" Green argues that finding the faint traces of Martian life, past or present, will unleash countless new questions that we’re not prepared to answer.
There is, of course, a religious angle to all of this. The origins of life on Earth are still the subject of debate today and science has always had to compete with stories for mindshare.
I mean, we live in a time where a not-insignificant chunk of people still claim to believe that the Earth is flat, so finding alien life on another world is sure to come with its own host of conspiracy theories and true believers spouting… whatever it is they truly believe.
Green may be right and mankind may not be ready to deal with the implications of finding life outside of Earth. But science waits for no one and if there’s life to be found on Mars, those discoveries aren’t going to wait until we’re ready to deal with them. Brace yourselves." NY Post
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One of the old timers on SST wrote me recently to admonish me to abandon my "frivolous" interest in humanity's coming migration from Terra. He suggested that I should embrace climate change as the focus of SST. I declined to do so since I think the leftist theme song of impending doom is yet another manifestation of the result of allowing teachers who are the spiritual offspring of the nutty sixties and seventies to indoctrinate our children for decades.
People are causing climate change? What an amusing thought! I will try to live long enough to dance on the grave of this stupidity. pl
After the last ice age, about 15,000 BC, the sea level rose about 400 feet. I live in Florida and if it raises another 20 feet, I'll deal with it then. Ignorance is bliss and I'm a happy guy.
Posted by: Martin Oline | 03 October 2019 at 06:43 PM
I hope you know how to slow dance. A lot of people, including me, have seen weather change lately compared to how it used to be. We have also seen the world population increase substantially in our lifetime.
Then there is the majority of scientist who claim what is causing this.
Posted by: Lars | 03 October 2019 at 08:22 PM
lars
BS, leftist hysteria and fantasy. Are you that gullible , really? Did you believe in Iraqi WMD? Same sort of log-rolling. Most scientists? What a joke! I m an expert at generating false beliefs in the masses. Climate changes. that is all.
Posted by: turcopolier | 03 October 2019 at 08:27 PM
I am sadly old enough to have lived through the new ice age scare, then it was nuclear holocaust, then it was acid rain, then the ozone layer, and now global warming.
Are there any I missed?
Posted by: Markopasha | 03 October 2019 at 08:44 PM
I agree with the "BS, leftist hysteria and fantasy". I've gone to the trouble of researching available stable site weather stations here in the US. There are only a few stable site stations with at least a century of continuous records. What I mean by stable site stations is as follows: The instrument location must have been constant; it cannot have moved, for example, from bottom land to hilltop in the same vicinity. The instrument site must not have become surrounded by urban development after having been previously in open country. The reason for this is microclimates have a big effect. An example of this is Wash. DC. Observation sites that in 1900 were semi rural are now heavily urbanized and this is reflected in higher average temperatures, but this is all due to the urban heat island effect. Therefore those stations' observations must be discarded when looking for evidence of general warming. Discarding non stable site stations and concentrating on the stable sites shows overall temperature trends since a century prior are remarkably stable. NOAA maintains a climate database that anyone can access for free. The two I have looked at are Charlottesville's McCormick observatory and the one at Dale Enterprise outside Harrisonburg. Both show remarkable long term consistency. I think a large part of the near universal perception of warmer conditions is related to the concentration of vocal public intellectual types in the big urban centers which have warm microclimates and the other factor is the selective memory many people have about weather. Their memory is largely composed of vignettes rather than a complete timeline and such individuals remember weather events in terms of extremes, which lead to such nonsense I hear from people around Charlottesville such as: "when we were kids the snow stayed on the ground from Thanksgiving until Easter" This is from people younger than I am and they believe their memories. I'm am oddity in that I retain full continuity of memory about many things and recall the exact timelines of weather events that play tricks on many people's recollections. I also tend to look up stuff to corroborate what my recall tells me. So, at least here in mid-latitude east coast there is simply no evidence that the climate of today differs in any way from that of a century ago.
Posted by: A. Pols | 03 October 2019 at 08:53 PM
markopasha
How about the millennial crash of civilization? The climateers are the kind of people who would have bought a lot of tulips.
Posted by: turcopolier | 03 October 2019 at 08:56 PM
Lars,
Have you sold your Florida home and moved to higher ground yet?
Posted by: Fred | 03 October 2019 at 09:20 PM
Earth is warming, caused by gradual changes in 3 parameters of its orbital motion. See please "Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes" by Dr. Mueller. And nothing can be done about it.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 03 October 2019 at 09:42 PM
The issue is man's contribution to the inevitable global warming. What percentage is due to man's activities and what percentage resulting from changes to orbital motion? One can make a lot of money from gullible people.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 03 October 2019 at 09:45 PM
In case anyone missed it, Mish Shedlock published an amusing summary of the fraudulent data practices that are being used in the attempt to shove the 'Green New Deal' through. The link is: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/global-warming-fraud-exposed-pictures
Posted by: fotokemist | 03 October 2019 at 09:58 PM
Climate Alarmism is a religious cult akin to the Flagellants, neo-flagellants, if you will. They hate themselves and humanity in general. They want to kill billions of humans to “save the earth”. The earth will be fine, thank you, if we can expel these maniacs from polite society.
Posted by: Rick Merlotti | 03 October 2019 at 10:46 PM
May I endorse the opinion of A Pols about temperature changes around instrument sites. A case in point is the meteorological site at Reagan National Airport. Formerly a 20 ft x 20 ft green sward in the midst of more green sward located on landfill dumped on the wide Potomac River floodplain, the site is now a 20 ft x 20 ft well surrounded by three floors of an office building.
Posted by: Petrel | 03 October 2019 at 11:51 PM
You missed the overpopulation scare that asked us to believe we would soon be eating "soylent green."
My personal belief was that this particular scar was started by the people who were anti Catholics--you know those people who did/do not like birth control AND by the hippies who just wanted to engage in sex, drugs, and rock and roll without having to worry about the consequences.
Heck....I saw a video tonight on television of a deranged young woman so worried about climate change that she felt we needed to "eat babies." (I couldn't follow her reasoning, thus my determination that she was deranged.)
As for me, I believe that God created the world, and to me that means the universe in which it is located) and IT IS GOOD. But then, I grew up in and still live in a place where I get to see nature every day and take week-end trips into farmland and rocky mountains with mountain streams and high mountain lakes.
My hometown is known for the smell of feedlots that sometimes is wafted into the downtown from the east. In our case, it's not the flatulence that bothers us but the lack of cow toilets I guess.
Posted by: Diana C | 04 October 2019 at 12:40 AM
Climate change?
I think there are 'natural climate cycles', the Ice Age, etc, already proven.
But I also think humans do add to it with more pollution and more extinction of certain species. Therefore reducing what we can is the prudent thing to do. Living on the ocean all my life I have seen the 'natural cycles'..such as one beach shrinking and another growing due to the ocean's movements. But then I have also seen the side of a mountain forest die due to pollution from a factory,erasing the trees that clean the air and destroying wildlife habitats .
Since the earth doesnt need humans but we need it to live on common sense says we should do what we can to lessen, not add to any negative effects of the natural cycles.
Posted by: catherine | 04 October 2019 at 01:30 AM
Colonel,
This is from NASA website:
"Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals1 show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree*: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. The following is a partial list of these organizations, along with links to their published statements and a selection of related resources."
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Posted by: TonyL | 04 October 2019 at 01:30 AM
I lived in south central Kansas in the early 1950s and having anywhere from six to as many as a dozen tornadoes reported every day for several weeks at a time during the summer was not at all unusual. I watch the "weather reporting" hysteria on the national news today and just laugh.
Posted by: Bill H | 04 October 2019 at 01:31 AM
I'm no climate expert and don’t have the knowledge (or any desire) to debate the science. FWIW after starting out as something of a sceptic 15-20 years ago I ended up coming down on the other side of this issue.
To my mind, Nassim Taleb has the right approach:
“This leads to the following asymmetry in climate policy. The scale of the effect must be demonstrated to be large enough to have impact. Once this is shown, and it has been, the burden of proof of absence of harm is on those who would deny it.
It is the degree of opacity and uncertainty in a system, as well as asymmetry in effect, rather than specific model predictions, that should drive the precautionary measures. Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the ’climate crisis’ that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it."
https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/895790889171386369
Posted by: Ingolf Eide | 04 October 2019 at 01:47 AM
We have over a century of weather data at our ranch. We have seen temperature and rainfall extremes distributed across that time horizon. I have to conclude that there are no patterns or trends at our ranch.
I would argue that what we have is man made pollution. Plastic and chemical waste, polluted creeks and streams and increased particulate matter in the air in some places like Beijing and New Delhi. Deforestation and habitat destruction are also issues.
Carbon trading and offsets are another scheme for financial interests to make money.
Posted by: Jack | 04 October 2019 at 03:55 AM
Ingolf Eide
"Once this is shown, and it has been," It has not bee SHOWN. Peer reviewed academic studies generally prove one thing and that is that academics are conformists who seek approval from other academics.
Posted by: turcopolier | 04 October 2019 at 08:09 AM
It is worse in this specific case, the consensus, at times, rests on the agreement with (and among) 6 global climate models. I do not trust those models to embody Climate Science Truths.
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 04 October 2019 at 08:36 AM
Appeal to Authority? What is this, a religion?
Please see here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles
Posted by: Babak Makkinejad | 04 October 2019 at 08:38 AM
A. Pols,
"vocal public intellectual types .... "
Someone's wallet is about to get beaten paper-thin by a hockeystick.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/28/1881956/-Tim-Ball-Pleads-For-Mercy-As-An-Irrelevant-Sick-Old-Man-Gets-It-Declares-Victory
https://www.steynonline.com/9762/michael-e-mann-loser-and-liar-and-scofflaw
Posted by: Fred | 04 October 2019 at 09:38 AM
Or scientist are experts "at generating false beliefs in the masses"?
Posted by: Vig | 04 October 2019 at 09:43 AM
TonyL,
Trust the government:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/30/health/red-meat-heart-cancer.html
"researchers produced a series of analyses concluding that the advice, a bedrock of almost all dietary guidelines, is not backed by good scientific evidence."
Evidence. Why I bet these scientists were all trained at schools that knew there were only 2 genders.
Posted by: Fred | 04 October 2019 at 09:46 AM
Yeah. You missed the Great Global Warming Scare of the 1930s.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/dozens-failed-climate-predictions-stretch-80-years-back
All my life somebody (with lots of scientists real and assumed) has been telling me We Are Doomed!!!
All that changes is the cause of the doom.
Posted by: Patrick Armstrong | 04 October 2019 at 11:08 AM