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.
Colonel
I will stop reading your blog if you don’t believe in our imminent rapture. I draw the line (in the sand, if you must) on this.
Charlie
Charlie Wilson
adios.
Now this is a post I can get behind. For me it has been the hysteria and the ease with which people are manipulated through propaganda that has astonished me, because that is what the climate change agenda is all about. We can all agree that humans have had a devastating impact on every corner the environment,every ecosystem. However, it is a leap of manufactured faith (manipulation) to claim that humans are responsible for climate change.
To support this bogus hypothesis, scientists strangle and manipulate data in an effort to justify draconian laws and policies that can only line the pockets of the very rich at the expense of the rest of the tax paying population. Carbon tax is the real aim here, a totally bullshit pretext to suck more trillions of dollars from the economies of the world. Self-selecting “experts” join the chorus because of fear of censorship and loss of status while the brave ones are called, as always, climate change denialists, and thus denigrated.
There is more evidence for a genetic (read: racial) component to intelligence than there is for anthropogenic climate change but if you say this aloud you will see real hysteria.
The hysteria that erupts when anyone questions climate change says pretty much all you need to know about it.
Oh man! Even most of the lefties I associate with believe it. They are supposed to, through the tenets of their secular ‘religion,’ use solid evidence as their guides. The evidence is not persuasive. The Earth has gone through fluctuations in climate for ever. The dinosaurs made do in a much hotter earth, if the geologic evidence be true. It took a cosmic strike to do them in.
Humans are the top predators here because they can adapt to change much quicker than any other animal. Modern human civilization may not be recognizable to any of us in two hundred years. That would be true with or without “climate change.” We will carry on, one way or another.
Similarly to what Bandit wrote above, I see various ‘elites’ angling to make book on whatever does happen. The Science Fiction writer William Gibson has proposed in his book “The Peripheral,” a near future based on a massive world population die back that he calls “The Jackpot.”
Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral
All in all, we live in ‘Interesting Times.’
Thank you for your indulgence.
You are in good company. In case anyone missed the excellent John Stossel interviews on this very topic “Are we all doomed?”: https://www.redstate.com/nick-arama/2019/11/24/watch-john-stossel-destroys-climate-change-myths-in-terrific-video/
Thank you for the reminders of how many hysterias that also gripped us from the past. Somehow I had assumed this was the worst- a symptom of so many being “unchurched” and ignorant of their own issues about mortality.
However, there was more imminent threat – nuclear war was real, Japanese invasion of US was real, 9-11 was real. Climate change – not even close – why wouldn’t a planet who has not had an Ice Age in over 10,000 years not be getting slightly warmer each year?
Colonel,
If anyone should need ammunition in their CO2 debates, you may want to consider the following:
The magnetic pole is currently migrating at a very high rate of speed (50Km per year).
The Hunger Stones have once again been uncovered.
There are any number of cities dating back centuries that are today submerged. Depending on your audience, Roman cities may have more impact on the psyche of your interlocutors rather than Asian or Indian cities.
The various wooly mammoths that have been discovered frozen since the 1700s
That should do it… at least as a primer…
g
…. I am surprised at you Col…. shocked…
You missed the big one!!!!! Rossians are coming! They have been coming since about 50s? I have yet to see one.. well may be except smoothieX12 around these virtual lands.. guess the Rossians must not have very good gps!!! they have yet to find their way over here…
you suppose the deep state has found a way to control the minds!!
Colonel
No offense intended. It was meant in jest.
Col. Lang
This manufactured hysteria has a lot of money behind it. Wall St is backing it to the hilt as they expect to clip a coupon on every carbon “trade”. Al Gore has already made a fortune with his Climate Emergency. The European automotive industry is betting billions on replacing internal combustion engines with electric motors. So is China with massive subsidies as they build with the same breath more coal power plants.
You are correct that Americans appear to be prone to hysteria. It would be hard to argue for a genetic basis for that fear, so the nature vs nurture argument would suggest that the hysteria is being nurtured.
The only real argument is whether that is self-reinforcing, or is being deliberately engineered.
Michael Moore is a buffoon moore often than not, but I suspect he is correct in his argument that it is the latter – that too many powerful institutions in the USA believe that they profit (not necessarily monetarily) from fear-mongering.
As for climate-change, well, I assume everyone agrees that the USA has no intention of doing anything about it.
So we’ll see soon enough who is right and who is wrong.
So “ten thousand scientists believe “ and have signed a letter. Anyone with experience in academe knows that bucking the accepted wisdom is a great way to lose your career, so the number who “get with the program” is meaningless.
Evidence of warming? Yes, I’ve seen it myself in the range of animals that used to be seen only in tropical areas that have moved South (I’m in the Southern hemisphere). Caused by man? Perhaps. Reversible? Not by man but by nature itself in my opinion.
To put that another way, the Earth has seen bigger catastrophes then the burning of a bit of carbon. It will survive and evolve without us. Plutonium has a half life of 100,000 years. That’s the blink of an eye in geological time. As for us, remnants may survive, I don’t care, but the scare mongering in my opinion is more dangerous than the alleged warming.
Obviously the whole climate warming/change is hysterical hogwash, but, what I really don’t get is why believers think that it will kill humans en mass. Do they imagine people just watching the water rise over decades and not moving? So the water is literally up to your neck, having risen from the level of ankles over the past 50 years, and you just continue to sit there until you drown? Sounds like a great Darwinian purge or another Great Flood sent by God to cleanse the earth of stupid people.
Also, these climate freaks are always so negative. They only see the downside. What about all of the areas of earth that become warm and green enough to be successfully inhabited, farmed, etc. that weren’t previously? And, since a lot of these cultists are Marxists too, they should be happy about the climate creating such opportunities for wealth and power redistribution, but it’s always with the negative doom and gloom angst all of the time. Bunch of miserable ninnies.
This climate thing is a slow roller. It’s hard for us with our limited lifespans to perceive trends and events that are occurring on a geological timescale – trends that takes tens and hundreds of human generations to play out.
SO thee and me, kind sir, are too old to see much of the rolling changes happen, as is true of all living. But if you intend to bequeath land to your posterity, I recommend that you consider its altitude. Why? Because sea level is rising, and in 100 years (that’s 4 or 5 generations by my reckoning), sea level will be at least 3 feet higher. And due to the increased level of water in the atmosphere, storms and therefore flooding will be more intense and destructive of our built environments. SO peak tides will also be higher, as will peak floods. This is already happening.
NOw you can ignore or gainsay the science that backs this up – but there’s no way I’m buying land other than for short- and medium-term profit that is exposed to sea level or is in a flood plain. Similarly, as California will be burning every summer for the foreseeable future, living in forested areas subject to this burning is similarly contraindicated.
And in a few hundred years Greenland will be populated by homesteaders. Trump is right to try and buy it.
divadab
do as you please. I see that you have already bought into the hysteria.
Charlie Wilson
It was understood to be such. Is the gorgeous blond still working in your outer office. I confess, like Jimmy Carter, to have lusted in my heart. That, also, was in jest, a memory of bygone days.
The Enlightenment Era has reached me. I believe in the science of global warming, until proved wrong, but not the hysteria.
Instead of the Age of Aquarius, it’s the Age of Chicken Little. Every dew drop spells doom, every molecule of air spells doom. Doom, DOOM!!
And to add fuel to the fire we have elites like Bill Gates wanting us to eat ourselves (spelled cannibalism) down to what he and his elites buddies term an acceptable level of humans on the planet. Course, if one mentioned to Mr. Gates and his buddies how about they go first like eating their young, you’d get most probably a ‘WHY NOT ME, NEVER WOULD I!’ from Mr. Gates and his crew.
Whether it be an Tunguska Asteroid event, or a lump of burning coal, this little blue marble is going to be around till the heavens determine its no longer needed (in other words our blue marble is here to stay).
I’ll be like Slim Pickens riding the nuke, YEE HAW!
srw
Yes, there is climate change.
pl
We have been here before on SST and I know you are not open to persuasion on this topic but there just too many data points for me to understand your position. I have great respect for your general knowledge and ability to understand data and extract meaning from it which makes your adamance worrying. The planet will be fine but humans are going to have a very hard time adjusting to the coming changes. People will migrate to more hospitable areas which will cause conflicts which will just exacerbate the problem. It is not the end of the world just the end of the climate system that has been atypically stable for the last 12,000 years. Look at climate system graphs for different time scales and how quickly it has transitioned from one steady-state to a quite different one. If it, with or without our help, decides it is time to transition it will be a problem orders of magnitude worse than any of the items in your post bar large scale nuclear conflict. I will not bother with links as those who have tried to understand the data know where to go.
I’m sorry guys but greenhouse gases have long-established physical properties. Nobody argues that it works – its why our planet can retain heat in the first place. We are digging carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere, and increasing the heat-trapping properties of the atmosphere.
You don’t have to like the hysteria, and exact predictions are impossible because there are 1000 interrelated factors. But you can’t deny the simple fact that CO2 and other gases help trap heat in an atmosphere, and over the longterm increasing their concentration in said atmosphere will make it hotter.
AGW aside, we use energy like there’s no tomorrow and if we keep on this way there won’t be. Or nothing like today. Some efforts to cut down might be genuine – I liked this article on one such effort, particularly for the immortal line “There are not a lot of tree-huggers in the Marines”. Can this be true?
https://www.naval-technology.com/features/going-green-sea-can-us-navy-cut-vast-energy-footprint/
Such venturesome efforts apart, the US armed forces use enough energy to keep a small country going. The UK and French forces would happily do the same if they had the money and the kit, as would all others. The Australians ship entire mountains of coal abroad and the Green Germans burn lignite to the tune of a hundred and more terawatt hours per year. We transfer millions of people from warm parts of the world to cold and therefore energy demanding parts of Europe.
We pride ourselves on living in a post-industrial economy and plan for a carbon neutral future while outsourcing the pollution to China. Our virtue signalling renewables never look that virtuous after a full energy audit. One could go on. If AGW is a reality we don’t even start to put our money where our mouths are when it comes to combating it.
This ecofreak isn’t happy, but for another reason. The jury’s out on AGW but it’s a hanging jury when it comes to EROEI. We have built an entirely new civilisation on cheap energy and haven’t the faintest what to do when it stops being cheap.
The principal cause of global warming is asphalt and aircraft engines.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/05/was-the-anchorage-all-time-temperature-record-aided-by-airport-growth/
EO
We have lots of energy here. You, on the other hand, have a problem.
Dan
Do you have a particular century that you would like to live in?
jjackson
A lot of the data is phony nonsense interpreted by hysterics.
I guess I am a little on the fence on this. I don’t see an apocalypse anytime soon, but I think that there is enough to the concept of “Climate Change” and “Peak Oil” that the long term implications cannot simply be dismissed.
I do see change coming, I just can’t for the life of me figure out what will be the actual trigger and what will simply be trotted out as an excuse to make the changes.
For that matter, I can’t even say that the data presented by the folks in the white lab coats is valid or invalid. At this point here it is just data and the hypotheses and theories being worked out to explain the data are not really all that satisfying.
Mostly I am in the “denialist” camp by default. I don’t think that the apocalypse is coming soon, so that puts me in the opposition camp in the eyes of the true believers.
In the immortal words of Zhou Enlai; “It’s too early to say”.
Precisely. Are the temperature data apples-to-apples comparisons? What are the actual environmental changes around these weather gauges over the past century?
As I have noted previously, I have over a century of weather data at our ranch and can’t plot any trend lines. The extremes show a rather random distribution.
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/the-grid/new-yorks-unstable-electric-grid/
“One of the bill’s mandates requires utilities to buy 9,000 megawatts of offshore wind-generated electricity by 2035. That would result in 900 10-megawatt turbines to be constructed off the coast of New York City and Long Island. Offshore wind is expensive. Based on current state estimates for similar projects, the capital costs for these wind turbines will total $48 billion, which the ratepayers will have to pay. If this and other targets are not met for new renewables and energy storage capacity, the Public Service Commission (PSC) will demand that the utilities buy renewable energy credits or pay penalties.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
“..Lysenkoism aims at legitimizing pseudoscience at the government level, for political reasons.”
https://judithcurry.com/2015/05/12/true-costs-of-wind-electricity/
“The impacts of subsidized wind upon electricity markets are highly uncertain, and in many cases demonstrably harmful. Wind serves to raise costs, complicate scheduling, destabilize markets, and adversely impact reliability all in a hopeless effort to receive “free” energy that is actually quite costly.
The potential for wind is limited. Any sub area can have a high penetration of renewables if those resources are diluted into a larger area. Wind can provide adequate performance when correctly integrated with hydro and fossil resources. But the challenges are significant at this time to reach high penetration levels within most standalone resource mixes in most system grids.”
Article makes the following points
1) Wind farms are not built where there are not subsidies.
2) They wear out quickly so hidden capital costs are higher
3) They need substantial back up generation for when winds are too low high
4) The larger the wind farm larger back up capacity needed
Hydrocarbons are what disproved Malthus.
The greenies want to move us to an electric future with the majority being produced by renewables. Utility-scale solar power purchasing agreements are currently being bid in the US at $0.025/kWh. Substantially cheaper than coal. Unfortunately neither wind or solar can provide base load unless there is sufficient storage capacity and Lithium chemistry has it’s downsides. Nuclear which can produce base load and has no carbon emission is shunned by the same greenies.
IMO, the focus should be on pollution. Plastic pollution, chemical pollution in our waterways and ground water, particulates in the air especially in places like Beijing and New Delhi and of course the massive quantities of solid waste that we generate.
Apparently it took 35,000 years for human migrations to cross the “climate change” land bridge between Russia and Alaska and populate North America.
We have time. Adapt or die.
For what purpose is this climate hysteria ginned up. And why does the Green New Deal demand all jobs become mandatory union jobs? Or else we are all gonna die.
“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.”
November 30, 2019
By the way you can’t. And you know you can’t.
+1000
Jjackson,
Can I get the raw data and run my own calculations? Can I question the placement of thermometers and adjustments to recorded temperatures from decades ago, or do I only get to see the pretty graph put together by those reviving government money? Do you have co2 data prior to 1958 that is not calculate by proxy?
And any one of those “1000 interrelated factors” could prove decisive, which is the point: the earth represents far too complex a system to go making any authoritative predictions of such a radical nature. This is not a rifle-bullet-wood problem from you high-school physics class; no sir! This is an immensely complex problem that involves lots of computer simulation, non-discrete math, stochastic analysis, and not a whole lot of certainty. At the very least, the hysteria and Greta-Thunberg theatrics need to go.
And a child shall lead them …
But seriously, if anyone here’s up for a longish read, this is a fabulous and enlightening article:
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
The author, Corey Morningstar, is actually a real environmentalist (not a ‘right-winger,’ whatever that label means to you) who’s been with the movement for many years. She has enough experience to know that Wall Street never subsidizes any movement unless it benefits Wall Street, which is Reason #1 why we should all be skeptical of this latest round of global-warming hysteria.
Enjoy!
If the problem is energy availability, a solution is nuclear power but that brings its own hysteria.
And inside every man is a crppled child.
Excellente, que todos aceptarlo.
All:
The rea science:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/8617066199/?coliid=ITOJJQUI6MR2P&colid=2PF8RPB6J6NU&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/3540437797/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_1?smid=A137N5PCRAJMCA&psc=1
For ice core samples, Dr. Mueller has all thr data as well as Matlab code posted at his web site. Google it.
Elora,
To quote the great climate expert, Greta, “How dare you!”
My research agrees with E. D. Here is a link to a non-technical article with a useful graph of CO2 and temperature levels over the last 600 million years.
https://medium.com/@ghornerhb/heres-a-better-graph-of-co2-and-temperature-for-the-last-600-million-years-f83169a68046
(Sorry, can’t activate the link)
It’s occurred to me that given the last 3 million years have been 80% +/- ice ages with 10,000 to 20,000 year enter glaciation periods, we might be near the end of a normal interglacial period at present. A little warming may not be a bad thing over the next several thousand years. Nevertheless, it would probably be better not to dump large volumes of various gases into the atmosphere and oceans, and it probably would be wise to be prepared to adapt to changes in fisheries, regional climate patterns, etc., without the fear and hysteria. After all, things change.
If this is true . . . that the climate change we are experiencing is just part of the naturally changing climate’s changing changes . . . then we are presented with some major contrarian investing opportunities.
For example, if the current slow-creeping rise in sea level is just a phase in the cycles, and the next phase will be a sea-level freeze-in-place, or even a slow-creeping fall in sea level back to before; then contrarian investors can buy sea-adjacent property from panicked seasiders-in-flight at a very low price. They can then hang onto it, or pass it to heirs, until the next cycle phase makes clear that it is safe to go back to the seaside again. At which point, people who bought property from seasiders-in-flight for a low price will be able to sell it back to seasiders-in-return for a high price. Maybe a very high price.
The same principle would apply to anything which the man-made global warming theory predicts will fail or disappear in due course. Simply invest in that thing at low prices and sell that thing back at high prices to panicked sellers who will have come to terms with their sellers remorse.
I am not advising anyone to do this. I am merely noting that if this view is correct, then this contrarian investing opportunity exists and will persist for some time.
Stephanie
“By the way you can’t. And you know you can’t.” You can’t send money to the DNC?
I am not a hysteric on climate change but do think that human activity can ‘add’ to the effects of the ‘natural cycles’ of climate.
So on the question of ignore or take some actions to protect earth I am exactly like the mob boss who when confronted with keeping or getting rid of a member who may or may not squeal on the family said..’why take the chance’.
AOC or Pompeo equally dangerous but easily Fixable $$$$. The dollar (money) always makes people suddenly come to their senses
Rollo May in 1965 predicted the Age of Aquarius would become the Age of Addiction in his book (a college favorite at the time) “Love and Will”. Indeed, this addiction to “climate change” is the fated outcome when feelings took over fact.
Let’s say all 100,000 “scientists” lived in the US- that is about 2000 for every state and I think this number includes dentists. These “scientists” can be easily out-voted. 2000 voices of “science” can get drowned out within California’s population of 40 million.
Hard to believe the mantra from the 1960’s’s was “Question Authority”. What happened? What brought about the total opposite mantra – question authority and you go to jail. What was the progression from one spectrum to the other?
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.
Babak,
What about the tree rings?
>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.
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.
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.
long I have a large experience of much of the world and Americans asa group are easier to propagandize than most.
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?
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.
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.
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?
anon
Figurative crap.
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.
Tony L
Thanks for saving us all. My point had to do with the hysteric reaction of the American people and media.
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.
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.
TTG,
“Too bad the world can’t come together like that for any other problem we face’
That said it all, brother.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
upstater
“That is entirely different from the man made deserts.” It is YOUR OPINION that it is different.
Elora Danan
Little marxists are children of God who have gone badly astray.
When Y2K threatened the end of modern civilization, I headed to Italy for a possible overnight return to the 16th Century. Worst that happened after all that survivalist hysteria, was they stopped the Italian trains for an hour to check all systems. Yet i thought if the lights went out all over the world permanently, I would take my chances in a Neo-Renaissance Italy: Candlelight, art, books, fine architecture, savoring the birth of Italian cuisine and robust conversation.
Exclusive mainstream focus on the climate change doomsday fantasies also takes attention away from the actual environmental catastrophes of our time:the plastic trash everywhere both on land and sea with the third world in particular wallowing in plastic, something unheard of 2 generations ago;pesticide extermination of insects(in particular bees) etc. Also creates political gridlock where any discussion on these issues becomes tainted with inane arguments over global warming.Sorry, it’s global climate change now. When I was a kid not very long ago the hysteria was over the hole in the ozone killing us all. I havent heard about this hole in at least 15 years.
All AGW hysteria and scholarly discourse is diversion. The finite, plentiful hydrocarbons upon which we blame warming WILL become scarce, as will people.
California Chumash burned the hills periodically, but never evolved even after thousands of years into an agrarian society – they remained hunter-gatherers. I think it was easier to hunt animals when the protective brush was cleared.
Serge – Agreed!
The plastic & other garbage in the Pacific Convergence Zone is now bigger than France or Texas. And National Geographic says now there is one building in the Atlantic stretching from the Virginia littoral to the Canary Islands.
Check out Tony Heller’s Youtube channel for excellent rebuttals to climate alarmism.
That letter,I believe of Canadian origins , has been investigated, the results are most amusing.
We could call it the Great Unpleasantness.
Clinton? Really? Clinton 2020?
Clinton created her own opposition last election. She repelled just enough people on just enough critical margins into voting for Trump that Trump won the Electoral College votes in several key MidWestern “Brexit” states. I was proud to be one of those “Bitter Berners for Trump” who helped make a difference that made a difference here in Michigan.
The reason you haven’t heard about it lately is because its mono-single cause . . . Freon-type gases drifting up to the ozone layer . . . was understood and globally stamped out by stamping out the production and use of Freons, as per the Montreal Protocol.
https://www.airhawkac.com/montreal-protocol-and-the-phaseout-of-r22/
Because of that counter-Freon stampout-phaseout . . . the ozone layer has been regaining ozone and the hole has been filling back in. And that is why we haven’t heard about this hole in at least 15 years.
I have read recently that certain “unknown” black market jackals in China ( where else but?) have been making and selling bootleg Freons to willing buyers. Along with all the fentanyl , carfentanyl, etc. If enough of them do enough of that for long enough, then we will start hearing about the Ozone Hole 2.0 all over again.
Will the earth survive and evolve without us? Why yes, yes it will. The earth got along fine before it met us, it will get along fine when we’re gone.
But will us survive and evolve without us? No, us won’t. Because if us disappear, then us won’t be here to survive and evolve with.
And my narrow selfish concern is with us, the survival of us and the ongoing evolution of us.
From an us-eye-view, we have burned more than a little bit of carbon. And we are currently planning to burn more than a little bit more. Also we are causing the release of enough NOXes and methane and whatever-that-computer-chip-manufacturing cleaning solvent is to add meaningfully more to the earth-surfasphere heat retention.
The warming is not alleged. It is real. You are seeing it in animal ranges moving southward. We are seeing it in high latitude sea ice not forming as before and also many glaciers and ice-cap edges melting and retreating some.
The scare mongering is also real. And it becomes more dangerous than the warming when it clouds dispassionate analysis of the problem and the consideration of realistic and applicable solutions. And when it reaches the point of creating its own equal and opposite reaction of opposition to the scaremongering extending to opposition to recognition of the problem itself, then it becomes more dangerous than the warming itself by virtue of immunizing society against taking heed and taking steps to counter the sky-heater gas-releases.
Can it be man-reversed? Yes, if we man-reverse it before enough heat sinks into the high latitude land and sea to thaw all the permafrost and release all the methane clathrates. If the permafrost permathaws and the clathrates boil up out of the shallow Arctic sea-zones, then a blind nature will take over and the Big Heatup will just roll merrily along.
What to do? Simple. Lower CO2 and NOX and methane and computer-chip-cleaner-solvent emissions while raising plant-driven bio-suckdown and bio-fixation of aerial CO2.
How to do it? Very difficult and complex, especially in today’s multi-team Buz Kashi politicultural atmosphere. Step one would be to separate the scare mongering from the dispassionate analysis. Step two would be for people firmly anchored in the head-space of dispassionate analysis to analyze every “solution” proposed so far and every “solution” thinkable-up, and subject them to a plausibility and feasibility test. Step three would be to start applying the socially non-disruptive or least-disruptive steps and see if we can see a measurable reduction of aerial levels of the several skyheater gases. And step four would be to keep applying and extending the non-disruptive or least disruptive and keep riding the skyheater gasload back down to comfort-maintaining levels.
There is no place in any of that for the New Green Deal. That was launched to advance a Theory Of Change having nothing more to do with Global De-Warming other than to use it as a handy skyhook to hand the GND Theory Of Change on.
A global de-warming plan would have to focus on the narrow goal of returning the skyheater gasload back to start-of-the-industrial-revolution levels. It would have to focus on re-balancing the carbon cycle, re-balancing the nitrogen cycle, suppressing and containing methane emissions, etc. The pursuit of social justice will have to fall by the wayside. Future generations can pursue it if they want to, once the survival of future generations has been assured, or at least highly likelihooded.
Ten hundred is a thousand. If I understand you correctly to mean “thousands of years” . . . there are some trees in the West which have been alive for several thousand years and whose tree rings can be read going back that far.
And tree-beams from ancient structures in the Southwest can have tree ring sequences compared to more-recently-killed-trees’ sequences of tree rings. If the “youngest rings” of a long dead tree align exactly with the “oldest rings of a recently dead tree, dendrochronologists think they can plausibly consider the two trees to be overlapping in time at those two sets of exactly matched tree rings. And they then read the older tree’s rings backwards-inwards from there.
James Hansen in his book Storms Of My Grandchildren writes about the need for nuclear power and the experimental existence of safer kinds of nuclear power than the mainstream establishment light water reactors we mostly have now. He admits to being just a layman who is making his best effort in the field of nuclear understanding. But I thought those several pages in the middle of the book were worth reading.
NASA research scientist ( retired) James Hansen strongly supports nuclear power.
A method of reversing desertification, or maybe semi-desertification, is summarised here –
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/reversing-desertification-with-livestock
Interestingly he used battlefield planning to develop his method.
There’s also the “Zai” technique developed and taught by a Burkina Faso farmer, Yacouba Sawadogo. Pits and compost.
Google “debunking ice core samples” and one finds the following:
CO2 lags temperature
“An article in Science magazine illustrated that a rise in carbon dioxide did not precede a rise in temperatures, but actually lagged behind temperature rises by 200 to 1000 years. A rise in carbon dioxide levels could not have caused a rise in temperature if it followed the temperature.” (Joe Barton)
Colonel – I think we’re covered all ways.
If the IPCC is wrong we have several hundred years of top quality coal to go at. If right, the last warm period we had, the Mediaeval, we could grow grapes quite far North. And if they’re really right Westminster will get submerged, though Greta says ten years and I’m not sure we ought to wait that long.
All ages of man have been Ages of Belief, including the age of that Zealot Christian Heresy called Marxism. Empirical & Skeptical men are never welcomed in any human society.
That isclikely true in rich capitalust West. We made a lot of money from Y2K here in US.
Plastics are a wonderful material, Human Nature is not.
You should buy a tract of beach outside Rome then.
I grew up in the town of Fregene outside of Rome. In that area, the sea has been retreating since I was a kid.
Nobody denies that climate changes. It, in fact, is the primary reason we exist at all.
There is no problem whatsoever with climate change and, other than trying to adapt, there is little we can do about it.
That is not to say we are not polluting our environment. Indeed we are.
It is not reasonable however to conflate pollution with climate change.
Climate is one of the most complex systems known to man. Anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic knows that to reduce the evolution of a complex system to one variable, is, at best, arithmetically unsound and, at worst, intellectually dishonest. Particularly when the time scale is counted in eons.
Other than that however, how can anyone not question the ostensible nobility of politicians?
In the past 40 years, we have been constantly told that we need to lower interest rates because our economies need spurring. In the same breath however, we are told that economic activity is causing climate change so we need to tax business, industry and individuals.
What good does it do then to lower interest rates so aggressively?
Allow me to offer a side, but related, note on pollution here.
What is the sense in keeping alive companies that should go bankrupt?
Take a behemoth like General Motors. Here is a company that has been losing money on the sale of every single one of their core products; cars.
Political expedience however calls for keeping GM alive and in business.
Clearly however, selling more vehicles is not a viable solution for GM that for many years was making up the loss by providing financing. Financing that was used to sell more vehicle on which they lose money.
If you want to begin to understand our pollution problem, you would do worse than to start by looking at monetary policy.
That is because if interest rates were not lowered artificially, governments would not be allowed to take such a cavalier attitude towards expedient and frivolous expenditures.
Climate change is not a problem. It is at best a challenge.
The fiscal well being of the state however is what should concern us here. It is the fiscal impasse we find ourselves in that is driving aberrant policy of which Global Warming is but one of the many bastard children.
g
And, I am sorry, but…. to discount the role of the sun in all this….?
That flies in the face of all evidence accumulated in the short time man has been on this earth.
Global Warming is, to be charitable, an unsound theory.
To base fiscal and economic policies based on unsound theories is ignorant.
Or, maybe, it is criminal.
You choose.
I’ve read that one thing the last two mass shooters had in common was their concerns about the environment. I regret I don’t have the original link though if you can stand the lefty group think I found an article here that at least supports that from the shooter manifestos ( https://earther.gizmodo.com/how-climate-change-is-becoming-a-deadly-part-of-white-n-1837010929 )
I suspect the hysteria is to keep the populace malleable. Many years ago I read that junkscience.com was started by the tobacco companies to spread uncertainty about Science itself. Fear prevents rational thought and argument at least until one becomes numb. It also sells eyeballs so whether you consider it a planned conspiracy or unplanned exploitation by the 4th estate it doesn’t really matter. The effectiveness is outlined nicely by Colonel Lang. I would also add the preparation for entering WWII, though no Germans were interred to my knowledge, there were graphic pictures, seeds of distrust, and even Bugs Bunny fought the German menace on the big screen. It should also be noted that while the Japanese on the West Coast were subject to internment and seizure (their property sold to mafia on the cheap), the ones in Hawaii weren’t so afflicted. Even if you believed the Congress, and the “fears of the people”, why didn’t they apply that to Hawaii, home of a Naval base of some import..
It seems that in order to convince people of some “good” causes and others of some financial interests we have undermined science and reason and must suffer that fate of having a population driven by fear (job, financial, social) and stress. Luckily, my millennial family members have their cell phones to retreat into (only said half in jest). I’m not sure how, given the information they are overloaded with every day, and the training from school, video games, and our corporate media we could expect them not to be delusional about any number of subjects. Climate is perfect in that regard because it is so complicated and interdependent that it is impossible to prove or disprove.
Fear is also the Foremost enemy of Freedom.
I think that Trust in US has declined and Fear has increased over the last 70 years and Freedom suffered.
Boomer,
AOC hasn’t written a book yet and I haven’t seen her on the honorarium circuit. I think she desires the power and publicity; only then will she think of cashing in.
I like to eat. Agriculture depends on stable local/regional climate patterns. AGW leads to regional/local Climate Changes, reducing predictability. When ya gonna plant this year?
Colonel,
Looks like Pelosi failed to read her memo from the President, that we are no longer in the deranged Paris Accord. But Pelosi and her vagrant vagabond Congressional clique locked their lips to the backsides of globalists at the Madrid Conference, making them assurances she nor her cohorts can keep.
Pelosi is a real sad case, real sad case.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/02/pelosi-to-climate-conference-were-still-in-paris-agreement-074756
It isn’t climate change that will kill us all but I don’t hold out much hope for the survival of the majority when we are forced to live in our unheated, darkened houses the food distribution system (dependent on fossil fuels) having collapsed about our ears and no clean water available (no municipal pumps working – fossil fuels you see) and with no viable transportation, no access to life-saving medications etc. The green paradise is what will do us in.
If temperature were the only factor affecting tree ring growth dendrochronology would be on to something, but it isn’t. That’s why Professor Mann wasn’t able to use tree ring data from his own series to plot the final forty years of his hockey stick graph. Known as “Mike’s nature trick”; look it up. Or was the tree ring data actually correct and there wasn’t actually the claimed warming? so hard to tell in these days of irreproducible results.
I believe you did not mention my favorite of the many concerns I endured while in my undergrad years: the population explosion that was going to result in our having nothing to eat but “soylent green.”
I felt all along it was really made up by those who were pushing the right to use birth control and to choose abortion. There were many printed stories of poor Catholic women forced into early graves from having too many children and working so hard to keep them fed and clothed. (At one time, I almost felt that Obama was trying to re energize those fears. While I was not against birth control, I was also not sure that having a lot of kids was a bad thing. My great aunts and uncles were “kinderreich,” many of them having ten or more children. Those children were an asset to them on their farms in Russia and in the early years as American immigrants.
I once asked a mathematician if he thought that the calculations were correct. He did not think so. My own thought was that at some point in our society it became necessary to limit the number of children in a family–but for economic reasons since living the American dream had become so expensive.
But I have many fond memories of holiday gatherings with my thirty-five cousins–a small number compared to the number of my mother’s and father’s cousins.