on May 20th, 2008 by mark
Which is actually a good thing. Making progress–and it has to do with what I originally posted about Peanut’s issues. Yes, the end of the school year, yes a little fear about 2nd grade, a little fear about Sofie leaving, Karina leaving and uncertainty about her future.
Talked with a few people, among them a child development specialist who goes to our church. Got some seriously good reassurance and a new toolbox with which to help Peanut get through this. Tried some of it tonight and you know what? It worked….
Tired of writing about it, though–and would like to move on.
Climate news: You have to be daft not to know this stuff now. It’s interesting, though, that the news pages aren’t picking it up. It’s in the commentary pages–but the reason it is is because scientists, the ones who actually practice science, that is, are becoming more and more aware that the climate models which said we’re in serious trouble of global warming–were wrong. In fact, data–the real kind, not modeled by a computer–indicates that warming has not occurred for the past 10 years. It appears that it is not likely to occur for even more than that–and this in a time when carbon emissions are at their peak.
Now, I’m no scientist. I cannot and will not say, “told you so.” I merely did what so many on the left say they do every day–but apparently don’t. I read, researched and found out for myself. The vocal IPCC community had everyone hyped and so did Al Gore–and he was and is really good at getting people to listen to him. But it turns out, he’s wrong. And he’s not just a little wrong, or wrong in the margins–he is amazingly, truly, gut-bustingly wrong.
Let’s add some icing to the cake, shall we? In the rush to get “green” what have we gotten? We’ve gotten the Prius, a car which literally rapes the earth in order to not burn so much fossil fuel. It avoids all that oil in favor of strip-mining for nickel and has a battery so toxic, that there really is no good place for it once it is used up, a process that takes less than 10 years in most cases.
What else have we gotten? We’ve gotten admonishments to trade in our incandescent bulbs for florescent ones. So many people have done this (though I have steadfastly refused–not on principle, but on the grounds that I loathe florescent light) and now what are we finding? The “green” florescent bulbs are laced with so much mercury that they’re toxic, dangerous and in some cases could be deadly, particularly to children. Of course, what most eco-whacko’s won’t tell you is that ultimately, they believe we should stop having children anyway. They believe there are too many. The hubris of these people is astounding.
What else do we get? We get even the Bush administration listing the polar bear as threatened. Nevermind that there are more polar bears alive and kicking today than there were 30 years ago. Nevermind that their habitat is not threatened by global warming because in order for that to happen, there has to be global warming. And there isn’t.
No, it’s not really news to me, nor to most of us who never got on the green bandwagon. The fact remains that the zealots will keep preaching the word of Gore until they’re green in the face–and everywhere else. “Never mind the facts,” they seem to say, “we’re saving the planet.”
But, facts are indeed stubborn things, as John Adams said. Without them, you get a green movement based on noise, symbolism and holier than thouness–instead of a true stewardship that seeks to live in balance, understand the use of resources, obtain them where and when possible and allow humanity, and not the resources, the benefit of the doubt.
Posted in Culture, Family
Oh, but were this only true!
The truth that global warming is a farce has been leaking out for some time, thus the move from “global warming” to “climate change” was necessitated. Not quite as specific as “global warming,” but just as ominous in it’s purported implications. This has gone so far that at the national American Planning Association conference I attended last month, nearly every session was beating the “climate change” drum, whereas at the last conference I attended (in 2006), I was subjected to not a single mention of it.
What astounds me isn’t the need for the enviro-nuts to insist on a problem. They’ve always done that since they became an organized bunch finding an ear in the leaders of the ’60′s anti-war movement. They’ve trumpeted the warnings of mass extinctions of whales, the advent of a new ice age due to man-made pollution of the atmosphere, the dangers of nuclear energy, the destruction of over 1,000 acres of rainforest each day in South America, global warming due to man-made pollution of the atmosphere. Each of these alarms were sounded with the impending doom at least 30 to 50 years out. Enough time that, should they be shown to be wrong (as most of them are), either folks would have forgotten about these warnings or be dead. So I can’t be surprised about the continued insistence on a problem of catastrophic scale.
What I am surprised about is that so many of us, the “uneducated masses” who don’t hold the PhD’s and who have never taken part in a PETA protest, a peace march, or a 12 hour hunger strike, have gone from seeing these people as they should be seen (chicken little) to seeing them as unerring guardians of our well-being. I’m just blown away by this. From those “true believers” I know, I hear them shout that they have “read the science” behind climate change and that it’s sound. “The computer models just don’t lie.” Sounds good to a techno-geek like myself, but for that troublesome term GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Climate is essentially the “average” of weather over a long period of time. In order to quantify our knowledge of climate over the long term, we need to be able to quantify our knowledge of weather over periods of much shorter terms. At the present time, our ability to predict the weather more than about 30 days out is non-existent, even with the very best of computer modeling. Why? Because the systems which interact to create the weather are terribly complex and not fully understood. We can’t quantify them all at this point.
Climate is a tremendously (nearly infinitely) complex system, extremely chaotic and subject to tremendous deviations due to changes in seemingly very small details. So the addition of previously unaccounted for data to climate models can have very huge effects on the output of those models, as was recently demonstrated when the recently quantified ocean current cycles were plugged in to the UN climate change model. Now, there is apparently no climate change problem, at least for the foreseeable future. I’ve no doubt that someone will come up with new data in the future and plug that in, only to find that the output shows us back on the warming trend. But that should put us back into our current frenzy, because we just don’t know what else is out there that will affect the model. Remember: GIGO. Reacting extremely to facts which we know are inadequate, inconclusive, or incomplete is just plain stupid. When our knowledge expands to the point when we can predict particular components of the weather (for instance, amount of rainfall) with a relative degree of accuracy for a year or more in the future, we’ll be in a much better place to stand and claim the ability to be able to predict where our climate is headed. Until then, I can’t see the climate change furor as anything more than just fear-mongering. Sorry Mr. Gore: You can keep your Oscar and your Nobel Prize, but I’ll keep my truck and my barbecue grill, thank you very much.
You know my whole “thing” is that the climate changes all the time. Like ummm the ice age..the other ice age..the one before that or maybe even when most of the earth’s suface was lava. The climate changed many times during the early days of mankind and if a guy wearing a loin cloth and carrying a pointy stick can handle it i think we can.
Secondly Green Peace, PETA, Al Gore…all terrorist organizations (yes Al Gore IS an organization). I can in fact back up these claims AND I can do it better than they can back up their theories on “global warming”. So anything they tell us can’t be trusted in any way (unless they publicly announce their true colors).
So in conclusion if you see these people, stop them. For the sake of all mad kind stop them..cut you brake lines and point you car at their rallies, when they move into a tree cut it down before they can get their safety lines in, be creative and together we can end this. Remember friends don’t let friends go hippie.