Whatever sells newspapers.Originally Posted by UNM1136
Whatever sells newspapers.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776
As Instapundit says:" I'll believe it's a crisis, when the people who say it's a crisis, act like it's a crisis."
" La rose est sans pourquoi, elle fleurit parce qu’elle fleurit ; Elle n’a souci d’elle-même, ne demande pas si on la voit. » Angelus Silesius
"There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." Paul Muad'dib
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776
" La rose est sans pourquoi, elle fleurit parce qu’elle fleurit ; Elle n’a souci d’elle-même, ne demande pas si on la voit. » Angelus Silesius
"There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers." Paul Muad'dib
If the media, academia, and the intelligentsia are panicked and worried, then I know it's nothing that actually needs to be worried about.
The fires in CA are nothing to worry about unless you want to live there. If people want to live in CA then they should pay to live there. That means not living in the areas that are set to burn or taking the proper precautions like buying the insurance to hire private fire crews to protect their property. 400 years ago southern CA was a desert, not parts of it, all of it, including the Imperial Valley. So now you have 20 million people living there and wondering who's going to take care of them when they get burned out or they have no more water.
So yeah, it really isn't anything to worry about unless you happen to live there, which I don't.
In the P-F basket of deplorables.
If we laid out the time line of the earth on a football field, all 120 yards end zone to end zone. Each yard would represent 38 million years of the earth's history. About 2 yards out from the back of the starting end zone another planet slammed into the early earth, the debris from that impact formed the moon. At the 18 yard line, we start picking up signs that single cell organisms exist. Walk past the 50 yard line and to the 6 yard line at the other end and we start finding signs of complex life forms. At the 4 yard line there was the first mass extinction event. At the start of the end zone was the second mass extinction. 4 yards into the end zone was the third mass extinction, the "Great Dying", where up to 96% of the species on earth died off. Another half yard in and there was the fourth mass extinction, and where mammals started to really get a foot hold on the planet. About 1.5 yards from the back of the end zone, a giant meteor struck the Yucatan and caused the fifth mass extinction, the mass extinction we are most familiar with. 2/10" inches from the back of the end zone, homo sapiens came into there current form. In about the last 1/100" an inch human began agricultural practices. In about the last 1/160" civilization began. In the last .000001", that's twenty years, the world is going to end. The ridiculousness of thinking that someone can predict the future of the planet with that degree of accuracy, short of something like a Nuclear Holocaust, is laughable.
Edited for math corrections.....maybe.
Last edited by txdpd; 01-24-2020 at 07:49 PM.
Whether you think you can or you can't, you're probably right.
Last edited by Totem Polar; 01-24-2020 at 07:50 PM.
”But in the end all of these ideas just manufacture new criminals when the problem isn't a lack of criminals.” -JRB
You know, I don't doubt that climate change that results directly from the burning of fossil fuels is real. In fact, I'm fairly convinced that the amount of heat energy that can be stored in the atmosphere does increase when you increase the CO2 content, and that the resulting increase in stored energy will have complicated results that include a subtle general rise in temperature, and more energetic storm behaviour, while still allowing for localized cooling trends that might confound people looking for a clear pattern. I get all that and I don't have a problem with it.
Here is where it begins to break up a little for me: I think our understanding of the inputs and outputs of the system is extremely poor. We have no idea what built-in mitigation factors might exist, but for sure there are powerful ones because the earth keeps self-balancing even when subjected to much more severe conditions.
For example, will an increase in CO2 generate massive algal blooms at sea, which we aren't really expecting or understanding because frankly our understanding of marine environments is pretty rudimentary? Will those algal blooms drift to the bottom and capture carbon more effectively than anyone imagines because again, stuff that happens at sea is really poorly recorded? Is that (among other similar effects) why the predicted floodings and shutdown of the Gulf Stream and so on and so on and so on never seem to come to fruition?
I don't disagree that we might well have an ongoing and worsening problem but I am just really unimpressed with the predictive abilities of people describing a system which I believe to be complex beyond their understanding. If you have never tuned a carburetor, the principles make it sound pretty simple. I think we have a first-day-of-shop-class grasp of the complexity of the atmosphere's interaction with the planet, and people want to use that as a basis to tune the carburetor. And while I concur that there may be an issue, I don't want to succumb to the "but we have to do SOMETHING" mentality. I think that's a big mistake, as anyone who's ever let a really green apprentice touch their carb will probably appreciate.
The EPA ruined carburetors in the US
#RESIST
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