Chart of the Day
[Click Image to Enlarge]
Global Warming is caused by several things. The sun, which should be obvious to anyone who has the slightest grasp of science, and volcanic eruptions, which can block sunlight for years in extreme cases. Something humans have never been able to achieve (outside of a nuke, theoretically). We can count that as a blessing.
UPDATE: From 1975, Newsweek. Talking about Global Cooling
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.
Sound familiar? Gee, if only we had listened. We could have made the Earth warmer and melted the ice caps. Oops.
Nuclear winter is discredited, actually. As far back as 1986 it was determined the original calculations were off by (in some cases) orders of magnitude and the probability of it happening was “vanishingly low.”
It’s interesting to note that the handling of nuclear winter theory was the dawn of “PR science.” Instead of the report being issued via an appropriate journal, Sagan and the others released the neatly-packaged conclusions to a press conference several days before actually publishing the report. As a result, their hysterical claims, gleefully parroted by the media, spread like a cancer before other scientists even had a chance to look at the data and start picking holes in it. Which they did, discrediting the report almost totally within four years.
Sagan and the others never really fought back--they didn’t need to. Nuclear Winter, like AGW now, is “received wisdom.”
It was also done this way for similar reasons. Sagan and his group were anti-nuke activists, trying to get the US and Russia to completely remove all nukes from inventory, and they figured the best way to do this was claim that there was no such thing as a survivable nuclear war...because “the world would be destroyed.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
(I would also note that this is not the way science is done; it is the way products are sold.)Posted by on 11/14 at 05:07 PMAnd regarding the chart: as AGW has become such an exasperatingly many-headed hydra, my discussions on it have been simplified. I simply point out that the experiment has been done. During the Medieval Climate Optimum, temperatures exceeded those predicted by AGM theory to cause massive global catastrophes...none of which occurred. Therefore, the theories--however plausible they seem, however nicely the computer models are polished--are what they call in the engineering community “wrong.”
“The great tragedy of science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”
--Thomas HuxleyPosted by on 11/14 at 05:16 PMOh, I’m not surprised about that nuke stuff. All that nuclear winter hysteria doesn’t hold up to facts about major volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa which were worse (or at best equal) to any nukes that would ever be used. They didn’t cause any such thing, though they did darken the skies and lower the temperature somewhat.
I also think nuclear hysteria is way overblown. Two cities were devastated by atomic bombs and people were irradiated. Yet those two cities are thriving today and have huge populations. Nukes wouldn’t make places unlivable for hundreds of years. The Ukraine is opening up Chernobyl for tourism.
Posted by on 11/14 at 06:20 PMYes, Three Mile Island could have been a disaster. Yes, Chernobyl was a catastrophe.
But what the no-nukes crowd constatly forgets is that TMI was over 30 years ago, and Chernobyl was using tech that was, what, 20 years old when it happened (in 1986, IIRC). We HAVE made a few advances since, in tech and safety.
Which is why the no-drilling folk are so ridiculous. “We must stop relying on foreign oil!”, they say. “But no new drilling in the US or off-shore, because there may be leaks...and no nukes, because those are unsafe!”
Oh, one of the arguments against ANWR is that it’ll disturb the caribou mating cycle. After they built the Alaska pipeline, caribou population TRIPLED, IIRC. Maybe the sound of oil in the pipeline is an aphrodisiac to them, I dunno.
Hey, solar and wind are fine...until they disturb someone’s view (cf. Ted “let’s go for a drive” Kennedy).
If we can get to the stuff that’s off-shore and drill some more on US territory (ANWR) and build some nuclear plants, we CAN get off the foreign teat. Also, I believe oil shale tech has grown to where it’s becoming feasible, and soon we can get to it.
Posted by Dave Marron on 11/15 at 11:27 AM
Next entry: Peak Oil is a Myth, Part 2
Previous entry: About Time
