Yup. You are right in that the plan has worked. The alarm is based entirely on the assumption that the ice/snow accumulation will reverse when the globe warms. Whether it does or not, I'll never live to find out, because even their models suggest that there will be no problem until the end of the century.
Even then, one part suggests it'll be a problem by the end of the century, another part comes clean and says it could START to melt by the end of the century. That's a huge difference.
We'll both be dead and our progeny will invent light speed drives so it won't matter by then.
All environmental concerns aren't inherently invalid, but creating governmental policy based upon fraction-of-a-degree predictions for the entire globe 5-10+ decades into the future is insane when our local TV meterologists routinely miss tomorrow's high and low by a full degree or two. I live in a coastal area, and the annual hurricane forecast from the most renowned international expert in the field invariably proves to be about as accurate as could be derived from letting a chicken poop on a grid. Yet it never fails to make headlines, especially if he says it's gonna be bad.
I'm especially cynical of this stuff simply because I'm old enough to remember being in elementary school at the turn of the 1980s and being taught in my Weekly Reader that the same carbon pollution now said to be retaining global heat was instead filtering solar energy, and based upon preceding decades of global temperature decline, we were likely heading into an industry-induced ice age. Then, of course, it started warming up a bit, and instead of calling off the doomsday predictions, they just reversed the direction of them while still blaming the same cause. Hmmm.
Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi contains an excellent passage about prognostication based upon past trends. He explains that the scientists of his time know that the river has shortened "x" number of miles over the past "x" number of years due to it constantly finding shortcuts to eliminate bends. Therefore, he propses, that a million years prior, the river obviuosly had to be 1.3 million miles long.
As a general rule when it comes to any prediction in any field, the more accurate the prediction and the more distant into the future it is for, the more likely the person making said prediction is completely full of shit.
I find it interesting that even though the number of global warming deniers in the United States and other English speaking nations is steadily shrinking, any time an article is posted stating the reality of global warming, even an article such as this that discusses a far off concern, the deniers come out of the woodwork and dominate the comments section.
I don't normally believe in conspiracies but I'm convinced that there are organized global warming denialist groups who scour the internet for any and all new postings, send out emails alerting their members and flood the comments section (not that this post has been flooded.)
There's a difference between "this isn't all going to melt immediately and dump PCBs in our garage next week"and "global warming isn't". If you want to think screwing over our grandkids instead of our kids = success, you should look up that word "sucess", I don't think it means what you think it means.
But yeah, just pretend everything's OK - that has always worked out really well.
Considering that by the predictions of my childhood and earlier, we were all supposed to be long since starved due to the "population bomb," sitting in the dark due to unsustainable energy demands and the oil supply having run out, and dealing with that aforementioned ice age, one could easily argue that things *have* worked out pretty well.
Another alarmist hit piece. Note this quote:
ReplyDelete"In the decades since Camp Century was abandoned, falling snows have buried the site ever deeper."
Um, that means the plan worked.
Oh, but the models! The models! You know, the ones that have never been right even one time?
Yeah. Someone wants money from the US.
Yup. You are right in that the plan has worked. The alarm is based entirely on the assumption that the ice/snow accumulation will reverse when the globe warms. Whether it does or not, I'll never live to find out, because even their models suggest that there will be no problem until the end of the century.
ReplyDeleteEven then, one part suggests it'll be a problem by the end of the century, another part comes clean and says it could START to melt by the end of the century. That's a huge difference.
DeleteWe'll both be dead and our progeny will invent light speed drives so it won't matter by then.
All environmental concerns aren't inherently invalid, but creating governmental policy based upon fraction-of-a-degree predictions for the entire globe 5-10+ decades into the future is insane when our local TV meterologists routinely miss tomorrow's high and low by a full degree or two. I live in a coastal area, and the annual hurricane forecast from the most renowned international expert in the field invariably proves to be about as accurate as could be derived from letting a chicken poop on a grid. Yet it never fails to make headlines, especially if he says it's gonna be bad.
ReplyDeleteI'm especially cynical of this stuff simply because I'm old enough to remember being in elementary school at the turn of the 1980s and being taught in my Weekly Reader that the same carbon pollution now said to be retaining global heat was instead filtering solar energy, and based upon preceding decades of global temperature decline, we were likely heading into an industry-induced ice age. Then, of course, it started warming up a bit, and instead of calling off the doomsday predictions, they just reversed the direction of them while still blaming the same cause. Hmmm.
Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi contains an excellent passage about prognostication based upon past trends. He explains that the scientists of his time know that the river has shortened "x" number of miles over the past "x" number of years due to it constantly finding shortcuts to eliminate bends. Therefore, he propses, that a million years prior, the river obviuosly had to be 1.3 million miles long.
As a general rule when it comes to any prediction in any field, the more accurate the prediction and the more distant into the future it is for, the more likely the person making said prediction is completely full of shit.
I find it interesting that even though the number of global warming deniers in the United States and other English speaking nations is steadily shrinking, any time an article is posted stating the reality of global warming, even an article such as this that discusses a far off concern, the deniers come out of the woodwork and dominate the comments section.
ReplyDeleteI don't normally believe in conspiracies but I'm convinced that there are organized global warming denialist groups who scour the internet for any and all new postings, send out emails alerting their members and flood the comments section (not that this post has been flooded.)
There's a difference between "this isn't all going to melt immediately and dump PCBs in our garage next week"and "global warming isn't". If you want to think screwing over our grandkids instead of our kids = success, you should look up that word "sucess", I don't think it means what you think it means.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, just pretend everything's OK - that has always worked out really well.
Considering that by the predictions of my childhood and earlier, we were all supposed to be long since starved due to the "population bomb," sitting in the dark due to unsustainable energy demands and the oil supply having run out, and dealing with that aforementioned ice age, one could easily argue that things *have* worked out pretty well.
ReplyDelete