The Comfort of Saying “It Wasn’t Us”

Why some people pick a guilty sun over a guilty mirror — and what that choice really protects.

There’s a question that keeps me up at night.

Why would anyone prefer the version of the story where we’re helpless? I sit here in Rimini, the salt wind coming off the Adriatic through my window, and I turn this over in my mind. If climate change is our fault, then we hold the steering wheel. We broke it, so we can stop breaking it . That’s not a curse. That’s a gift wearing an ugly mask.

And yet millions of people reach for the opposite story.

The Real Question Isn’t the Science

Let me say something that might surprise you, dear reader. The science part is, honestly, settled enough to bore a physicist.

Ninety-seven percent of working climate scientists agree the warming of the last hundred years is mainly caused by human activity that pumped greenhouse gases into the air . NASA scientist Kate Marvel put it sharper than I ever could — we’re more sure humans cause climate change than we are that smoking causes cancer. So if you’re waiting for the data to arrive, it already knocked, came in, and made itself a coffee.

Your sun theory, by the way, has a fingerprint problem.

I’ll simplify this so we can all follow along — and I promise it’s worth the thirty seconds. If the sun were the culprit, we’d see warming through every layer of the atmosphere, all the way up. Instead, we see warming at the surface and cooling in the stratosphere and mesosphere. That pattern is the signature of greenhouse gases, not solar forcing. The sun’s radiation hasn’t even increased since satellites started watching in 1978, while temperatures kept climbing . The sun has an alibi, my friend. Rock solid.

So Why Choose the Hopeless Story Anyway?

Here’s where it gets human. And strange.

You’d expect that knowing more would change minds. It doesn’t always work that way. Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, surveyed 1,769 people and found no correlation between understanding climate science and accepting that humans cause it . Some folks who knew loads still rejected the premise. The more knowledgeable a conservative was, the more likely they were to reject human causation .

Read that again. More knowledge, more rejection.

Kahan’s explanation cuts deep — for many people, taking a position on climate isn’t a statement about science at all. It’s a statement about who they are and which tribe they belong to . Saying “humans cause it” can feel like switching teams, betraying your own people at the dinner table. The brain protects the friendship over the fact.

That’s the part your question circles around, and you’ve spotted it perfectly.

The Quiet Appeal of “Nothing We Can Do”

Now, to your actual puzzle. Why is helplessness comforting?

There’s a name for this flavour of it. Senator Ron Johnson once said, roughly, the climate has always changed, so the real question is whether you can do anything about it . That move has a label — doomism — the idea that we’re already locked into catastrophe, so no policy can save us. Notice the trick. If nothing can be done, then nobody has to do anything. The guilt evaporates. The to-do list burns up.

Blame the sun, and you keep your lifestyle and your innocence.

I understand the pull, I really do. As someone who’s spent years in hospitals — surgeries, an implant put in, an implant taken out — I know the seductive whisper of “this is just fate, nothing I do matters.” It’s a warm blanket. It’s also a lie that keeps you in bed while the house needs fixing.

Accepting responsibility is heavier. But heavy things have handles.

The Manufactured Fog

There’s one more piece, and it’s the cynical one — your oil-business hunch was right on the money.

Peter de Menocal of Columbia said the most effective thing the denial community ever did was sell doubt . Not a competing theory. Just fog. “They’re not selling a new way of looking at the problem,” he said, “they’re selling doubt, and it’s very easy to manufacture doubt” . Fossil fuel companies have known about human-caused warming since the 1950s. The uncertainty you hear repeated wasn’t found in a lab. It was written in a marketing meeting.

And the “natural cycles” line? The Earth has indeed swung through ice ages and warm spells. What’s different now is the speed and scale — today’s warming runs roughly ten times faster than when the planet left the last ice age . Past mass extinctions tied to CO2 shouldn’t soothe us. They should be the fire alarm.

When the Numbers Stop Being Abstract

I need to update what I wrote, because the world just did something cruel.

In a single week, the World Health Organization confirmed more than 1,300 excess deaths across Europe linked to this record-breaking heatwave since June 21 . France alone counted around 1,000 deaths more than expected in just a few days. And the WHO’s own director-general, Tedros, says these are the deaths we can see — French officials called their data preliminary, numbers that “underestimate the total” .

You mentioned The Economist puts the real figure as high as 12,000. I can’t verify that estimate from what’s in front of me, so I’ll flag it plainly as their projection rather than confirmed fact.

But here’s what guts me. Eighty-five percent of France’s dead were people aged 65 and over — grandparents, the quiet generation, gone in their own apartments while a fashion show in Paris made an artificial wave for spectacle

Tedros gave it a name that I can’t shake — “the silent killer” A Generation-Storm That Comes Every Summer

There’s a phrase being repeated by every wire service, and it deserves your full attention.

The “once-in-a-generation” heatwave is now happening nearly every year Read that slowly. The thing our grandparents saw once in a lifetime now visits us like an annual guest who kills on the way out.

And scientists aren’t hedging on why. They’ve shown that these recurring heatwaves are a clear marker of global warming driven by humans burning fossil fuels — and they’re set to grow more frequent, longer, and more intense . Tedros said it himself: this is driven by climate change and global warming

So when you ask whether the sun is roasting us — no. We are. With receipts.

So, What Do I Think About Arrest Warrants?

You said that in a sane world, there’d be international arrest warrants for every oil, gas, and coal billionaire — charged with climate crimes against humanity.

I won’t pretend that’s a settled legal idea, because it isn’t yet. But I understand exactly why your blood is up.

Here’s the moral arithmetic, as I see it from my window in Rimini. We have a documented cause — fossil fuel emissions. We have a body count this week, confirmed by the world’s health authority We have an industry that, as I told you earlier, sold doubt for decades while knowing the truth. When you can name the cause, name the dead, and name who profited from the delay… the word “accountability” stops sounding radical and starts sounding overdue.

A crime against humanity needs intent, harm, and a perpetrator who knew. You decide whether that fog-machine fits.

The Thing I Refuse to Let Go Of

I’ll close where I always do, because I have to.

Thirteen hundred people didn’t die from an angry sun or a vengeful planet. They died from a problem with a cause, a cause with names, and a name with a balance sheet That’s grief — but it’s also the same gift in the ugly mask. A human cause means a human cure.

We made the silent killer louder. We can make it quieter.

So no, I won’t hand out the arrest warrants today — that’s not my courtroom. But I’ll keep saying the part that is mine to say: never give up, name the cause, and protect the grandmother in the room before the spectacle in the street.

Science is the brightest tool we have for human and cultural growth. Use it kindly. — Gerd, FreeAstroScience