency as “green lodging” and that government agencies make fuel efficiency the top priority in buying new vehicles. It also ends a requirement that Florida state agencies look at a list of “climate-friendly” products before making purchases.

In 2008, a bill to address climate change and promote renewable energy passed unanimously in both legislative chambers and was signed into law by then-Gov. Charlie Crist, at the time a Republican. Former Gov. Rick Scott, now a Republican U.S. senator, took steps after taking the governor’s office in 2011 to undo some of that measure and this latest bill takes it even further.

The measure signed by DeSantis would also launch a study of small nuclear reactor technology, expand the use of vehicles powered by hydrogen and enhance electric grid security, according to the governor’s office.

It goes without saying that we should take good care of the creation, which the All-Holy Trinity has made mankind the steward of, and which the Lord Jesus Christ has united to His own Person through His incarnation:  ‘God incarnate unites with mankind through His Church, and as God remains unconfusedly united with His creation unto the ages of ages’ (via Elder Athansius’s commentary on Revelation 19).  But fanatical green ideologies based on manipulated data and other lies only make that task harder, and, as with the sea spray technique above, can actually do more harm than good.

So what is causing changing climatic conditions?  Mainly, those things that always have:  changes in solar activity, the oceans warming and cooling, etc., along with, unfortunately, human sin, and not cow burps, chicken poop, or the air flowing out of a pickup truck’s exhaust pipe.