Why the climatologists get it wrong.
Correction: Why we shouldn't listen to a douche-bag about climate change.
From a facebook post I felt compelled to write (contained link to article I'm about to shred):
Gary Sutton sounds like a drunk bum who drank whisky through a Forbes magazine straw, while missing every scientific discovery of the 80's 90's, and aughts, then woke up on a park bench and stammered into the journalistic crowd shouting that everything was nonsense and crying about who put all the bad-tasting cotton in his mouth.
1. the 70's cooling thing was mostly a media hype. What science was behind it is still valid, but during a great wave of atmospheric data compilation in the early 70's, some scientists thought the data showed a cooling trend - which it did from 1940's to 1970's. Then the trend reversed. Now (and some then) most scientists say the data shows warming on the way. Note also that warming creates further temperature instability (a property of accelerating dynamic systems) so any given year in the future could indeed have snow storms and worse and worse winters, but overall, the global average will go up.
2. Scientists care about this because a change of a few degrees globally would radically alter the living systems in our biosphere. Hence, if there is a way to exist without pumping shit into the air (keep it out of Clayton's kids' lungs), we would be smart to do so. After all, the Earth can cope with any change - we however cannot.
3. I agree that gov. hype is b.s., but, just b/c Al Gore looks in need of punching doesn't mean he's wrong. Read Malthus, read Ehrlich, read a world census. You have to be pretty dumb to look at i) an exponential population curve, ii) an exponential per kappita consumption curve, and iii) a heavy sloped linear vegetation (CO2 scrubber) curve in the down direction, and still not see why bringing change isn't just the rantings of your economic enemy trying to change your consumption behaviors. I can kill my neighbor with a lawn mower much more effectively in a direct assault, but if our culture doesn't start bending the curve, we're going to be breathing nothing but cow fart, coal plant, and truck exhaust within a few generations. And all because crapheads felt the need to tranfer-of-affect what they should have felt for Bush on to the first semi-sane political leader we've had since...?... It is all not ALL about government control. It is also about U.S. citizens putting fingers in their ears and going 'la,la,la,la,la'.
Here, Mr. Gary Sutton's article begins. I've interspersed my comments in red - as I often do. It portrays my anger nicely.
Many of you are too young to remember, but in 1975 our government pushed "the coming ice age."
From Wikipedia (and the only reference I can find to any government "pushing" in 1975:
"The 1975 NAS report titled "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action" did not make predictions, stating in fact that "we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate." Its "program for action" consisted simply of a call for further research, because "it is only through the use of adequatelycalibrated numerical models that we can hope to acquire the information necessary for a quantitative assessment of the climatic impacts."The report further stated:The climates of the earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless continue to do so in the future. How large these future changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, we do not know..This is not consistent with claims like those of Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) that "the NAS "experts" exhibited ... hysterical fears" in the 1975 report.[21]"
So, when this guy tries to tell you that he remembers the government pushing stuff, remember that he's probably a highly indoctrinated wacko Libertarian (unlike the cool libertarians that are out there) who saw a PBS special on global cooling in middle school or high school, as it was apparently an widely viewed thing that brought the new sciences around climate change some attention. Then again PBS is a leftist pinko organization brainwashing our kids so that pot-dealing terrorists can enter our country and... Between that and a National Academy of the Sciences Report, this is apparently supposed to qualify as "our government pushing a coming ice age". Maybe he thought the gas shortage had something to do with it too - who knows. (That one was caused by the Oil of Petroleum Exporting Countries, by the way.)
Random House dutifully printed "THE WEATHER CONSPIRACY … coming of the New Ice Age." This may be the only book ever written by 18 authors. The Bible? All 18 lived just a short sled ride from Washington, D.C. Newsweek fell in line and did a cover issue warning us of global cooling on April 28, 1975. And The New York Times, Aug. 14, 1976, reported "many signs that Earth may be headed for another ice age."
Cheer up Mr. Tea Party, you can rest assured that the Earth will actually have another ice age in all probability. They come every 20,000 years or so due to irregularities in Earth's orbit affecting how much sunlight we get and possibly for other reasons as well.
OK, you say, that's media. But what did our rational scientists say?
In 1974, the National Science Board announced: "During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade. Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end…leading into the next ice age."
How dare those rational scientists get something wrong. Naturally we should stop being rational.
You can't blame these scientists for sucking up to the fed's mantra du jour. Scientists live off grants. Remember how Galileo recanted his preaching about the earth revolving around the sun? He, of course, was about to be barbecued by his leaders. Today's scientists merely lose their cash flow. Threats work.
This guy actually thinks that it is politically expedient to advocate tighter regulation of industrial emissions. He assumes anything the government pays a scientist to do is bogus. So one guy gets paid to study the flow rate of ketchup and 60 Minutes does a show about it - get over it. This 'out-of-the-hat government is bad' reasoning is the sure sign of a dim wit. Remember how seemingly intelligent intellectuals ignored Galileo en masse because they had dogmatic heads up stoic asses and they relied on their worldview to support their own ego's? Sound familiar my vitriolic friend?
In 2002 I stood in a room of the Smithsonian. One entire wall charted the cooling of our globe over the last 60 million years. This was no straight line. Straight line is neither expected nor necessary to show trends. Well, not since Gaussian Random Variables hit the scene around 1800. The curve had two steep dips followed by leveling. There were no significant warming periods. Smithsonian scientists inscribed it across some 20 feet of plaster, with timelines.
Last year, I went back. That fresco is painted over. It's called re-decorating - not the liberal conspiracy you think it is. The same curve hides behind smoked glass, shrunk to three feet but showing the same cooling trend. Hey, why should the Smithsonian put its tax-free status at risk? News flash: dim-witted climate change nay-sayer believes the Smithsonian would lose funding if they drew a non-straight line graph of world temperatures. If the politicians decide to whip up public fear in a different direction, get with it, oh ye subsidized servants. Downplay that embarrassing old chart and maybe nobody will notice.
Sorry, I noticed. I'm sorry you noticed and then didn't spend more that an airborne-bird-droppings length of time looking into the history of this complex, scientific, and fascinating subject.
It's the job of elected officials to whip up panic. Panic only gets you votes if you run as a Republican. Sorry dude. They then get re-elected. Their supporters fall in line. Dems aren't known for their ability to "get in line". Neither are scientists. Once again, mainly just Republicans fall into this category.
Al Gore thought he might ride his global warming crusade back toward the White House. Don't think he's dumb enough to think a power point and a speaking tour/video would win him the presidency. If you saw his movie, which opened showing cattle on his farm, you start to understand how shallow this is. And by 'this' do you mean Al Gore's whole spiel? He could be spending millions on reforestation, recycling, alternative energy, but to you those head of cattle are enough reason to ignore his arguments. The ancient Greeks would be very disappointed in your ability to reason my friend. The United Nations says that cattle, farting and belching methane, create more global warming than all the SUVs in the world. Which will be true for a few years, until the Indians and Chinese, who don't eat much beef, all begin driving SUVs. Even more laughably, Al and his camera crew flew first class for that film, consuming 50% more jet fuel per seat-mile than coach fliers, while his Tennessee mansion sucks as much carbon as 20 average homes. Pay attention people, if you're going to criticize Mr. Tea Party here for his dumb economic ideas, you'd better be prepared to forswear all modern convenience - or else! your argument holds no water! Oh, never mind, I forgot, that's PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. THAT'S THE WHOLE PROBLEM! Put in cap and trade and suddenly the airlines have incentive to move to more efficient flying wing designs and offer some slower flights that use up less carbon per passenger.
His PR folks say he's "carbon neutral" due to some trades. I'm unsure of how that works, but, maybe there's a tribe in the Sudan that cannot have a campfire for the next hundred years to cover Al's energy gluttony. I'm not even going to...at least he admitted he's unsure of how this works. Al puts money into cleaning up after himself - not that complicated to understand, unless you're a moron and a dinosaur. I'm just not sophisticated enough to know how that stuff works. Now I'm sure you're a Tea Partier. Probably thinks Palin is a genius too. You know you suck if you have to profess your own ignorance of things to get people to like you. But I do understand he flies a private jet when the camera crew is gone. Totally agree that Al and others should reduce consumption. Totally amazed that Forbes would print something full of more fallacies than a book about fallacies.
The fall of Saigon in the '70s may have distracted the shrill pronouncements about the imminent ice age. Actually, the Vietnam war had nothing to do with scientists redacting their former theories. What happened was the world started warming up again like it hadn't been for the previous thirty years. Vietnam was just the only other event you noticed in your kool-aid-drunken stupor, so you naturally associate the two concurrent phenomena. You see, unlike greedy demagogues, when scientists (or President's named Obama) find out they are wrong about something they tell everyone they were wrong, instead of clinging to the edifice of a pater-familia ethic about never looking back and always staying the course. Science's prediction of "A full-blown, 10,000 year ice age," came from its March 1, 1975 issue. The Christian Science Monitor observed that armadillos were retreating south from Nebraska to escape the "global cooling" in its Aug. 27, 1974 issue. It cracks me up how he keeps accusing scientists of saying things, then cites popular magazine journals. Guess they are easier to find on the internet than the scholarly journals that would have the records of what happened beyond what pop culture said. But, we've already established this guy isn't too deep, so...
That armadillo caveat seems reminiscent of today's tales of polar bears drowning due to glaciers disappearing. That actually is happening ass munch. Or did you miss the news about world governments vying for control of the newly opening Arctic passage. That couldn't have anything to do with global temperature change could it? Well, even if we don't care about polar bears, I reserve the right to caveat the hell out of a country really only caring about the almighty dollar.
While scientists march to the drumbeat of grant money, at least trees don't lie. Scientists by nature don't march, and trees by nature don't tell us much about anything that happened more than a few hundred years ago. Sometimes a thousand. Their growth rings show what's happened in the last couple hundred years maybe! no matter which philosophy is in power. I think he means political party. Apparently to this guy, being a Republican/Libertarian is a Philosophy (*laughs). Tree rings show a mini ice age in Europe about the time Stradivarius crafted his violins. Chilled Alpine Spruce gave him tighter wood so the instruments sang with a new purity. But England had to give up the wines that the Romans cultivated while our globe cooled, switching from grapes to colder weather grains and learning to take comfort with beer, whisky and ales. The oldest known tree is less than 10,000 years old. Then again, this guy is probably religious and thinks dinosaurs were just bones put in the dirt by god to test the true King James believers.
Yet many centuries earlier, during a global warming, Greenland was green. And so it stayed and was settled by Vikings for generations until global cooling came along. Don't think vikings were around since the last ice age. Greenland is habitable on the edges and stuff, regardless of its not being green. Leif Ericsson even made it to Newfoundland. His shallow draft boats, perfect for sailing and rowing up rivers to conquer villages, wouldn't have stood a chance against a baby iceberg. Well at least talking about vikings and violins makes you sound kind of smart. Kind of.
Those sustained temperature swings, all before the evil economic benefits of oil consumption, suggest there are factors at work besides humans. Yes. Many other factors. Humans have never been a factor until recently when we went from a few million to many billion and from rarely eating meat or burning oil to eating nothing but meat and driving armored urban assault soccer mom vehicles.
Today, as I peck out these words do you really want to take climate change cues from a guy who never learned to touch type? If so it's called the observation bias and your reason has been compromised, the weather channel is broadcasting views of a freakish and early snow falling on Dallas. Snow in Dallas = all climate change scientists are wrong. Got it. The Iowa state extension service reports that the record corn crop expected this year will have unusually large kernels, thanks to "relatively cool August and September temperatures." And on Jan. 16, 2007, NPR went politically incorrect, briefly, by reporting that "An unusually harsh winter frost, the worst in 20 years, killed much of the California citrus, avocados and flower crops." Dumb ass. Political correctness was only made laughable by the most bleeding of bleeding heart liberals. But, I get it, you're trying to make your empty headed readers laugh. Well, I got news for you - NPR isn't sacred to me at all. I think it sucks.
To be fair, those reports are short-term swings. And by short term, he means a couple days. But the longer term changes are no more compelling says the guy who can't type and thinks Republicanism is a Philosophy, unless you include the ice ages, and then, perhaps, the panic attempts of the 1970s were right. Is it possible that if we put more CO2 in the air, we'd forestall the next ice age? No douche, you can't claim you're saving the world by commuting in a Hummer. If anything you're pissing off hippies and ensuring our nation is dependent on foreign oil (which is guaranteed to become more and more scarce and expensive in the next 100 years btw).
I can ask "outrageous" questions like that because I'm not dependent upon government money for my livelihood. You can ask dumb-headed questions like that because you're a checkers-brained individual writing nonsense about a chess-brain level global issue (chaos mathematics is a bit above your head - let me assure you). From the witch doctors of old to the elected officials today, scaring the bejesus out of the populace maintains their status. Agreed. Funny that you state this in an article that has nothing to do with the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, consolidation of media, our stimulant worshipping culture, the flaws in modern entertainment media, or the attempts to undercut public education by your best buddies over at the Cato Institute.
Sadly, the public just learned that our scientific community hid data and censored critics. Yeah, like five datums and one critic, out of, thousands. maybe tens of thousands. Maybe the feds should drop this crusade and focus on our health care crisis. This dude is DUMB and DUMBER. If you're going to claim the feds need to drop this crusade in favor of something important they are currently ignoring, YOU SHOULDN'T PICK HEALTH CARE, WHICH THEY ARE CURRENTLY WORKING DILIGENTLY ON. IN FACT THE WHOLE COUNTRY IS TALKING ABOUT IT. You should have said Entitlement Expenditures or Torte Reform or something. They should, of course, ignore the life insurance statistics that show every class of American and both genders are living longer than ever. Imagine what our lifespans would be if all the poor/sick weren't bringing the figures down. That's another inconvenient fact. What was the first inconvenient fact? That it snowed in Dallas or that you watched a PBS special on Global Cooling when you were in high school and have ignored science since then? I'm just not clear on this last point, though his last sentence did read vaguely like a clincher.
Gary Sutton is co-founder of Teledesic and has been CEO of several other companies, including Knight Protective Industries and @Backup.
Final analysis on Climate Change:
1. Oil is great - we use it for everything - let's not waste it uneccessarily so our great great grandchildren can find toys in their cereal boxes too. Our cruise ships won't be able to expose the glory of the Tongass National Forest if we burned it all watching Spongebob in the back of the Excursion.
2. Refuting modern science by saying "but they said the opposite thing forty years ago" is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. Forbes is now a stupid magazine.
3. Currently in America we need to do several things: quit whining when things change; vote more; educate our kids so they're smarter than we are; quit spending money on wasteful things like guns and bombs (i.e. the bloated U.S. military - now on the road to becoming human-free in the age of drone warfare); start spending money on things that will pay off higher in future dividends (both as a country and as individuals); spend more time thinking and listening and less time bloviating; AND MOST OF ALL, WHETHER IT'S FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, ETHICS, or just to turn our culture into one of health and economic sustainability WE HAVE TO ADMIT OUR ADDICTION TO OIL AND CONQUER IT. Since the industrialist rhetoric like this guy spews forth has gone too far, we now have to resort to peoples' empathy for polar bears in order to convince the somnambulant public that there is a crisis we have to do something about. Gary won't live to see the polar bears disappear. My nieces, however, might. (clincher ending).
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