I have a couple of flaws when it comes to believing anything I’m told.

First, I’m old. Second, I’m a journalist. Both of those unalterable traits make me worse than just a skeptic. I’m a skeptic squared.

I see things like Gov. Jerry Brown’s dog-and-pony show Monday in Sacramento and think more about his motivation than I do about his message. Brown spoke at a conference about climate change, and the media in attendance relayed his concern that global warming threatens our state.

He said California is at the “epicenter” of global climate change. He said the state must prepare for longer fire seasons, for rising oceans and for extended droughts. And he had charts and graphs to prove his points, so it must be true.

If I wasn’t on the downhill side of my journey up and over the hill, I’d be very worried — because while going up the hill, I remember a similar warning. I’m old enough to remember the ’70s, a truly forgettable decade. Growing up back then, there was talk about a “Mini Ice Ace” that was coming. It scared the heck out of me. As an impressionable young lad with a love for swimming in creeks and running around in cutoffs during the hot Northern California summers, I didn’t want to give that up.

I had a love of books and all natural things, so I knew the story of the real Ice Age. I’d never been north of Chico and didn’t want to go anywhere near snow and ice. To think the whole planet could be covered in the stuff truly frightened me.

The talk of the Mini Ice Age was an explanation dreamed up by scientists who couldn’t figure out why the earth was suffering such cruel winters. They figured that’s where we were headed, back to days of woolly mammoths and men wearing furs. Magazines and newspapers fed into the hysteria, with earnest pieces trying to figure out how we would survive a long-term polar event.

We never had to deal with it. Mother Nature let up. I could still swim in the summer.

I read the newspaper when I was young, and the prospect of a Mini Ice Age spooked me. I guess there’s one bright side to fewer kids reading newspapers today — they won’t get frightened by the story talking about raging fire, rising seas and widespread death of many living things.

Here’s the problem I have with the global warming boogeyman: It gets blamed for everything. Only now it’s called climate change, because it needs to encompass more than just hot weather.

Summer heat waves? Climate change. Tornadoes in the Midwest and heretofore mostly untouched places like the north valley? Climate change. Last winter’s polar vortex? Climate change. Our current drought? Climate change? Floods in other parts of the country? Climate change.

And if torrential rains come next winter, courtesy of El Niño? That will be blamed on climate change too.

It’s one heck of a scapegoat, an explanation for anything unpredictable. But that’s the thing — the weather is unpredictable. We don’t need to explain why it might rain hard the year after a drought. It’s weather. Weather happens.

I’ve lived through three pronounced droughts. The first two ended and I’m betting the third one will eventually. I’ve also lived through the third-wettest winter in Eureka history. The next winter was normal again. (At least, that’s what I’m told. I don’t know firsthand. I moved. It rained too much.)

We don’t need to find an explanation for why the weather is unpredictable. Maybe people have a hard time admitting there’s something they can’t predict. Not me. I like mystery.

I like variety, too. I’m thrilled to live in a state where we see it all, from a Eureka winter to a Chico summer, and everything inside or outside that spectrum.

Case in point: The same day the story about the governor’s climate change warning was published in the newspaper, I kept flipping pages until I came to the weather page. I always check the highest and lowest temperatures from the previous day in the lower 48 states.

Amazingly on this day, both were in California. The high was 102 in Death Valley. The low was 24 in Bridgeport. They are just a couple hundred miles apart.

Are those extremes in such proximity a product of climate change, or just climate?