If you believe that climate change will kill us all ...

 

I am increasingly impressed with the number of people in the US who have been converted to the climate change hysteric state.  People I have known for years are considering winding up their earthly affairs.  One man asked if the government would help us all  "transition" before the end. 

We Americans seem to be be particularly prone to waves of hysteria.

People lived in dread of a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War.  A lot of money was spent on fallout shelters from coast to coast.  Food stocks were stored against the day of nuclear winter.  My father, who was as tight as a tick when it came to money, actually considered digging up his back yard for the purpose.

And then there was the millennial hysteria when all the computers were expected to stop or start running backward.

After 9/11 people lived in a hysteric state for months afraid of everything and everyone.  The Muslims are coming!  The Muslims are coming! This might have been the grito of the day. Federal Civil servants and employees of the World Bank in DC refused to go to work because they were afraid.  Of what?  of everything and nothing.  I had a beard then and a man on a subway train told me that I should go back where I came from.  Hysteria.  I  offered to give him help with an attitude adjustment.

In 1941 the population of the west coast expected to be bombed and invaded by the Japanese.  Hysteria set in and sober people like FDR and George Marshall accepted the idea that American citizens of Japanese descent should be interned for the duration of the war in camps well away from the Pacific Ocean.  They were interned solely because they were of Japanese descent and public hysteria forced  Washington to act.

I could go on and on ...

How about the hysteria that led to the Spanish War?  "Remember the Maine,"  The ship was supposedly sunk in Havana Harbor by Spanish perfidy.  In fact the Maine blew up  because a coal bunker fire burned through a bulkhead and set off something or other.  That was the US Navy's investigative finding after the war.  Don't tell me about Hearst.  Hearst was just selling newspapers.  The American people went into a hysteric rage against Spain and that was the cause of war.  Hearst just wanted to find "Rosebud."  Figure it out.

And now we have the approaching end of the world through man made climate change.  It would be funny if there were not so many who believe it.

Science?  Hah! For every study you can produce in support of this fantasy I will find you one to rebut it.  All you ecofreaks!  Don't send me material about this.  I will not help you support the hysteric fantasy.  Send money to the Democratic Party.  They believe this crap.   pl.

Comments

[Factotum]

I still think any measured global temperature change simply comes from the plethora A/C exhausts venting outdoors, and once you throw in the new indoor A/C temperatures you still end up with "normal" averages. They have been running A/C in the wooden stilt houses along the Bangkok klongs for decades. There is a lot of A/C in this world. Gotta count for something.

[Fred]

Babak,

What about the tree rings?

[Long]

>For what purpose is this climate hysteria ginned up.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”

― H.L. Mencken

" Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peace makers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

-H. Goering

Americans are vulnerable to hysteria mostly because profiteers and carpetbaggers stir up hysteria for unscrupulous advantage.

[anon]

Did you say crap.

On average, researchers found 20 microplastic particles in every 10 grams of stool, suggesting humans are swallowing them in food. Particles between 50 and 500 micrometres across were found, the most common being polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET).Oct 22, 2018

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/plastic-microplastic-study-pollution-food-drink-water-poo-faeces-a8596836.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plastic-in-poop-study-microplastics-in-stool-raises-concerns/

Climate change is only on part of the problem.Overpopulation and lack of fresh drinking water is another.Luckily it is not my problem but it surely will be my children's.I would say that is the attitude of most people in leadership roles today.

[anon]

The DNC will elect Hillary Clinton and she will start a worldwide movement asking woman to stop having children.It is now cheaper to pay young woman to not have children in terms of the cost to this planets resources in the next 10 years.I suggest no new births for 10 years starting 2025 worldwide.

[turcopolier]

long I have a large experience of much of the world and Americans asa group are easier to propagandize than most.

[upstater]

After the Spaniards arrived in the Sonoran Desert, it took less that 200 years of running cattle to turn the deep soils of treed grassland with few cacti and many perrenial rivers into a true desert. The soil is thin, grasslands gone, rivers intermittent, etc. The process in the Sahara happened 2 millennia earlier. Britain used to be a temperate rainforest. Iceland had trees and grasslands. There are plenty of other examples. In all these cases, man's actions radically changed the environment and local climate changed as a result.

Why is it considered implausible that man's impact on the atmosphere and resulting chimate change is any different?

[Babak Makkinejad]

They are not direct proxies for temperature. Furthermore, the issue of Cabiration of Time, just like in the case of core samples, persists. Tree rings, furthermore, do not go back tens of hundreds of years.

[The Twisted Genius]

One of the Earth's major periods of catastrophic climate change was the Permian-Triassic extinction, also called the Great Dying. In a period of several hundred years, global temperatures increased close to 10 degrees Celsius. The Earth lost 96% of its ocean life and 70% of life on land. Obvious this was not a man made crisis. There was a massive eruption of multiple Siberian volcanoes spewing CO2, methane and enough lava to cover North America. The massive increase in greenhouse gases caused a fairly quick global warming with catastrophic results.

The current increase in greenhouse gases are only a fraction of the increase associated with the Great Dying. One of the effects we'll likely see is an increase in Summer dead zones, red tides and flesh eating bacteria blooms in coastal areas. It's not Doomsday, but it's going to suck especially for those of us who like the water.

[turcopolier]

upstater

The question is -how much as opposed to non-human factors. In my part of the country humans have always affected the terrain and vegetation. Before the europeans came the Shawnee burned off the whole Shenandoah Valley every few years to improve the grazing for Buffalo. This land in grass was very suitable for European farming. The farming population is now much smaller and lands that were grassy in the19th Century are densely forested. How does that fit your concept?

[turcopolier]

anon

Figurative crap.

[TonyL]

Colonel,

"And then there was the millennial hysteria when all the computers were expected to stop or start running backward."

Yes, the Y2K problem was real. This was proven to be the most successful effort in the history of computing to mitigate an impending disaster. Perhaps the hysteria you saw was what has made the effort a success. Computers would not stop because of Y2K, the applications running on them would.

As someone who personally fixed a few of mission-critical applications, I can say that without that effort, at the turn of the millenia, aircrafts would not have known where they were going, financial transactions would not have been completed, which would have caused market crashes. And these scenarios are just a tip of the iceberg in our Y2K assessment.

At present time, most of mission-critical computers in the world are running on Linux operating system. There is an upcoming Y2.38K issue, i.e. the year 2038, where another turnover will potentially cause similar problems. However, there has been an on-going effort in the Linux community to prevent such disaster. The mitigation for Y2038 has been going on for about a decade to ensure we will not be impacted by that. I think in a way, the Y2K panic has helped in the awareness of the Y2.38K.

[turcopolier]

Tony L

Thanks for saving us all. My point had to do with the hysteric reaction of the American people and media.

[The Twisted Genius]

TonyL, I can also vouch for the massive and successful effort to avert the potential effects of Y2K. I was the point man for the Y2K response for the Defense HUMINT Service. Actually Pete Kline was "in charge" but he didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground when it came to IT. He wisely left it to others. I was privy to all the international coordination efforts for the year leading up to Y2K. The international cooperation and ingenuity was remarkable. There was no crisis because everything was fixed before it became a crisis. Too bad the world can't come together like that for any other problem we face.

[TonyL]

Colonel,

:) I know your comment was a tongue-in-cheek, but I'd say "You're welcome!" anyways!

Seriously, that was a lack of foresight and imagination on the programmers mind. Using 2-digit field for the year, then the world would restart at the end of 1999 .

The F22 program experienced a similiar snafu. Some years ago, during a flight test, a bunch of F22 fighters needed to be "towed" back to base (by a tanker that guided them visually). This was a longitude wrap-around problem at the international dateline near Hawaii.

[TonyL]

TTG,

"Too bad the world can't come together like that for any other problem we face'

That said it all, brother.

[anon]

No it is a good political move.Trump and co. did the groundwork by neutralizing the opposition.Clinton now can go in unrestrained.
Nice word figurative.bit of fruit,bit of curvy woman,even some Picasso

[upstater]

Periodic burning by native peoples to create small farming areas is rather different than the complete destruction of ecosystems. The valley where I live was denuded of trees 150 years ago but marginal agricultural land was abandoned and has since reverted to forests. A reversible process.

Desertification is not reversible on a human time scale. Once the soil is gone, it is gone. Same is true for permafrost.

My brother has been a pilot/biologist in Alaska for 45 years. Some of the changes he has seen are anecdotal, but most are scientific based. Most interesting for me is that when he first went there in the mid 70s, in winter 250 miles of visibility when flying was common. Now 75 miles is a good day. The smog and haze is mostly from Europe and some from Asia. The amount of fossil fuels burned has grown considerably in that time.

We can all agree there is a scientific basis for natural climate cycles. What is now happening is occurring at a far more rapid rate because of man. Too much money is at stake with the BAU model. You can hire many shills to defend BAU when trillions are on the table.

[Fred]

Babak,

Still can't take a joke. Ice core samples are not distributed equally across the globe, which is going to have a major impact on calculations. But you convinced me. We need to do something about all that greenhouse gas being emmitted by China and Europe. I know, lets wreck their economies with tariffs! That'll cut industrial output and make us a lot of money! So much better than wrecking our economy while they polute and make so much money off of us. Too bad for the green economy people, they'll have to get buy without regulatory mandaates and subsidies. Now if we could only figure out how to get the jet set to stop flying around polluting all the time while they tell the rest of us we need to cut our carbon emissions.

[turcopolier]

Elora Danan

"taking into account that you all made good gains through your years at intelligence work..." Ah! you think we are thieves who took bribes and extorted money. Que lastima! We are not that. Perhaps that is true in Spain or wherever it is that you are from. TTG lives simply by choice, a value based inclination that he probably acquired from his Jesuit mentors. He and I disagree politically but I applaud the style of his life.

[Babak Makkinejad]

I am not sure how I could have convinced you of anything. If you do not like the ice core samples, you can always try sea-bed samples, lake-bed samples and so on.

Global warming is inevitale results of Earth's orbital parameters as they change.

[turcopolier]

upstater

"Periodic burning by native peoples to create small farming areas is rather different than the complete destruction of ecosystems." Are you sure that you do not live in Washington, DC. A standard technique here in The Swamp is to misquote someone and then comment on the distortion. The Shenandoah Valley was not burned over by the Indians for the purpose of creating "small farming communities." Look at a map. The Valley extends from tennessee to Pennsylvania.

[upstater]

Colonel, I'm not misquoting you and readily acknowledge burning was widely practiced by native people. Yes there were large expanses of prairie in VA and in upstate New York created by selective, planned burning. Plains indians did this on a massive scale.

That is entirely different from the man made deserts. The end of burning or marginal agriculture in the east allowed for natural reforestation. One can't turn back the clock in the Sonoran or Sahara deserts. Those places reached a tipping point and cannot be restored even in millennia.

PS: I am not from DC and only change planes there!

[Babak Makkinejad]

Pre-industrial socities were more destructive of the environment than industrial ones. Think of the Cedars of Lebanon, consumed by Phonecians, Greeks, and Romans for building ships.

[turcopolier]

upstater

"That is entirely different from the man made deserts." It is YOUR OPINION that it is different.